California On The Path To Oblivion

And Jerry Brown's at the wheel again.

Not since the disco era, when a young Jerry Brown and a tone-deaf Legislature dithered away their chance to head off Prop. 13, has Sacramento seen such a spectacle of fatuous folly as legislative Democrats now display over pension reform.

Then, a too-little-too-late Sacto measure failed to cool simmering anger about property taxes, which boiled over with the landslide passage of 13.

Now, months after an older and wiser Governor Brown sent lawmakers an eminently sensible package of pension reforms, Democratic legislative leaders ho-hum that they’ll get around to it, maybe, eventually, sometime, as labor types insist retirement costs ain’t no big deal anyhow..

In taking this laid-back approach to retirement reform, the Democrats and unions foolishly disdain the concern of taxpayers, who perceive pensions as a visible symbol of pigs-at-the-trough government spending. In the process, their arrogance puts further at risk the 50-50 chance of voters passing Brown’s $8 billion tax increase initiative in November.