Wednesday, May 20, 2009

A Temporary Victory for California

Yesterday, California voters soundly defeated all of the ballot measures that would have increased taxes and/or cooked the books to temporarily lower the state's budget deficit. Yay! Victory!

This is a fleeting victory. The sense I get from reading the blogs and opinion pieces is that voters wanted to spank their representatives and make them do their jobs properly. Allow me to suggest that they already were.

The problem across the board, across all parties, across all states, the entire country and the entire Western world is that we don't want to earn what we get. At the same time we're voting down fiscal chicanery in California, we're debating universal health insurance across the nation. We're borrowing $6,000 per person this year for all the goodies we want to receive, but we don't want to pay for and we're talking about another monstrous entitlement.

Someone, somewhere has to earn what we receive. Until we collectively decide that the someone is us and we start talking in terms of earning things rather than giving things, we'll keep having elections like yesterday's where we had to decide which pocket to pick to keep getting our treats.

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