Joel Stein on California's State of Insanity

By Joel Stein
Time

Before I moved to California, I enjoyed voting. Once every four years, I thought very deeply for a very long time about the presidential candidates and then voted for the Democrat. I left the crappy high school gym knowing I had voted for a government that would bring progress and change, ignoring the fact that the high school gym kept getting crappier.

But once I got to Los Angeles, I learned that the East Coast version of democracy is weak. In L.A. we vote all the time, on everything. We've already voted twice since everybody else last voted in November. Thanks to the endless ballot-initiative system, in the four years that I've been here, I've voted on all kinds of stuff I have absolutely no understanding of: high-speed rail lines (yes!), port security (sure!), children's-hospital bonds (of course!) and how chickens should be housed (humanely and not by me!). I have considered running for the state legislature just because I think those guys vote less often. (Watch a video about voting in the 2008 presidential election.)

It turns out that letting me vote on stuff is a bad idea, for much the same reason that giving me a credit card was a bad idea: I love stuff and hate paying for it. And it turns out there are a lot of people just like me. On May 19, California voters knocked down all five of the budget-cutting and tax-raising propositions designed to save the state budget from being $21 billion short. We already had the worst credit rating of any state. Which means that if states were people, California would be Ed McMahon.

(More here.)