California is overrun. No one wants to use the I word (Illegal Immigration) anymore or even pretend its an issue. However, you can let a million largely uneducated immigrants in every year for twenty years and expect the state to be the land of opportunity and growth it once was.

Instead of nipping the problem in the bud, the politicians ignored it or only offered extremist rhetoric that the left can paint as hateful and insensitive. Such has ruined the economic prospects of California, made housing costs preposterous, killed the lower tiers of the job markets and created generations of kids whose early career options spiralled down from aerospace and sixties era boomtime and booming real estate markets to Wal-mart and Del Taco. The middle class has been displaced by a huge lower class and the upper class has become even more cloistered and isolated.

IMHO Quality of life peaked in CA around 1982 or '83. The 405 freeway wasn't nearly as impassable (by today's standard it was traveling breakneck speeds) and you still had 20,000,000 less illegals in the state, a healthier job market, an economy that still offered limitless entrepreneurial opportunities. After 85, with all the smog laws and retroactive requirements the state government showed how unfriendly it really was to residents. After Jarvis passed Prop 13 - the government tried to punish the residents by cutting from the infrastructure. The legacy of that bill has been awful for California because the politicians used it to justify butchering infrastructure and services for the past twenty-five years.

Naturally, if you let in a million illegal aliens each year you might as well throw away your efforts to curb pollution - because you are offsetting your gains by the need for more vehicles on the road. So, insidiously, all the pollution controls and trillions of dollars spent, the billions of man hours, endless cars repaired and refitted have all been effectively negated.

Dumb? Nope, just amazingly shortsighted.

Brown, Deukmajian, Wilson, Davis...each have not been very good for California and none have addressed the real problem which is that California, the whole southwest and to a lesser degree the whole US has been allowed to be turned into the only "solution" for Mexico's economic problems. Combine illegal immigration with a population that's largely devotedly Catholic - and you can predict suffering and poverty for centuries to come.

No State and no nation, no matter how economically robust, can give free rides and handouts endlessly and not eventually realize they will ruin it for everyone, both in the US and in Mexico.

The power issue is a red herring. The only reason more power plants were necessary ahead of schedule was to accomodate an abnormally increasing population. I toured Palos Verde in '80 and it was projected to support the San Diego and OC region till 1995. Didn't happen. Arizona ships out a third of it's generated power to California to help sustain it's infrastructure. Anything ever happens to that power and California is in the dark - really in the dark.

Can Arnold make it worse? Hardly. As long as the primary source of California's budget and infrastructure strain remains unaddressed - California will continue to quickly sink into the Pacific under the weight of illegal immigration, increased crime, increased strain on government services, increased strain on hospitals and highways and further away from the "Golden" image than could ever have been imagined outside of a SciFi novel.

The state is developing a "Wal-mart" economy. By that I mean that everyone who lives there, even the currently "rich", will sooner or later be shopping at Wal-mart.*

Can Arnold save the State? So doubtful as to be statistically negligible. The damage is pretty much done. The SoCal boom industries have been destroyed and more importantly no new ones lurk on the horizon. The independent businessman is punished, taxed and penalized. In the north, Silicon Valley is like a carnival town after the carnival's left - and all that's left is cotton candy on your shoe. Your basic staples such as farming and shipping will always be there - but they can only employ so many. Hollyweird will always exist and attract the insecure in the same number Las Vegas attracts the poor. But it's a lousy way to make a living in a city that offers fewer perks and more pain with each passing year.

I love California, for what it was and am saddened by what it has become. Sure one can live in Balboa or in a gated community and shop at Fashion Island and fly out at John Wayne Airport or work in Irvine and call it a life. However, the days of Sunday drives down PCH, wind in one's hair, no traffic to speak of, while seeing the vast open cliffs beautiful beaches and beautiful valleys and orange groves is long past. It is an era that will never come again, a snapshot in time that made California famous and desirable - yet now is largely unreal and just frustratingly out of reach.

California needs a miracle and by the time the perpetualy predicted "Big One" finally does hit - no one will be able to notice a difference....and all too many might even consider it an improvement.

;-)

SDAI-Tech1

*Because sustaining a high or middle class income will be increasingly difficult and folks who do have money will be moving out as the neighborhoods all decline in QOL while increasing in living expenses.