Web Letters: California Budget Blues

The United States is building a fancy new super embassy in Pakistan for $ 1 billion dollars.

The Getty museum in Lost Angeles cost $ 1 billion dollars to build.

President Obama says there has been $295 billion dollars in defense contract overruns and it has to stop.

The U.S. military could do well on half of its overbloated $534 billion budget, if only we would fight fewer wars, not different wars.

Gary Amstutz
The Democratic Club of Kern River Valley

Lake Isabella , CA

A big part of the problem in getting a budget passed in California is the requirement for a 60 percent vote in the legislative process to get it into law. This was a part of Howard Jarvis's Prop 13 that passed in the seventies. State and local government have been handicapped since that time. If effect, it means a conservative minority can stop or delay any state budget.

Last time I looked, California had the same population as Canada, and while we don't have Canada's land mass or natural resources, there is a lot we can do for ourselves. Oddly enough this state's infrastructure was built by progressive Republicans using many of the same methods as the New Deal. Californians need to get back to their progressive origins, and they can do a lot to help themselves.

Pervis James Casey

Riverside, CA

I did not like the bank bailout at all, or in fact, any of the bailouts. But the situation was very similar to the 1931 Creditanstalt collapse and would have provided instant depression, instead of a few years of relatively minor recession.

But California's problems center around spending that has more than doubled in around a decade, with a population that has basically stabilized recently. California desperately needs to get spending under control. I would no more "help" poison California by removing the presure to correct this than I would "help" the drunkard who lives on the next block by donating some whiskey and cigarettes.

Why punish more prudent states through higher taxes? Don't their poor people count, too?

John D. Froelich

Upper Darby, PA