Economist Looks At California's Special-Election Ballot Measures

California is a disaster, the Unions have too much power and the left coast is more concerned with ideology then actual development. With massive unemployment and huge budget holes the state is inching closer to a complete breakdown. A breakdown so bad that the government began looking at using "IOU's" instead of actual cash for its bills.

From The Economist:

ON MAY 19th Californians will go to the polls to vote on six ballot measures that are as important as they are confusing. If these measures fail, America’s biggest state will enter a full-blown financial crisis that will require excruciating cuts in public services. If the measures succeed, the crisis will be only a little less acute. Recent polls suggest that voters are planning to vote most of them down.

The occasion has thus become an ugly summary of all that is wrong with California’s governance, and that list is long. This special election, the sixth in 36 years, came about because the state’s elected politicians once again—for the system virtually assures as much—could not agree on a budget in time and had to cobble together a compromise in February to fill a $42 billion gap between revenue and spending. But that compromise required extending some temporary taxes, shifting spending around and borrowing against future lottery profits. These are among the steps that voters must now approve, thanks to California’s brand of direct democracy, which is unique in extent, complexity and misuse.

Basically the government is dominated by extremes and a crazy quilt work of groups that have driven the state of the rails. In general the article favors, along with many Californians, a Constitutional Convention for a clean start in the state.

To the extent that there is scepticism at all, it is not about the idea of a new and cleaner constitution but about the process that might lead to it. If a convention set out to rewrite the entire constitution, it would end in the usual war over hot-button social issues such as gay marriage or the perennial Californian fight over water. And there is concern that “the nutwings are the ones who will show up, not the soccer moms,” as Ms Ross of the California Budget Project puts it. The same partisan extremists bickering about the same controversies would lead nowhere.

To address these concerns, the Bay Area Council, which has become the driving force behind the scheme, has put forth two ideas. First, delegates to the convention should be chosen through the general jury pool to ensure that the whole population, as opposed to partisans or voters, is represented. Second, the scope of the constitutional convention would be explicitly limited to governance issues and the budget mechanism and would exclude all others.

Good Luck