Re: that's NOT totalitarianism

Um, you really don't have any clue about economics, do you?

It's presumptuous to assume that because I don't agree with your fundamentalist Austrian School/Libertarian/Friedmanite/whatever-you-want-to-call-it views that I don't know anything about economics.

The public sector simply increases because it can, because the employees thereof benefit thereby and deliberately game the system to their own advantage.

The public sector and government in general provides all kinds of services that enhance the private sector's ability to create wealth; it does not simply skim off the top. To begin with, the government creates and maintains a currency and provides a court system to solve business disputes. The public sector allows women to become more productive in the economy by guaranteeing access to child care in many countries and offers a basic level of education to children whose families otherwise wouldn't have the means to provide it.

Moreover, the government has the resources to create entire new industries in which wealth can be created. The Internet, nuclear energy, and all the spinoff technologies of the space program are just some of the innovations that only would've arrived decades later if not for investment in the public sector. The fact that the U.S. continues to dominate in web related industries and the wealth that's been created in this country because of that owes much to our government's spending in the development of the Internet.

As for the "salaries and benefits they've fought hard for" - that usually means that they threw their political support to politicians who would give them even more of somebody else's money.

When I say they've fought hard for these salaries and benefits, I'm referring the labor movement in this country, in which some people actually died trying to create conditions that were fairer than the libertarian Gilded Age/Victorian England societies they found themselves in. The fact that public sector workers remain heavily unionized even as unions have been undermined in the private sector is a legacy of the labor movement.

In any case, the reason for the big economic gains in the 1950's and 1960's was that after World War II the USA had the only game in town - the only developed industry that didn't suffer horribly during the war and was in a position to continue producing. Since then, other nations have developed or redeveloped their productive capacity, and Americans have to actually compete - which has shocked many who got used to easy work with guaranteed returns.

American workers haven't been undermined by their own laziness or reluctance to compete, as you seem to suggest. They've been undermined by corporatist trade policy that under the guise of "free trade" has forced them to compete with more easily exploitable workers from countries with no environmental standards (as well as with easily exploitable undocumented immigrant labor).

In fact, there is now reason to believe that much of the reason why African nations have remained poor is because the strong government sectors there have siphoned off talent from private industry with higher pay, which means that the growth of the private sector has been retarded.

That may be part of the reason for poverty in African nations (I think that's actually a complex issue with numerous social and cultural causes as well as economic ones), but California is a very different place than Africa. California actually has a very low number of government employees relative to its population compared to other states, so I don't think it's a matter of the public sector crowding out the private sector there. I think qtns2di4 does a good job of pointing out some of the reasons for California's particular mess below (that, and again, the republicans in the state's legislature prevent the possibility of increased tax revenue).

Here's one reason for California's financial problems I think we'll agree on, though: overly punitive criminal legislation and a bloated prison system.