Jennifer Rubin: California, There It Went
[Jennifer Rubin is Commentary's contributing editor.]
More than 40 years later, I still remember the bright sun and the palm trees when we got off the plane. California in 1968 was a magical place, a magnet for those seeking new opportunities or to lose an old identity. The Golden State was allowing the rich to get richer and the middle class to live out the American dream in its pristine state. The public schools and expanding state-university system (two separate systems, in fact) were the envy of the nation. The corruption and Mob influence that had paralyzed many eastern and midwestern states and cities were largely absent.
When my parents announced they were uprooting the Glazer family from a cozy suburb of Philadelphia, as 5 million people did from eastern and midwestern towns between 1950 and 1980, the news was met with a mixture of awe (“California...” they would breathlessly whisper) and bewilderment (“But what is there?”). The very act of migrating by plane was itself somewhat grand. In the years before airline deregulation, one dressed up to fly, as if sailing on an ocean liner, and at prices not all that much lower than an ocean voyage’s. And yet those we were leaving behind acted as though we were traveling by caravan, leaving civilization and going into the wilderness....
Forty-two years after I arrived in California, the very notion of an affordable, happy-go-lucky, optimistic, and “golden” state seems otherworldly. Its financial condition resembles Greece’s. Self-dealing and political scandals involving public-sector unions have become commonplace not only in Sacramento but also in cities from Mexico to Oregon. Thirteen percent of the state’s workforce is unemployed. Taxes (sometimes disguised as “fees” or “special assessments”) are among the highest in the country, school days are being cut, and state universities have cut off financial aid as they squeeze out in-state residents in favor ofhigher-paying out-of-staters.
After a decade of energy brown-outs that shut down air conditioners in the sweltering summer, spending cuts that have increased the decrepitude of roads and public facilities, and mushrooming retirement obligations to state workers that have crowded out basic public services, California is only now teetering on the crest of a fiscal sinkhole from which it will be impossible to emerge....
Read entire article at Commentary
More than 40 years later, I still remember the bright sun and the palm trees when we got off the plane. California in 1968 was a magical place, a magnet for those seeking new opportunities or to lose an old identity. The Golden State was allowing the rich to get richer and the middle class to live out the American dream in its pristine state. The public schools and expanding state-university system (two separate systems, in fact) were the envy of the nation. The corruption and Mob influence that had paralyzed many eastern and midwestern states and cities were largely absent.
When my parents announced they were uprooting the Glazer family from a cozy suburb of Philadelphia, as 5 million people did from eastern and midwestern towns between 1950 and 1980, the news was met with a mixture of awe (“California...” they would breathlessly whisper) and bewilderment (“But what is there?”). The very act of migrating by plane was itself somewhat grand. In the years before airline deregulation, one dressed up to fly, as if sailing on an ocean liner, and at prices not all that much lower than an ocean voyage’s. And yet those we were leaving behind acted as though we were traveling by caravan, leaving civilization and going into the wilderness....
Forty-two years after I arrived in California, the very notion of an affordable, happy-go-lucky, optimistic, and “golden” state seems otherworldly. Its financial condition resembles Greece’s. Self-dealing and political scandals involving public-sector unions have become commonplace not only in Sacramento but also in cities from Mexico to Oregon. Thirteen percent of the state’s workforce is unemployed. Taxes (sometimes disguised as “fees” or “special assessments”) are among the highest in the country, school days are being cut, and state universities have cut off financial aid as they squeeze out in-state residents in favor ofhigher-paying out-of-staters.
After a decade of energy brown-outs that shut down air conditioners in the sweltering summer, spending cuts that have increased the decrepitude of roads and public facilities, and mushrooming retirement obligations to state workers that have crowded out basic public services, California is only now teetering on the crest of a fiscal sinkhole from which it will be impossible to emerge....