Presidnt’s Message
January 2011
Turning the Page
Fast away the old year passes,
Fa la la la la, la la la la.
Hail the new, ye lads and lasses,
Fa la la la la, la la la la.
Thus the traditional carol reads before those with trembling
chins have rendered it stupid. Which is to say, would you believe “Don we now
our bright apparel”? But I digress.
What should we hail in this New Year that lies before us,
those 52 weeks that stretch from now to the year when we hope to see a Mitch
Daniels-like figure elected to the highest office in the land? As a dealer in
Vegas might say, open a new pack of Bicycles with those 52 cards and let’s see
what we get. The political landscape is a target-rich environment, and since
we’ve got to start somewhere let’s start here at home in California.
The editorial in our Contra Costa Times, shortly after last
November’s election, tartly opined that “Californians are every bit as
dysfunctional as their representatives in Sacramento. Perhaps that’s why they
re-elected so many.” But then it has been suggested that it may have been a good
thing for Meg Whitman to have lost to Jerry Brown.
Let’s journey to Fantasyland and consider that maybe our
electorate isn’t so dysfunctional after all. Maybe they saw justice in sending
Jerry Brown back to Sacramento to clean up the mess he helped create. It would
have been unkind, and probably counter-productive, to have sent Meg to that
abattoir only to get torn apart and chewed up by the public employee unions and
entrenched, leftwing special interests.
Then imagine Brother Jerry in the twilight of his political
career deciding that his tarnished legacy needs some polishing. Maybe, just
maybe, he wants to leave the Golden State better off than when he found it at
the beginning of 2011. Of course even a small gain toward fiscal sanity would
ensure that. But maybe, just maybe, he wants to cut the restraints that keep us
from being golden once again.
Start with the unfunded public employee pensions and health benefits. And we can
get some help on this because California is not alone in having this problem.
When I say help, I don’t mean a bailout. Why should the sober people of Indiana
send money to California to save us from our profligacy? Our new Republican
House of Representatives certainly won’t midwife that kind of deal. But Indiana
can send sound advice and that is what we need in Sacramento most of all.
Then we need to get a handle on public employee unions themselves for they have
become the tail that wags the dog. Mr. Obama’s egregious stimulus package was
designed to pay off the unions for their help in getting him elected. Notice
that much of the money going to states was earmarked for public employees:
teachers, police and fire fighters. Then recall Obama’s recent admission that
there were no “shovel ready” projects awaiting the stimulus money. Well maybe
the Fourth Bore.
Once we get California’s public employees to focus on the fact
that they are “public servants,” perhaps they can also focus on the fact that
maybe they should give back a little---even retirees---to save the jobs of their
brethren who face layoffs because states, counties and municipalities can no
longer afford them.
Next we should work to damp down the rhetoric about how “the rich” must pay. Boy
oh boy is this tiresome. Democrats are particularly skilled at employing this
twaddle as they heat up the atmosphere for class envy and class warfare. You get
the picture; the rich are rich because they somehow cheated those of us who are
not rich out of our rightful inheritance. For Democrats, wealth creation is a
zero-sum game, which is to say your gain is someone else’s loss. That’s cruel
and abysmally ignorant, and a few Democrats are smart enough to know this, which
makes them dishonest as well.
So the next time you hear rabble-rousing, know-nothings
calling for the confiscation of other people’s money---Obama refers to it as
sharing the wealth---call their attention to the Korean immigrant family that
runs the cleaning establishment next to our Safeway. The whole family works
long, hard hours in order to educate their children so that they all can realize
the American dream. Democrats want to raise their taxes because they earn too
much.
Tell these mountebanks to look at their own dentists, for example, who incurred
education debts, deferred gratification, developed their practices and created
jobs for dental hygienists and office staff. Democrats think they earn too much.
Look at Meg, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Carly Fiorina. They earned what they
have through hard work and wise choices. They have created well-paying jobs for
many and, although they owe the rest of us nothing, generously give back to our
community and nation. Robber barons? Well hardly. Then why do Democrats loathe
them?
So that’s a start for 2011. It promises to be a very
interesting year.
