California: America's High-Stakes Experiment

Once blessed with a superb educational system, well-funded infrastructure and competent, vigorous state government, California now wrestles with lousy schools, decrepit public services and government gridlock. This incisive study traces the decline to a state constitution that requires unobtainable legislative super-majorities to pass taxes, spending increases and budgets; to America's nationwide antitax ideology, which was jump-started by California's infamous Proposition 13; and to term limits that have made the legislature a collection of neophytes. With the legislative process paralyzed, the author observes, lawmaking has devolved to ad hoc ballot initiatives—a hoary populist nostrum now exploited by monied special interests—with which voters impose burdensome spending mandates on the state while rejecting the taxes needed to fund them. The result is a chaotic but perpetually stymied " 'hybrid democracy'" dominated by glitzy ad campaigns and Schwarzeneggerian political theater. Journalist Schrag (former editorial page editor for the Sacramento Bee and author of Paradise Lost: California's Experience, America's Future ) provides a fascinating guide through the labyrinth of California state politics and probes the intractable social conflict underlying its dysfunctions: the unwillingness of a disproportionately white, Anglo, middle-class electorate to pay for public services for an increasingly brown, immigrant, working-class population. Lucid, evenhanded and thoughtful, Schrag offers one of the best analyses yet of the California train wreck and its troubling implications for America's future. (Apr.)