The hangover for cutting taxes and expecting miracles when no money is available. Here's to the Jarvis tax-cutting gimmicks that started this mess.

Golden State just reflects nation's ills
Jay Bookman The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
E-mail:jbookman@ajc.com

These days, volunteering to be governor of California seems as foolhardy as volunteering to serve as captain of the Titanic.

AFTER the Titanic hit the iceberg.

The state is a mess. Its budget is a patched-together disaster, its political culture has collapsed, its economy is in a tailspin, and for the first time in recorded history more people are fleeing the Golden State than coming in.

And yet scores of people -- a millionaire, a movie star, a columnist, a porno king ... everybody but the Professor and Mary Anne -- are apparently eager to take responsibility for all that.

It's funny in a way, at least for those of us safely watching the three-ring circus from the grandstands. Many people around the country even seem to be taking a certain glee in the woes of a state that for so long has been the subject of envy.

But that's a dangerous attitude. California has long been our leading cultural, political and economic indicator. The sun may rise in the east and move westward, but trends, like storm systems, tend to move in the other direction, rising first in the West and moving to the East.

In fact, California's crisis is the natural culmination of two trends already visible in the country as a whole.

First, we increasingly treat politics not as a means of self-government but as a bloodsport fought both to entertain the masses and to vent our deep-seated cultural resentments against each other. Politics has always been brutal, of course, but it was brutal like boxing was brutal. There were still rules, with a referee and a set of rules and a patina of civil behavior.

No longer. Politics in California and elsewhere has devolved into a cage fight from which only the winner emerges alive, and victory justifies any tactic. Governing is far less important than getting the chance to gouge out the other guy's eyeball.

The second trend at work is fiscal irresponsibility. Californians are angry at Gov. Gray Davis and other leaders because they're finally being forced to confront the yawning chasm that has developed between the services that they demand from their government and their unwillingness to tax themselves enough to finance those services.

On the federal level, a similar chasm exists between what we demand of government and what resources we are willing to provide to meet those demands. The true magnitude of that gap has been hard to envision, though, because measures such as the national debt and deficit only measure what the gap used to be, not what it will be.

Recently, however, two economists for the conservative American Enterprise Institute decided to compare what the federal government is already obligated to spend in the future against the revenue that Uncle Sam can expect to collect, based on current policies. The results, published in a paper last month, were stunning.

According to Jagadeesh Gohkale and Kent Smetters, the federal government faces a future fiscal imbalance of $44.2 trillion. (For comparison purposes, the total national debt, incurred since the nation began, is a mere $6.75 trillion.)

And with the baby boom generation set to ease into retirement soon, almost all of that fiscal imbalance can be attributed to looming Social Security and Medicare costs. As the two AEI economists note, today's generations will enjoy the benefits of that spending while our kids and children not yet born will get stuck with the bill.

"In the absence of economic or demographic developments dramatically different from anything anticipated, massive tax increases or benefit reductions are inevitable," AEI President Christopher Demuth writes in a foreword to the Gohkale and Smetters report.

And unfortunately, because of a civic laziness in which the sober duties of citizenship and self-government are shrugged off in favor of talk-radio shtick, we lack the ability to address that problem responsibly.

To paraphrase that old song, "California, here we come. . . ."




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