Break up California?

As I watch the California economy crumble into the sea, pondering whether the state will default first on my municipal bonds, my salary, or my pension, I'm struck by the absurdity that the world's eighth largest economy (we used to be seventh, BTW) is essentially ungovernable. There's a radical solution floating around, upon which Joe Weisenthal comments:

... the state's uber-democratic system is broken beyond repair. It's truly a failed state, in the classic political science sense of the term. If it were its own country, the US would be consulting with the UN and NATO about establishing a presence and supervising elections. So the state needs radical help, and a bailout will only make things worse. But theoretically the state is salvageable, argues Breakingviews, if only because the state could both afford higher taxes and reduce state spending. Spending is far from bare-bones levels, and state employees are extremely well paid.

But Breakingviews actually proposes a much more radical solution, which is breaking California up into 4 distinct states (seriously). Think of it like good bank/bad bank, but for states. Actually it's a little different. The idea is not that this will solve the state's financial problems, but that it will split it into four coherent political units, which would be:

• San Diego/Orange County/Inland Empire (socially conservative, Hispanic, heavily military)


• Greater LA (Hollywood and Hispanics, very liberal)


• San Francisco/Silicon Valley (Liberal, but very dynamic and market oriented)


• Central (Conservative, Kansas-like)

This is a political scientist's late night fantasy and doing this might actually solve some political problems, but in the end it wouldn't work. The first state to go would be Greater LA. You see, the Hollywood liberal types may love to support government spending and immigration, but the moment the entire burden fell on them to support the rest of the population they'd scream bloody murder. You know they would. And it's probably a gloss-over to just say that the San Diego state would be solidly "conservative" just because there's a lot of military and socially conservative Hispanics there. There'd be huge public support tensions over spending and government safety nets.

Beyond that, national Republicans would never go for this, since you'd essentially be creating three new Democratic states (it sounds like Central would probably be Republican), giving Democrats permanent dominance in the US Senate.

As for his second point, what if we broke Texas up into the 5 states contemplated by its annexation agreement? Most of them would be GOP states, which would balance out the new democratic states formed by breaking up California.

The more serious objection would be the near impossibility of allocating water rights.

Even so, it's at least as plausible an idea as the laughable hypothesis that the legislature can actually fix out budget problems.

Comments

[kevin barry]

I have long held that California and New York would both be much better off if the large urban centers, L.A. and NYC were cut away and given state status. These two megopolises drag down the rest of the state. They both contain many millions of people, and both should get city-state representation in the federal system. I recall the velvet revolution in Czecholslovakia and how it turned out to be a very good thing for both the Czechs and the Slovaks.
Upstate New York certainly would be a very more dynamic and livable place without the incredible drag of providing for NYC's welfare state. I think Californians could use the break as well.
L.A. is simply too big to be handled by a state capital hundreds of miles away.
I say, "Fifty two states, or fight!"

[Chuck Clarke]

I think most of New England (MA, ME, VT, NH, RI) should be consolidated into one state. Same goes for Maryland and Delaware. Who can tell the difference?

[C.E. Petit]

For those who contemplate breaking up states -- however ineptly their initial borders may have been drawn, however irrelevant the passage of time has made those borders -- I have a sarcastic, but serious, question:

Been to the Balkans lately?

Or, for that matter, to Belfast?

[Justin Talbot]

There's no need to tie the administrative units within California to the level at which we vote for US senators. It would be possible to devolve much of the governing power to individual counties or county groups, while still voting for senators at a state-wide level.

Similarly, things such as water rights which might be difficult to divide now could be managed by a skeleton state government.