As California goes, so goes the nation -- and it ain't good. Social and environmental isms have ruind this state.

Midknight Review is based in the Central Valley of California. Our recession began 7 or 8 years ago and hit bottom 4 years ago -- two years before the national recession is said to have begun.

We have to borrow more than 20 billion a year to make ends meet. The time has come when this situation has come to an end and that time is now.

Over the course of the last 5 years, we have lost nearly half of our millionaires, all of our auto and cabinet manufacturing, the food production of the "Westside" because of environmental policies --- one time the most productive food production center in the world and, now, we find out that the unfunded liabilities of our public unions, run by SEIU, total $500 billion dollars.

Understand that our annual deficit is more than 20 billion. We lead the nation in this category. The second highest state deficit is Texas with 3 billion. Of our total budget, 40 billion is spent on legacy payments to public union retirees, which takes us 20 to 25 billion into the red each and every year.

Union legacy obligations have destroyed this state. Public union employees (teachers, fire and police) out number all other individual groups and block every effort to curtail their rape of our State. The result is that the State is about to collapse onto itself. Three days ago, it was announced that the City of L.A. would furlough all city employees two days a week. The city is that much "in the hole." The unions cried "foul," and prevented this action from taking place. It is clear that the unions are in control and care nothing about the financial health of the surrounding society if it means their members must suffer.

Again, 500 billion dollars is obligated to these unions - a greater number than the entire economies of Sweden, or Poland or Saudi Arabia.

The trigger has already been pulled, here in California. The suicide bullet has been fired. And no politician here in California has a clue as to what to do.

Point of the post ? Just letting the rest of the nation know what is going on in this left coast state. There can be no argument whatsoever that Socialist Democrat policy has ground us into oblivion. What to do? What to do ?

Update: we add this account to our story. As far as Midknight Review is concerned, this story involves crinimal negligence on the part of the fund managers referenced in this story:

An independent analysis of California’s three big pension funds has found a hidden shortfall of more than half a trillion dollars, several times the amount reported by the funds and more than six times the value of the state’s outstanding bonds.

Graduate students at Stanford applied fair-value accounting principles to California’s pension funds, using a method recently devised by two economists working in Illinois, Joshua D. Rauh of Northwestern University and Robert Novy-Marx of the University of Chicago.

The Stanford group’s finding does not suggest that California has to come up with half a trillion dollars all at once; pensions are paid slowly over time. But the possibility that the state’s public pension funds are much deeper in the hole than reported could help explain why the required contributions to the funds have been rising every year, contributing to California’s annual budget drama. The rest of The New York Times story is here and the Stanford report can be found here.

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