CA Senate President Pro Tem: 'No More Cuts'

California’s fiscal future may look bleak, and its current funding source may be bond-buyers on Wall Street, but according to California Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento), the problem with California is that it’s too fiscally responsible. Giving the keynote speech at the California Democrats State Convention in Sacramento over the weekend, Steinberg announced an agenda of no cuts, and no business. “No more cuts to education, to health care, to public safety, or help for those in need,” he said.

He went on to argue that the Wall Street culture of “something for nothing” was not the policy of the Democratic Party, “for we place a premium on investing in people.” This would surely come as a shock to all the Californians being taxed into oblivion, and all the Californians receiving something for nothing in the former of others’ tax dollars.

Then he got to his punch line: California needs to make paying taxes more profitable for businesses than investing in Wall Street. Seriously. “I ask today, what if we took this whole notion of investing and we shifted it from producing nothing, from chasing wealth for wealth’s sake to a very different kind of proposition. Today, I offer a different IPO. A California IPO. I propose that we make it more profitable for California businesses to invest in California’s high schools than a Wall Street hedge fund,” he jabbered.

Never mind that California’s entire fiscal future hangs on Wall Street’s willingness to buy state bonds and finance future spending efforts. Never mind that the California education system has become one of the greatest money sucks in human history. Somehow, the state must convince businesses not to invest with Wall Street, and instead to turn over huge swaths of cash to a failing California education system dominated by rich pensions and corrupt union bureaucrats. He even said that the education system should focus on keeping teachers employed, rather than on getting rid of ineffective teachers.

This is what passes for political sense in California: alienating business, ripping the state’s biggest clients, and pretending that wealth confiscation and redistribution is “investment.” No wonder the state’s in trouble.

Ben Shapiro is Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the New York Times bestseller “Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America” (Threshold Editions, January 8, 2013).