Second Thoughts on Recent Posts

A couple of followups.

Eliminating 'Voting with your feet'

1) A major drawback to the complete nationalization of the states' budgets is that people could no longer "vote with their feet" when conditions become unacceptable. For instance, I recently read where 10,000 millionaires have left California in recent years. Now some might consider this un-neighborly but in our free society we are guaranteed freedom of association, which includes the freedom to associate with people in other parts of the country. Leveling out tax rates nationwide would eliminate the incentive to go elsewhere, except out of the country. That would leave the U.S. looking like the old Soviet Union.

The Founders realized that individual states were the small laboratories of representative government, and that any one state might fail for a time. Yet the experience would be observed by other states and serve as an instructive lesson of what not to do.

California right now is that instructive lesson. Do not spend billions more than you have or eventually the piper comes a calling. If California is forced to do the hard thing, cut programs and budgets to the extent necessary, and to consider once "unthinkable" solutions like allowing oil drilling offshore which would raise tax revenues -- this is the only kind of tax that makes sense, one that creates jobs and wealth -- then it will survive this mess. It will thrive later. It will earn the respect of millions of registered voters (taxpayers).

The lesson of California will not be lost on the lawmakers in high spend-high tax states like New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts.

And if the progressives "nationalize" California's debt load with guarantees, that lesson will be exactly the wrong one, and every other state will take notice.

Correction on CAFE averages

2) In a post yesterday, "Mileage Standards on the Road to Hell," I referred to the new gas mileage target as 39 mph. The actual average is 35.5 mpg, still an abomination. The 39 mpg is the mileage that American autos will need to average, while the truck average will be 30 mpg, based on recent sales figures of cars and trucks.

How automakers will hit these targets without some sort of mandatory mechanism to force Americans to purchase unsafe-at-any-speed crap boxes on wheels is beyond belief, even with the corrected numbers.