My Broken State, Part WAY Too Many

It's not getting any better.

The Left Coaster has a good piece today about the ongoing death spiral that is California these days:

Anyway, that’s basically it, nothing has been solved in California in all of 2009, there are no solutions in sight to solve any element of our revenue problems, and we will continue to abuse our little people in a stupid, cruel twist of human life that was never, ever necessary. As always, it was so easy to be so much better than this, the problems we face aren’t difficult to solve, but the Republicans have abandoned public service altogether, they’ll bring all of us down if they can’t get their way.

This on the tail of last month's news that California's roads, once the envy of the world, have almost slipped to the worst in the country. And the worst are in the major metropolitan areas.

Mark Watt, executive director of Transportation California, a labor and heavy construction industry group that works with TRIP, said the state's failure to raise the gasoline tax since 1990 combined with the recession-related decline in driving leaves the state with far too little money to maintain and rehabilitate highways.

"We've got to come to grips that we have to pay for it or we have to live with it," he said. "We need new revenues to dig through the backlog we're building."

It just keeps rolling. Downhill. You don't get what you don't pay for....