It’s STILL the economy, and stupid decisions by sixty years of politicians are coming home to roost. California is in economic collapse, and it isn’t pretty. The only way to correct the state of affairs will be painful, and cost everyone some grief, and plenty of cold cash. Economic irresponsibility has been a fine tradition in the Golden State. For about half that sixty year period, the state has had an economically impossible situation, requiring a two-thirds majority to authorize increase taxes, but only a simple majority to increase spending. This has led to the state’s current insolvency. You just can’t convince some of the state’s most educated people that business cannot continue as it has.

Marc Bousequet, who teaches a course in radical US culture at one of the California system universities, has posted often, arguing the cuts in positions and reductions in service hurt university students and employees. In his posts, he calls for the state to just fund higher education at what he considers to be an acceptable level. His latest offering is called “California is Burning,” calling for the students and citizens to protest the decision by the California regents to raise tuition and fees. Full of recycled radical verbiage and logic, it’s an homage to the 60s. A lot of demands for the state to fund their demands, but nowhere in Bousquet’s column will you find any indication that there is any recognition that the state is out of money. He has a lot of “hell no, we won’t go!” sort of language, but nothing suggesting how the state will pay for the services and pay raises he demands.

This is the California nightmare. Public employees, such as university professors, have lived well. They have become a political power, successfully obtaining better pay and benefits, but the state legislature has proven to be unwilling to buck them. This, coupled with the state’s tax restrictions, and other legal restrictions on private economic development, have created an economic disaster. Businesses that pay well and offer good benefits have been leaving California for other states for years. The high paying jobs, and the big corporate support for the state’s tax base have departed, leaving the state unable to pay for the many public responsibilities it has undertaken, including higher education. Deficit spending is not really an option. Sooner or later, the creditors expect to get paid. Expenditures have to be reduced to pay the bills, painful as it may be. California’s public employees are refusing to go along with reductions. Professor Bousquet thinks it’s simply a matter of protesting students taking over the campus and forcing the capitalists to pay or else.

Perhaps Professor Bousquet should spend more time reading international news and less time spouting old radical demands at meetings of the American Association of University Professors. He might ask some serious questions, and engage in some serious discussions about how California, and the USA as a whole will revise our long standing deficit spending practices to live within our means. That discussion is long overdue, and the creditors, including the Chinese government, are making it clear that they are not going to fund the deficit spending of the USA much longer. President Obama can probably attest to the nature of the economic leverage the Chinese exercise over our economy following his just concluded visit to China.

The students protesting the tuition and fee increase at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) are understandably unhappy. However, they are being misled by their elders like Bousquet. The reality is, the long deficit spending party is going to be over soon. The crash is coming. None of the platitudes offered by our charismatic President, or our radical chic professors are going to change that fact. We cannot continue living beyond our means as we have done for the past sixty years. Regardless of how much it pains them, that means everyone, including public employees, will see a reduction in goods, services and benefits. The question is only degree of pain. Can we deal with this on our terms, difficult as it may be, or will we wait until it is forced on us by our creditors, under much more painful terms? So far, we aren’t seeing any useful ideas from the vocal Professor Bousquet, just a call to the barricades. I would say whatever the students are paying for tuition and fees, they’re getting robbed if Bousequet typifies the caliber of thinking on the faculty at the public universities in California.