Part One: Break the Gerrymander or Bust

In the 1830s, Alexis de Toqueville, coined an immortal phrase, the tyranny of the majority. While touring our young country, the French journalist and aristocrat became an enthusiast for the American experiment, yet he presciently warned that, like republics of antiquity, universal suffrage leads to the ‘public treasury being exhausted.” Modern translation: If enough Americans find a way to vote themselves a paycheck, the Republic is doomed.

The five-term U.S. congressman and Governor Schwarzenegger’s current Director of Finance, Tom Campbell, now openly attests that the treasury of the country’s largest state is very nearly exhausted. Although the state took in an awesome $84.5 billion (revenues for the last fiscal year) it has what Campbell calls a “structural deficit” of $5 billion and growing. Ominously, he makes it clear that our backs are against the wall. “We have nothing in the Budget Stabilization Account (the rainy-day reserve), and we’ve almost exhausted our existing authority to borrow.”

To understand how our elected officials could have legislated their way into this fiscal crisis, while awash in a tsunami of money, More »