CA swears it will pay us next month

Keeping up with a decades-old tradition of bumbling through yet another fiscal year, California will begin issuing IOUs, a drastic measure not taken since The Great Depression, to the tune of $53.3 million dollars.

Luckily, it's illegal to send out IOUs to state employees. But we've found another way to screw them over.

And here's the kicker: even banks, those fun, failing institutions, are hesitant to lend to us.
“In evaluating potential registered warrant acceptance, banks have been advised by regulatory authorities to consider such issues as credit quality, capital requirements and concentration limits,” the president of the California Bankers Association, Rod Brown, said in a prepared statement. “Given the poor credit rating of California – the worst in the nation – banks may be hesitant to extend credit to the state.”

And you guys can't raise taxes, can you?

I read an article somewhere that described it as "direct democracy gone awry"

Subrosa has gone into detail about over the course of several threads. I think the recent prop 8 threads may be a good bit of research. Don't bump them, just read his posts about the California constitution.

Hey Arnie, I bet that car license fee thing you ran against looks pretty damn good now, doesn't it?

As have I.

Is there any other way for direct democracy to go? What with its admitting no cure for the mischiefs of factions and all.

The simple answer here is that California needs to cut spending. Yeah it's a simple Sarge-World answer, but let me ask you this:

What exactly are you getting out of California's current spending that people in other states aren't getting from their goverment's not spending as much? That's what I'd like to know. Other states don't seem to be having the same problem as California (or at least not even close to the point that California is). What's California doing wrong here?

California doesn't have a spending problem. Real per capita spending has only increased 2.2% over the last decade. What it has is a revenue problem. Prop 13 has kept corporate property tax artificially low, we're the only oil-extracting state that doesn't charge an extraction fee, and it's practically impossible to increase taxes (although it's dirt easy to reduce them).

I went here to find some cross state comparisons of per capita spending.

Basically, a bunch of states sit within the $9-10K per annum per capita band. Massachussetts is a bit higher, climbing towards $11K, while California is a bit over $11K. New York is well over $14K.

Just so we know.

D'oh.

If you're spending more money than you have to the point of issuing IOUs, you have a spending problem.

If you're spending more money than you have, you could spend less, or you could find a way to get more money.

Who knew life could be so multi-faceted outside of SargeWorld??

Not in this case. If your tax collection system is utterly broken, you have a revenue problem. California per-capita state spending is roughly average.

You need to match your spending to the money you take in, not match the money you take to you sustain your spending.

Right - who needs schools, roads, bridges, police, jails, firefighters, trash collection, water, sewers and libraries anyway?

Area State Good For It By Next Year, It Swears

Hey, can you guys fix the state before I move back? Please?

Will this crisis force California to draft a new constitution?

Now I hate living in California even more.

So far, it looks like Wells Fargo and Bank of America are the only banks accepting the IOUs, and Wells is doing it only for the next seven days. I don't know about B of A.

No, there isn't. There are just nicer ways to put it, like "gone awry," versus less-nice ways to put it, like "a constant clusterfuck of frequently epic proportions, and if I'd wanted my neighbor Bob or those morons upstairs with the loud music they play early in the morning to have the power to make laws for me, I'd have written him/them in on the ballot at the last election--and, as it turns out, I didn't and wouldn't do that, ever. Nothing against Bob personally, of course. Everything against the morons upstairs with the music, though."

I suspect I know the answer to this, but do you even know the first thing about California politics? The California budget?

Idiots! Making more bad loans to lenders with crappy credit! We're just back into the same death spiral!!!