How much is $17 trillion? Visualized for reference.

[parsonsj]

Yeah, California has real problems. It's a bit of a poster child for austerity efforts not working.. as each new round of spending cuts is instituted, the deficit goes up, not down. It was true for Gray Davis, the Governator (who can spell the man's name), and now for Jerry Brown.

What's the answer? More tax base. How? Invest in the population. Get the unemployed back to work paying texes. If you want to see the cause of California's budget problems, go back to Proposition 13 in 1978, and you can see a series of budget crises that have been happening since then.

There's no easy solutions -- but cutting government spending doesn't work. It hasn't worked in California, it hasn't worked in Texas, it hasn't worked in the UK, and it hasn't worked in Italy, Greece, or Spain. We need to do something else.

Wisconsin has shown some promise. Their approach has been to require government employees to provide a larger percentage of their pension contributions -- in effect, a tax on unionized government employees. I'm just spitballin' but maybe something to try in California is to invest in more school teachers (California is currently 48th in spending per capita in education) and require them to provide a greater percentage of their pension.