 If you've grown weary of California's annual budget stalemates and furloughs, if you're frustrated by the Legislature, if you feel California is broken, then "California Crack Up: How Reform Broke the Golden State and how we can fix it" should be required reading.
Co-authored by Joe Matthews and Mark Paul, the book is a concise and lucid analysis of how the state arrived at its current mess, as well as offering strategies to address what's ailing it.
To understand the nature of the problem, one should read no further than the following passage:
"California is a nation without states. Its central government, in Sacramento, seem to many of us too distant to understand our needs. Its local governments are often scaled at the wrong size and are deprived of the tools and flexibility to effectively solve the problems that touch our everyday lives such as crime and schools.
The ambivalence about growth consistently undercuts any attempt to plan for the well being of Californians, present and future. The whole system requires a great unwinding."
I suspect to the overwhelming number who have reached the conclusion that California is indeed broken, the previous statement might seem nothing more than an exclamation point on the obvious. If it was simply another book, or for that matter, another column articulating California's political and economic morass, there is no reason to continue reading.
But Matthews and Paul offer much more than a commentary on the current crisis. They provide a historical analysis of not only how we arrived, but also show that the culprits for this quagmire are a mix of Democrat and Republican politicians working in solidarity, if not always in tandem, with the voters.
Matthews and Paul portray the history of California as a 160-year odyssey of reactionary reforms, whose luck has run out.
They argue California is a state that never had a proper founding with the momentum for its growth fueled by the discovery of gold.
The reactionary theme that has been California's trademark of late was evident in the beginning. California hurriedly put together a state constitution. Borrowing liberally from Iowa's constitution largely due to its brevity. It was so confident of its admittance into the Union that even before Congress decided, California had already sent two senators to Washington. Matthews and Paul contend that since 1879, which was California's last constitutional convention, the state has made do with a series of "rapid improvisations" that have spun the state into corner.
Perusing the history of California's formative years one can see the foundation being laid for today's challenges.
The thoughtful analysis by Matthews and Paul also makes it difficult to see how gubernatorial candidates Jerry Brown and Meg Whitman, based on their rhetoric to solve the stated problems, will make any real difference if elected.
Why do we continue a system where Californians today are free to lock in perpetuity how the state will be run? Shouldn't future generations have a say?
Here are Matthews and Paul's five recommendations to fix California:
• Move power out of Sacramento and restore authority and accountability to local communities by requiring that spending and revenue-producing decisions for each program be made at the same level of government, with fiscal rewards for success and costs for failure.
• Make direct democracy more direct by giving voters both more choices (by allowing the Legislature to place a counterproposal on the ballot next to each initiative) and more power (by making it easier for voters to overturn legislation via referendum).
• End fiscal gridlock, restore accountability and return flexibility to government by emptying California's constitution of supermajority vote requirements for budgets and policy mandates for spending and taxes.
• Improve representation by creating a unicameral legislature with smaller districts so that legislators are closer to the people and do more of their own work.
• Make every vote count, end partisan gerrymandering, increase political competition and create more substantive campaigns by replacing single-member legislative districts with multi-member districts elected by proportional representation.
But it's not enough to read the recommendation bullets. "California Crack Up" is worth the time for anyone who has complained that the state is broken, thought they were voting for change that didn't materialize, or simply curious how the nation's most populous state with the largest economy is also its most dysfunctional.
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