"Death to a Dream"

Based on the article written by Joel Kotkin it isn't very likely that California will make a comeback, and if there is eventually a comeback it won't be anytime soon. The University of California, Santa Barbera forecasted that California will actually lag behind until 2011. California has made a comeback before actually in recent history, but there are just too many things wrong right now. Unemployment is up at 10% and is still expected to rise. Kotkin believes that the people in the legislature of California is still just taking us backwards. He doesn't believe the people of California made a good choice in electing a movie star in running the state, and the California has just turned into a laughingstock.



The writer believes that the only way California can turn things around is for it to make jobs for themselves. He thinks that people like the Cardenas family need to try and make a business for themselves and take things from there. He also believes that the people fighting to make things greener aren't helping, but just hurting.



I don't agree with his reasoning. The way the housing plummeted isn't the government's fault. I mean things could have been planned for, but it wasn't the government's fault. I don't know that much about the government and their decisions, but if the government is making bad decisions it's still the people's fault. They are the ones who chose who was going to run the government, therefore it was their fault.

Everyone is going to be effected by the new budget. When the new budget was first engineered it failed to gain the two-thirds vote that was needed, and the Democrats were trying to pursuade just one Republicn. Eventually the Democrats agreed to ban legislative pay increases during deficit years, and they eliminated a 12 cent gas increase that they planned on putting in. Maldonado, the senator who agreed with these circumstances, also made California political primaries open and nonparisan.

The new budget has $15 billion in spending cuts, $ 12.8 billion in temporary taxes, they borrowed $11.4 billion, and they made a new reserve fund with $1 billion. If the state recieves money from the nation some of the taxes will be reduced and the borrowed money should be cut in half. Billions of dollars are going to be out of schools, and healthcare institutions, sales tax is going up by 1 percentage points, and the licence fee is raised to 115% of the old price. Although the gasoline tax has been shot down, residents income tax rates were raised by a quarter of a percentage point. Althought the new taxes are only supposed to last two years it could be extended for another two years by the voters. But all that being said small businesses are going to be given tax breaks, and so are some parts of the movie industry which is huge in California. Both tax breaks are considered huge wins for Republicans who just wouldn't give in.