NOT SO GOLDEN-You got to hand it to California’s politicians – not only do we have the region with the nation’s worst roads in Los Angeles-Santa Ana but we also rank 2nd, 3rd and 4th in San Francisco-Oakland, San Jose and San Diego, according to the national transportation research group TRIP.
Maybe that’s why we’re in such a rush to build a bullet train and a subway to the sea – the roads are too dangerous.
Schools are no better with California ranking 49th when it comes to per pupil spending when adjusted for cost of living, a category that puts the Golden State 45th.
And, of course, you can’t beat our air quality where we are totally dominant, according to the American Lung Association. Los Angeles, Bakersfield, Visalia, Fresno, Sacramento Hanford and San Diego hold the top seven places for ozone and six of the top 10 spots for year-round particle pollution.
The ocean breezes sparing San Diego this distinction.
Air, education, transportation – those are all important to the quality of our lives and all have a lot to with the quality of the political leadership in Sacramento which arguably has been pretty dismal since Reagan and Brown, Pat Brown that is, held high office.
So when some researchers at Indiana University counted up 25,000 convictions of public officials in America over three decades, they found Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, Illinois and Pennsylvania topped the list while California ranked a middle of the road 20th.
The researchers put a price tag on corruption among the top ten as well, finding that overall per capita spending in nine of them was higher than in the less corrupt states.
The bottom line was state level corruption cost $1,308 per year per capita in the most corrupt states, 5.2 percent of average expenditures with the crooked politicians spending more on “construction, salaries, correction, and police protection” at the expense of “education, health and hospitals.”
So is it any wonder that California ranks 4th for highest taxes at 11.4 percent of income behind New York, New Jersey and Connecticut and is far away No. 1 for what the U.S. Census defines as the Supplemental Poverty Rate, which takes into account cost of living, housing costs, taxes and government assistance programs.
By this measure, the average poverty rate in California for 2010-2014 is 23.8 percent – 50 percent higher than the national average, twice the rate in Alabama, nearly three times the rate in Mississippi. That means 8.95 million Californians live in poverty – nearly 20 percent of the national total and more than twice as many as any other state.
It’s a free country and you can believe anything you want but after decades of Sacramento’s failure to solve the problems that matter – water, air, roads, housing, jobs, schools and on and on – the only word that is appropriate is corruption, not just the venal kind that occasionally lands guys like Ron Calderon (photo) and Leland Yee in trouble, but institutionalized corruption that infects the entire political process.
Back in the 1980s, I asked then Attorney General John Van de Kamp how come so few California politicians ever went to jail.
He laughed and said something like: “They wrote the public corruption laws so narrowly they’d have to stand up in public and admit they took a bribe in order to convict them.” Or get caught on tape or video in a federal sting cause the system is so tightly closed, it’s almost unheard of for local law enforcement to go after elected officials unless they do something really stupid it can’t be covered up.
The system of institutionalized corruption works so well for the politicians, their friends and contributors, contractors and the consultants around them who prosper so well that California ranks 38th in the nation for people convicted of public corruption per 100,000 people.
Louisiana is tops, according to Justice Department figures for 2000 to 2010, with nine convictions per 100,000 while South Carolina, Oregon and Washington are at the bottom with fewer than 1.3 convictions per 100,000.
California’s rate is not far behind at less than 2 per 100,000.
God didn’t do this to California. We did it to ourselves. And we the people who get so few of the benefits that trickle down after the gravy is shared among those who matter are as complicit as the crooks we elect. We go along for the ride as if everything is going to be alright. It’s not.
(Ron Kaye is a lifetime journalist, writer and political observer. He is the former editor of the Daily News and the founder of the Saving LA Project. He writes occasionally for CityWatch and can be reached at [email protected])
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CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 48
Pub: June 13, 2014