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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (135019)	3/27/2001 6:57:16 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1571636

I'm not saying it is necessarily unreasonable for you to dispute the importance of certain facts or statistics, but your argument basically just boils down to personal impressions which are hard to debate rationally. Now whether that's due from insufficient funds or from mismanagement of the monies is unclear. However, we do know that if it were the latter, it would mean that CA's management of its money had worsened significantly during the 22 years in question. Why that would be I don't know. It would certainly signify a major drop in the quality of the state gov't over that 22 year period. You list two posibilities. I also mentioned a third. Spending increases in other areas besides the areas you consider a problem draining away the funds. Unfortunately it is hard to find detailed breakdowns of old state budgets. I'm sure I could get the information if I wanted to put enough time and effort in to it but it is not something I could find with quick web searches. It didn't intentionally short its highway dept so that there would be horrendous traffic jams. There are bad traffic jams all over the US. I think this could be slightly reduced by more (and better directed) highway spending but I can't see how this would reasonably considered a result of proposition 13 (I don't think the property taxes even went to highway spending). Tim, its like global warming you can throw all these numbers around, call them facts but then there is the reality. There are parts of CA, mainly in the cities, where things are breaking down. And in 78 there was not any place where things where breaking down in CA? Their is reality. The reality is that CA spends an enormous and rapidly growing amount of money. Another example of the moral decay in CA is the incredible strength, power and wealth of their gangs. These gangs not only control their respective territories in CA but in the past ten years, they have established branches throughtout the western states much like a major corporation and have set up bases of operation for drug dealing and gun selling in the major cities of those states. These gangs have grown in power and stature because the police forces in CA are not equipped to deal with them effectively, This is not something unique to CA, or to gangs from CA, or to the western states. Spending on law enforcement has gone up a lot in CA, and across the country. Maybe it should go up more, maybe it should not, but either way the gangs did not spring up, or grow rapidly because of low spending on law enforcement. They would not go away and probably would not shrink much if law enforcement spending in CA doubled. When alcahol was illegal it funded a lot of gang activity. With narcotics illegal the gangs sell them and make a lot of money. Personally I would make the drugs legal which would dry up the money for these gangs and free police, court, and prison resources to deal with them and other crime problems. It would also end the incentive to kill over drug sales. Our gun laws are lax and our inability to keep major drugs out of this country is embarrassing. We have all ready debated gun control a number of times, but it has little to do with funding or proposition13. We allready spend more on the drug war then many countries do on their armies. If you add drug interdiction costs and aid to other countries to fight drugs, prison costs, and federal state and local anti-drug law enforcement we might spend $50bil a year fighting drugs (or about half of CA's total state budget). Now if continueing to spend that much would make the drug problem not as bad or spending double or triple that amount would eliminate most drug use then it might make some sense, but as spending has doubled and doubled again the drug situation has not gotten any better. Think of what that $50bil a year could do for education or infrastructure? Wouldn't that be a better way to spend it? Many do not understand the dynamic that's in play in CA, particularly S. Other then electricity supply is CA really that much worse then New York or many other areas in the country? All the people I know who have spent a lot of time there (most particuarly in ths bay area and in San Diego) seem to like it there. Tim