Bankrupting the State for Politics Sake ...

CA is becoming such a mini-casim of Washington DC its sad ... nothing quite like having political parties stepping in to stop a good idea.

Schwarzenegger sues to furlough more Calif workers - International Herald Tribune: "The Republican governor already ordered more than 200,000 state government workers to take two days off each month without pay and projected it would save $1.3 billion through June 2010. The first furlough day was last Friday.
But the court ruling that upheld Schwarzenegger's authority to order the furloughs did not address employees of state constitutional officers or members of a tax panel, the Board of Equalization.
The lawsuit filed Monday seeks an injunction that would force Controller John Chiang to reduce the hours of those employees. Chiang's office cuts the checks to state workers.
Furloughing the 15,000 employees in the constitutional offices and the tax board will save $93.2 million, according the governor's finance department." So here is the other alternative ....

Keep all the workers going and either
(a)go deeper in debt, bankrupt the state, and have it ... well what can they do? sell it to Mexico?
(b)tax the shit out of residents which will force companies and people out of the country, which will put a higher tax burden on those who remain, who won't be able to pay the taxes, which would then bankrupt the state.

If it were the middle of summer, do you think these people would be bitching about getting an extra TWO DAYS OFF A MONTH? hell no ... if they got paid do you think they'd be complaining? Nope.

But that isn't even it...

this is all politics. If Arnold were Democrat, like his Kennedy-in-laws, then there would be no problems with this Chiang dude .... but since he's a Republican there has to be a cat&dog fight going on.

Now by that same standard -- I can understand why there would have been a fuss over Arnold's first plan to roll back the wages of people ....

that idea totally sucks.

can you imagine getting a job for one wage then having your boss turn around and say 'oh by the way, now that you were counting on this wage and these hours .... we are going to cut the amount you get by about 1/3 and we're going to give you more work to do" .... that would be kind of hard to handle. (almost as bad as being promoted, working in the position for three months and then being told you don't get a raise because you are already earning what they consider to be the minimum for that position -- true story) ... although it also sounds like these people were getting outrageous payscales because they were unioned workers -- why are there unions in government jobs??

But what the state is basically doing is changing the work week schedules for people -- I don't see a problem with what he wants to do now.

Its like going to your job and having them say ... look ... we need to cut back hours, but its going to be across the board.

These people are actually lucky -- Arnold could have been really firm and simply said "look we need to close this whole department" and then there would be 15,000 people out of jobs completely.