Por que a California vai a falencia...

pelas razões abaixo e várias outras mais.
Ainda bem que o Brasil pratica políticas completamente diferentes...

Freakish Frisco
PETE PETERSON
The City Journal, May 4 2010

Where one-third of city workers make $100,000 and Willie Brown is a budget hawk
San Francisco, a city accustomed to earthquakes, has recently been experiencing political tremors that may wind up reshaping its landscape. They started in January, when Willie Brown—the city’s former mayor, longtime speaker of the State Assembly, and now Democratic éminence grise—penned a startling mea culpa in the San Francisco Chronicle. “The deal used to be that civil servants were paid less than private sector workers in exchange for an understanding that they had job security for life,” Brown wrote. “But we politicians, pushed by our friends in labor, gradually expanded pay and benefits to private-sector levels while keeping the job protections and layering on incredibly generous retirement packages that pay ex-workers almost as much as current workers.” Brown’s essay was immediately picked up by Republican state legislators and conservative talk-radio hosts, who held it aloft, in an unusual demonstration of bipartisanship, to illustrate the causes of the state’s fiscal crisis.

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E não é só San Francisco: Los Angeles caminha para a falência, e com data anunciada, segundo o Wall Street Journal. Abaixo o começo de um artigo sobre sua decadência e falência em 2014, sendo que o resto só pode ser lido por quem assinar esse jornal perfeitamente capitalista (e sem vergonha de sê-lo):

Los Angeles on the Brink of Bankruptcy
BY RICHARD RIORDAN AND ALEXANDER RUBALCAVA
Opinion, Wall Street Hournal, May 5, 2010

What Mayor Villaraigosa must do to save the city.

Los Angeles is facing a terminal fiscal crisis: Between now and 2014 the city will likely declare bankruptcy. Yet Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and the City Council have been either unable or unwilling to face this fact.

According to the city's own forecasts, in the next four years annual pension and post-retirement health-care costs will increase by about $2.5 billion if no action is taken by the city government. Even if Mr. Villaraigosa were to enact drastic pension reform today—which he shows no signs of doing—the city would only save a few hundred million per year.

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