Recently California voted down several ballot measures in a special election that were designed to help pull the state out of a deepening budget crisis. I could rant for hours about how American's in general think they are owed something for nothing, but I won't. In essence the people of the state just cut off their noses despite their faces... Rather than suck it up and take some tax hikes in certain areas the state overwhelmingly voted no on 5 of the 6 propositions put forward by the Governator.
What saddens me most about this (besides the American mentality that we can continue to cut taxes and still spend money on things we need like roads, education, fire departments, police, etc.) is the likelihood of the coming budget cuts coming back to bite us later on. The people who voted against these tax increases will end up being the ones who suffer when fire season hits and there isn't enough money to put their burning houses out... because they didn't want to pay 5 cents more on a gallon of gas, or in some other slight expense increase. Schwarzenneger also now has to cut a lot government programs that help blue collar workers like Healthy Families, and after school programs. Cutting these types of programs has the potential to create further unemployment and put even more families on welfare... or since that's being cut too, in the streets.
LA Times has a great "Budget calculator" that allows you to make hypothetical cuts yourself and kind of helps to put this all into perspective. At this point it's going to be pretty difficult for Republicans argue that "cutting taxes" (their default campaign slogan) is always the right thing to do. Especially when you have to run up a government budget on the credit card. It's common sense really... Most of us HAVE to balance our checkbooks because we don't have an endless credit limit with China. One could even argue that this mentality at the Federal level is what finally ended up pushing our economy off a proverbial cliff.
If you live in California and haven't seen the LA Times' budget cut calculator, take a look... it's pretty sobering.