Is California, once the striding colossus of the American economy, about to go the way of the Soviet Union?
In its final days, the USSR was a flailing giant – a paper superpower with an imploding economy and a deteriorating ability to exercise rational public policies.
Sounds a lot like the Golden State.
With an ossified and impotent state bureaucracy, diminishing public services and a wholesale meltdown of the California economy, the analogy isn’t too far-fetched.
Even the state’s leading historian, Dr. Kevin Starr, has his doubts about California’s ability to recover from its current downward spiral. Quoted in a recent article in Great Britain’s Sunday Guardian, Starr warned that California may become “America’s first failed state.”
Foreclosures have leveled suburbs from Riverside to Merced. California is home to one of every four mortgages in the country where the loan is worth more than the property.
Employment numbers have plunged even more dramatically. At 12.2 percent, the state’s unemployment rate is the highest it has been since the 1940s. In many areas of the state, the job picture is almost surreal. The central valley town of Mendota, for example, is grappling with 38 percent unemployment. Nearly 5,000 East Bay jobs will disappear in one broad stroke when Fremont’s NUMMI auto plant closes early next year.
There are other alarming crisis indicators as well. The poverty rate in Los Angeles has climbed to 20 percent. Our schools, once the backbone of California’s ingenuity and progress, are now ranked 47th out of 50 states. This, coupled with spiraling higher education costs, has resulted in a 13-percent reduction over eight years in the number of 19-year-old Californians enrolled in college.
This isn’t a game. Californians need to wake up to the urgency of the situation.
We may require an unprecedented federally funded Marshall Plan to create new jobs, repair our infrastructure and restart our housing market. These funds cannot be financed by a state government stalked by serial multi-billion-dollar deficits. Unlike the federal government, California cannot simply print more money to jumpstart the economy.
At the same time, we must reform our archaic, inefficient and ineffective state government, which hampers initiative and squanders irreplaceable dollars on short-term solutions and other wasteful policies.
Here’s what we can do:
First, we must elect a Democratic governor in 2010. Next year’s election comes at a crossroads for the state. Only a Democratic governor will be able to partner with President Obama and a Democratic House and Senate to obtain the massive federal resources necessary to revive our economy, rescue our schools and renew our infrastructure.
A Democratic governor working in concert with our congressional delegation and other Democrats in Washington will be better able to request – and receive – the federal dollars necessary to get the great Californian job machine cranking again.
Second, we can begin the serious business of reforming our beleaguered and dysfunctional state government.
The Bay Area Council, a Northern California business group disaffected with the perpetual dysfunction in Sacramento, is leading an innovative charge to restore sanity to the Capitol. Noting the failures of past reformers seeking incremental change through the initiative process, the Council is instead advocating for a constitutional convention that would rationalize and renew California’s constitution for the 21st century.
This convention might offer a way for citizens to make massive reforms. With a single bold stroke, voters could remake their state government. Issues addressed might include reducing special interest influence, term limits, budget reform, bureaucratic downsizing, the shape of both the Assembly and state Senate, and many other governance topics.
Instead of a pace of change too slow to be meaningful, a Constitutional Convention might give a new generation of Founding Fathers a chance to restore democratic values and renew democratic institutions.
Will California rise from the ashes as it has so many times before? Or will the state collapse under the mounting weight of its own failures? The decision is ours.
Clint Reilly’s initial foray into political consulting at age 23 developed into a successful 26-year career in politics, during which he founded the nation’s largest political consulting firm of its time. Reilly managed winning campaigns for a wide variety of high-profile candidates, including current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, and former California State Senate President Pro Tem Dave Roberti. Recently, Reilly has led the battle to preserve media competition in the Bay Area via two landmark anti-trust lawsuits (Reilly v. Hearst and Reilly v. MediaNews, et. al.). Reilly was chairman of the board of Catholic Charities/CYO from 2002 to 2006 and is active in a variety of civic and charitable causes. This article first appeared on www.clintreilly.com/ and is republished with his permission.
