It’s like everything else. We all want the benefits of big government but we don’t want to pay for them. We choose to spend our money supporting professional sports organizations. We choose to redevelop our downtown for the sole benefit of the developers, leaving our schools and libraries to scramble for light bulbs. We spend almost as much money on the lowest performing 10% of our kids as we do on the other 90% even though most of those underachievers will never appreciably improve. We want the European-style social systems but we don’t want the 55% tax brackets it takes to pay for them.
Collectively, our electorate has the mentality of a teenager – that’s why the political machines operate on such an adolescent level. As far as I’m concerned, we completely deserve the government we get.
As long as Prop 13 has been dredged up again, you may want to read this.
While I don’t necessarily agree with everything he says, I think he does a good job dispelling the notion that the tax burden in California is insufficient.
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