What is wrong with California?

[CardiacCoug]

Ouch. Comparing Detroit to California is ugly for everyone.

http://www.newgeography.com/content/...ia-new-detroit

Crazy.

California’s public education system, once the envy of the world, now ranks 46th in the nation in per pupil spending and faces a $1.4 billion cut in the fall. In the last month, three California cities declared bankruptcy. More will follow. Take Poway for example. Its school board borrowed $100,000,000 (for 33,000 students) through a Capital Appreciation Bond. The politicians told the voters there would be no payments for 20 years. What they did not explain was the residents must pay back $1 billion dollars on their $100 million loan. Beginning in 2021, tiny Poway will be forced to pay $50 million per year in bond payments. Huge property tax assessments will be required if homes do not appreciate 400% by then, which is unlikely under foreseeable circumstances.

As with household finances, it's always simpler and less painful to reign your own spending in than to have external forces impose huge interest rates and stop all access to credit.

Nobody in California government wants to do their job. Let's hope we don't face the same thing at a federal level.

[Uncle Ted]

I have zero faith in a government run train system after regularly commuting from DC to NY on Amtrak.

Maybe the Texas model will be better.

Amtrak can't even make a profit selling food...

According to audits by the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress, and the railroad’s own inspector general, Amtrak loses about $80 million a year selling food. Since 2002, Amtrak’s food service has lost $834 million.

[...]

Mr. Alves, who issued a report on the problem last year, estimated that theft by Amtrak food service employees could cost the agency $4 million to $7 million annually. According to charts shown by Republican committee staff members during the hearing, Amtrak charges about $2 for a soft drink, but the cost to taxpayers is about $3.40 when labor is included. A $9.50 hamburger on the train costs taxpayers $16, the charts showed. Labor adds nearly 60 percent to food and beverage costs.

[LA Ute]

Victor Davis Hanson: "There Is No California"

How I wish I could say I disagree with him. I get around the state quite a bit, and everything he says here rings true to me.

[Babs]

Texas is dumb. It's not difficult to get from Dallas to Houston. It's the I-35 corridor whose traffic needs to be reduced. People would pay a small fortune to avoid the congestion.

[Flystripper]

Getting back to the title of this thread. As I am sitting on the beach near T Street break, I honestly can't find a thing wrong with this glorious place.

[LA Ute]

Getting back to the title of this thread. As I am sitting on the beach near T Street break, I honestly can't find a thing wrong with this glorious place.

You're enjoying the part that's not broken.

[Uncle Ted]

Texas is dumb. It's not difficult to get from Dallas to Houston. It's the I-35 corridor whose traffic needs to be reduced. People would pay a small fortune to avoid the congestion.

Apparently the folks that travel between Houston and Dallas are willing to pay more.

[CardiacCoug]

Texas is dumb. It's not difficult to get from Dallas to Houston. It's the I-35 corridor whose traffic needs to be reduced. People would pay a small fortune to avoid the congestion.

Southwest flies from Dallas to Houston and back 25 times a day or so I think. Plus you have a lot of people who drive instead of flying.

Once people realize how much more comfortable a high speed train is compared with both of those options, there will be plenty of business for the train.

If they do it right, it will be nothing like Amtrak and they will easily have 5000 or more people a day on that train I think.

Then I-35 Austin to Dallas will get a train too.

[Babs]

Southwest flies from Dallas to Houston and back 25 times a day or so I think. Plus you have a lot of people who drive instead of flying.

Once people realize how much more comfortable a high speed train is compared with both of those options, there will be plenty of business for the train.

If they do it right, it will be nothing like Amtrak and they will easily have 5000 or more people a day on that train I think.

Then I-35 Austin to Dallas will get a train too.

It would be Dallas to San Antonio, I should think.

[Pelado]

"California Higher Education's Hollow Core"

Some reflect the failure to manage effectively forces that have been inflating the nationwide higher education bubble. The cost of attending college, greatly outpacing the rate of inflation almost everywhere, has skyrocketed in California: Whereas nationwide tuition and fees at public universities over the last five years have risen on average by 28 percent, the average increase at UC campuses is an astounding 73.1 percent and, at Cal State campuses a still more astounding 83.8 percent. While turning away students and seeking billions for new buildings, California institutions are significantly under-using classroom and laboratory space. And, absent drastic reform, in little more than a decade the Cal State and UC systems are unlikely to be able to meet their obligations to faculty retirement programs.

More menacing to higher education in California is educators’ adoption of curricula, classroom pedagogy, and limitations on free speech that fly in the face of liberal education’s fundamental requirements. These practices also fly in the face of public opinion.

A Roper survey (commissioned by ACTA) shows that the public by a wide margin favors a required core college curriculum, with strongest support for it coming from those ages 25-34. Nevertheless, California universities neglect general education courses, which ACTA defines as “broad in scope, exposing the student to the rich array of material that characterizes the subject.”

The situation is less severe among the 23 Cal State campuses: Almost all require undergraduate general education courses in composition, government and history, math, and sciences. In the elite UC system, however, the situation is dismal.

Berkeley and Davis, according to ACTA, lack general education requirements worthy of the name in composition, literature, foreign language, government and history, economics, math, and science. Of the nine UC campuses, only Santa Barbara imposes a substantial general education requirement in literature, and only UCLA in a foreign language. No UC campus requires in government and history or in economics a basic course of the sort that introduces students to the fundamentals, scope, and significance of the subject.

California higher education, moreover, undermines academic freedom by both abolishing proper obligations and imposing improper restrictions. In 2003, the system opened the door to classroom indoctrination by replacing guidelines that obliged professors to present inconvenient facts and alternative points of view with guidelines that merely direct them to offer students conclusions based on “professional standards of inquiry.”

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/art...re_115232.html

[filsdepac]

http://images.businessweek.com/slide...50-best-cities

[LA Ute]

Interesting piece by Victor Davis Hanson, about the people he calls "quietists" who live in California despite the state's determined slide downhill.

The Quiet Californians

No state has suffered the last four years as much as has California — given that its progressive governor and legislative majorities serve as force multipliers for the Obama national agenda. We live in a 2X Obama state. And it is desirous for twelve or sixteen, not just four, more years in Washington.

The bluest state is polling at a 20 to 24 point lead for Barack Obama. Who cares that it is struggling with nearly 11% unemployment and facing a $16 billion budget shortfall? What does it matter that its public schools rated variously from 45th to 49th in the nation and that it is home to one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients, forty percent of the nation’s illegal aliens, and the largest prison population in the country? If Ohio supposedly has a million Obama-phones, I shudder to wonder how many are in California.

Bleak? But such stats do not necessarily translate into the bad life for those Californians who vote — a least in comparison, I suppose, to Minnesota’s winters, Mississippi’s rate of welfare payouts, Baltimore’s streets, or Mexico’s police. We are living on the fumes of natural wealth and a century of prior investment by some pretty hard-working and far-sighted long dead Californians; and it takes a long time to screw all that up.

Indeed, the state’s voting population accepts the status quo: the growing underclass expects entitlements always to grow even greater; state employees are more than happy with in-the-future-unsustainable benefits and packages; and the coastal elite have enough money that they do not care whether they have to pay a bit more to subsidize others and create tranquility in their anointed souls. Meanwhile, California is clear and 78 degrees without humidity — in late September....

[Mormon Red Death]

Gas prices jumped 20cents last night

$4.50 for a gallon of gas???

[Uncle Ted]

Gas prices jumped 20cents last night

$4.50 for a gallon of gas???

And it keeps going up...

California motorists faced another day of record-breaking gasoline prices Sunday, though relief appeared to be on the way.

In its latest update early Sunday, AAA reported that the statewide average price for a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline was $4.655. Saturday's average of $4.6140 was the highest since June 19, 2008, when it was $4.6096.

[...]

In some locations, fuming motorists paid $5 or more per gallon while station owners had to shut down pumps in others.

A station in Long Beach had California's priciest gas at $6.65 for a gallon of regular, according to GasBuddy.com

$6.65? I am not looking forward to buying gas in Cali next week.

[The_Douger]

Ugh, California.