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This is a thoughtful and thorough article on what is needed to fix California. Personally, I think the union owned and operated Democrat Party is not willing to fix any economic problem.
How bad is the problem? "To get a sense of the institutional problems, first understand that California is as polarized as the nation is as a whole. San Francisco is so left-leaning that the city’s name has become an adjective for liberalism. Orange County, by contrast, regularly boasts of being the most Republican municipality in the nation. Farmers in the state’s vast Central Valley tend to one-sixth of the irrigated land in the United States. Environmentalists in Los Angeles, meanwhile, mount regular bids to reduce water supplies to the valley in order to protect a local fish species. One-third of the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet makes home port in San Diego. Up the coast in San Francisco, residents voted in 2005 to shut military recruiters out of high schools."
There is an economic answer to end the deficits and cut taxes, what do you think of this idea---a 6% flat tax?
"California would therefore do well to take the advice of economist Arthur Laffer, not just because of his status as one of the authors of Reaganomics but because he is an example of the state’s woes, having packed up his California-based fund-management business in 2006 and relocated to Tennessee. By Laffer’s estimates, if California abandoned its current, highly progressive income-tax system in favor of a statewide flat tax of no more than 6 percent on personal income and net business sales, it could completely abolish all property taxes, state gas taxes, and state payroll taxes, as well as all current state and local sales taxes, without losing revenue. And that’s without factoring in the increased economic activity that such a dramatic change to the tax code would almost certainly generate. This change would once again require the support of a two-thirds majority in the legislature, but its appeal just might be broad enough to attract such a coalition."
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How bad is the problem? "To get a sense of the institutional problems, first understand that California is as polarized as the nation is as a whole. San Francisco is so left-leaning that the city’s name has become an adjective for liberalism. Orange County, by contrast, regularly boasts of being the most Republican municipality in the nation. Farmers in the state’s vast Central Valley tend to one-sixth of the irrigated land in the United States. Environmentalists in Los Angeles, meanwhile, mount regular bids to reduce water supplies to the valley in order to protect a local fish species. One-third of the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet makes home port in San Diego. Up the coast in San Francisco, residents voted in 2005 to shut military recruiters out of high schools."
There is an economic answer to end the deficits and cut taxes, what do you think of this idea---a 6% flat tax?
"California would therefore do well to take the advice of economist Arthur Laffer, not just because of his status as one of the authors of Reaganomics but because he is an example of the state’s woes, having packed up his California-based fund-management business in 2006 and relocated to Tennessee. By Laffer’s estimates, if California abandoned its current, highly progressive income-tax system in favor of a statewide flat tax of no more than 6 percent on personal income and net business sales, it could completely abolish all property taxes, state gas taxes, and state payroll taxes, as well as all current state and local sales taxes, without losing revenue. And that’s without factoring in the increased economic activity that such a dramatic change to the tax code would almost certainly generate. This change would once again require the support of a two-thirds majority in the legislature, but its appeal just might be broad enough to attract such a coalition."
More...