Main Street

No Laughing Matter

Ezra Klein explains why we shouldn’t be mocking California’s budget crisis, but worrying about it:

Whatever its entertainment value, California is the largest state in the union. Almost one-in-seven Americans call it home. And a lot of them are suffering now and, absent a fix, more will be suffering soon. Not joke-suffering. Not buddy-comedy suffering. Really suffering. Schools will close. Children will lose their health care. Families will lose their homes. The state will stop helping the mentally ill afford the medicine that lets them live normal lives. The budget cuts will cause 60,000 public employees to lose their jobs.

And as goes California, so might well go the nation. Harold Meyerson has been prosecuting the short-term version of this argument: “Because California is so much larger than any other state, and its unemployment rate among the nation’s highest, the collapse of its capacity to spend will counteract some of the effect of the federal stimulus and retard the nation’s recovery.” But I’d add in the long-term version: The pathologies that have led California to the brink exist in our larger political culture as well.