New Old Jerry Brown, a Modern Sisyphus - between a rock and the same rock

Jerry Brown, a Modern Sisyphus - Victor Davis Hanson - National Review Online

excerpts-

...Perhaps California did not invest in its public workers, skimped on entitlements, and turned away newcomers? Not really. Its teachers and public servants in many comparative surveys remain the highest-compensated and best-pensioned in the nation. Its welfare system is still the most generous in America. Seventy percent of its budget continues to go for education and social services. A state that accounts for 12 percent of the nation’s population generously provides for 30 percent of the national welfare load. More than a quarter of the nation’s illegal aliens are welcomed into California.

...California uses more gasoline than any other state and has the most voracious appetite for electricity. But Californians also enact the most obstacles to developing their own sources of oil, natural gas, and nuclear power. State referenda and the legislature have made it the hardest state in the nation in which to raise taxes and the easiest in which to pass costly new laws.

...The state’s mineral and timber industries are nearly moribund. At a time of skyrocketing food prices, more than a quarter-million acres of some of the wealthiest agricultural land in California’s Central Valley lie idle due to court-driven irrigation cutoffs — costing thousands of jobs and robbing the state of millions of dollars in revenue.

Home prices stay prohibitive along the upscale coastal corridor from San Francisco to San Diego, even as millions of acres of open spaces there remain off-limits for new housing construction. Most refined Californians who regulate how the state’s natural resources are used live on the coast far away from — and do not always understand — those earthy people who struggle to develop them.

...California does not ask its millions of foreign immigrants to arrive with legal status, the ability to speak English, or high-school diplomas, and then is confused when its entitlement and legal costs skyrocket. Billions of dollars in remittances are sent from California to Mexico — but without the state being curious whether some of the remitters are on some sort of state-funded public assistance.

Somehow, Jerry Brown must not only change the way Californians act, but also the strange way they now seem to think — persuading the present generation to produce far more private wealth while consuming far less in public funds. Otherwise, the revenue-strapped and reform-minded governor will be little more than a modern Sisyphus — endlessly pushing his enormous rock uphill, never quite reaching the top.