CALIFORNIA AS LIBERALISM'S LABORATORY

California's increasingly severe and largely self-inflicted economic crisis is impeding national economic revival.

• For four consecutive years, more Americans have moved out of California than have moved in.
• California's business costs are more than 20 percent higher than the average state's.
• In the last decade, net out-migration of Americans has been 1.4 million.
• California is exporting talent while importing Mexico's poverty.

Also:

• If, since 1990, state spending increases had been held to the inflation rate plus population growth, the state would have a $15 billion surplus instead of a $42 billion budget deficit, which is larger than the budgets of all but 10 states.
• Since 1990, the number of state employees has increased by more than a third.
• In Schwarzenegger's less than six years as governor, per capita government spending, adjusted for inflation, has increased nearly 20 percent.

Liberal orthodoxy has made the state dependent on a volatile source of revenues -- high income tax rates on the wealthy:

• In 2006, the top 1 percent of earners paid 48 percent of the income taxes. [and now they're leaving...]
  
• Unemployment, the nation's fourth highest, is 11.2 percent.

California has become liberalism's laboratory, in which the case for fiscal conservatism is being confirmed. The state is a slow learner and hence will remain a drag on the nation's economy.

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image toon - cali mny = Spending caps = dunce caps on sac + arnold