Of course, the gov. couldn’t possibly sell assets nor account for all the vehicles it has on the road, etc. etc. etc. into eternity.

I realized how stupid I was when I was part of the 11% of Californians who voted to cut services instead of passing bond measures back in 2000. Silly me to think dealing with the pain back then was a good idea. Let’s pass more bond measures, increase taxes, snub our noses at the rest of the world cuz we’re so much better than everyone else… blah, blah, blah.

California – Land of Colossal Failure!

The state and local govts. here are openly corrupt, the gerrymandering is just one example. They will continue to get away with it because the people here are too busy entertaining themselves to death. A shallower, more vacuous population you will never see, than the people in Southern Cali.

True our public employee unions are first rate moochers like those in every other state. The UAW has nothing on these guys. True our state legislators never saw tax they didn’t want to pass. And yes San Francisco is becoming a “manhattanized” city for only those with big bank accounts. Yes SF’s mayor is a real oddball.

But you are missing huge parts of the problem.

One is the inability of our state republicans to focus on things other than gay marriage: elected to control the Aseembly in the 90’s they imemdiately put an anti-gay marrigae bill in the hopper. But no one had elected them for that. They pursued a social agenda and soon lost control and have been in decline ever since.

Money? We send more money to D.C. than many states and perhaps if we had some of it back instead of supporting bridges to nowhere, we wouldn’t be running a deficit.

What do we spend it on? Well, we are funding the expense of millions of illegals that we howled about in the 80’s while none of you though it was important. We passed prop 209 barring benefits to illegals while many of your state newspapers clucked over our insensibility and then we were deprived of it by a federal judge.

Now there are just too many illegals here to “cut” spending to them. In many LA School Districts over 90% of the kids in elementary and middle schools speak spanish as the first language. 90%! Want to help us pay for those translators? Their medical care?

The drain on trauma centers, schools and other public funds by illegals is enormous Even if you have some illegals,the number is dwarfed by the number here.

There is now no choice but to send hundreds of thousands of illegals to school and to pay for their medical care. The feds are not sending them home and they’ll be 21 one day, looking for jobs, driving on the streets, having kids who are US citizens and walking down our streets as adults. Many of those kids, by the way, are now in the military doing a terrific job.

Unlike Paris with its mobs of angry disenfranchised “youths,” we will do our best to assure that the illegals that stay here (because the feds allowed it) will become peacefully integrated people, not angry, uneducated malcontents with transmissible diseases. The time to “send them back” passed decades ago.

The cost of this is easily in the billions. Its killing us. But it cannot be shut off and its naive to suggest otherwise. We are paying for the failure of the federal governemnt to control illegal imigration. So send us some money for a change!

Actually, the domestic automakers have been shifting advertising resources away from broadcast and cable towards “new media” for a while. As for the Dodge truck ads, I agree they’re silly and have criticized Detroit’s car ads myself. Still, you need to have some kind of marketing.