As California Goes?

There's an old saying about California: "As California Goes, So Goes the Country".

Given that, one of the things that surprised me a bit during the last Presidential election was how relatively little attention California got from the candidates. Granted, we aren't considered a battleground state politically, but if we were a separate nation, according to the CIA we'd have the 10th biggest GDP in the world.

And so how's that California economy going?

You could put the words "hell" + "hand basket" together to come up with a pleasantly descriptive and apropos saying.

Worse than Michigan? I don't know, but here's a few things to chew on:

An unwelcome friend named Drought has come and overstayed his welcome. It's winter and Drought's nemesis, Rain, is supposed to be visiting. The problem is that hot, summer-like weather is keeping Drought around.

What does this mean for you? Without rain, all those fruits and vegetables you like to eat are going to shrivel up and dry. We grow a whole lot of them. So much so that I'd bet you money that the lettuce you're eating was grown in California. No rain = farmers abandoning their fields. Abandoned fields = smaller crops. Smaller crops = higher prices at the grocery store.

Yes, you will need a few more dollars for your grocery store kitty if rain does not appear in California's Central Valley.

Oh, and drought also sets things up for those awful fires every fall. Remember, the fires that cost a gazillion dollars to fight and destroy homes? Remember how at one point it seemed like all of Southern California was on fire?

Then there's the housing crash. Everybody was wigging out today over the LA Times story about crashing prices on the Westside of Los Angeles. The story proclaimed, "Home prices in Beverly Hills, Santa Monica and Malibu -- which continued to soar well into 2008 -- finally tanked at the end of the year, losing between 26% and 30% of their value in just a few months, the latest data show."

How could home prices in the enclaves of the Los Angeles gentry actually lose value? It's mind boggling! That was only supposed to happen in other areas of the city!

What else? Our unemployment is officially around 10%, although unofficially, who knows what it could be. I know a lot of out-of-work people right now, sadly enough. And, because our State is so broke that an approximately $42 billion deficit is projected, they're delaying tax refunds to people and demanding that state employees take furlough days.

The furlough days would mean that around 238,000 state employees will not get compensated for the 1st and 3rd Friday's of the month. Countless state offices (like the DMV) will be closed on those days.

Interestingly enough, this past Saturday, I talked to a woman who is a state employee. She shared that her boss was insisting that she'd still have to come to work on those furlough days, whether or not she got paid. That sounded absolutely insane. How could her boss demand that she come in and work for free? But she said she was told that if she didn't come in, she'd be written up.

In this economy, who wants to be written up?

I wonder, wouldn't it make sense to make California a little experiment? If we really do have that much influence, just think, if things can be fixed here, wouldn't it make things better for the rest of the United States?

If not, I worry about what else could happen out here. Maybe you should too.