The Land of Arnold
I previously used my weekends for philosophy and theology. Now I use them to catch up on the previous week's contemporary reading, on those essays that I should have read when they first appeared but simply couldn't get to because of the exigencies of office and family life.
Last week, I missed a great new piece by Michael Lewis: California and Bust. The gist of the piece: California is a lot worse than people realize. It could become America's Greece. It's going to need a massive bailout, which will come at the expense of other states who exercised fiscal restraint. Sound familiar? Just as California will become America's Greece, people are going to expect Indiana to become its new Germany. Problem is, the smart money says the Hoosiers and similarly-situated states are going to balk.
And by the way: If you're invested in municipal bond markets, thanks for the donation to state and local government public service sector's inflated pension benefits. But then again, I suspect Washington will use your investment as a reason to bailout the funds: "If we don't bailout California, New Jersey, and other such states, the municipal bond funds will go bust, and people will lose their investment." So maybe you'll be okay after all.
In fact, it might be a smart investment. Muni bond funds have taken a beating. You might be able to get in cheap, with a level of confidence that the government won't let you lose too much money. It's Vegas without the losing side. Go ahead and give it a shot.
After all, the spoiled brats in California and their enormous number of electoral college votes aren't going down without a fight, especially when they can fight the fight at the expense of the other 49 states.
Maybe the Articles of Confederation weren't so bad after all. Expect a renaissance of interest in that archaic document, once the California mess hits the fan in full.
Excerpt:
Back in 2008, unable to come to terms with its many creditors, Vallejo declared bankruptcy. Eighty percent of the city's budget–and the lion's share of the claims that had thrown it into bankruptcy–were wrapped up in the pay and benefits of public-safety workers. Relations between the police and the firefighters, on the one hand, and the citizens, on the other, were at historic lows. The public-safety workers thought that the city was out to screw them on their contracts; the citizenry thought that the public-safety workers were using fear as a tool to extort money from them. The local joke was that “P.D.” stands for “Pay or Die.” The city-council meetings had become exercises in outrage: at one, a citizen arrived with a severed pig's head on a barbecue grill. “There's no good reason why Vallejo is as fucked up as it is,” says longtime resident Marc Garman, who created a Web site to catalogue the civil war. “It's a boat ride to San Francisco. You throw a stone and you hit Napa.” Since the bankruptcy, the police and fire departments have been cut in half; some number of the citizens who came to Phil Batchelor's office did so to say they no longer felt safe in their own homes. All other city services had been reduced effectively to zero. “Do you know that some cities actually pave their streets?” says Batchelor. “That's not here.”
Received in an Email
A friend tells me that it's Canada's Thanksgiving today. Happy Thanksgiving to our friends up north. And I offer this GKC quote (which my friend included in her email):
“I do not, in my private capacity, believe that a baby gets his best physical food by sucking his thumb; nor that a man gets his best moral food by sucking on his soul, and denying its dependence on God or other good things. I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.”
