'If I am not for myself, who shall be for me?" Hillel, the Jewish sage, famously asked.
It's a question that needs to be heard in Sacramento, where too many of the state's elected officials seem resigned to denying medical care to 1 million children, cutting college scholarships, shutting the state's parks, throwing welfare recipients into the streets and laying off 60,000 state employees.
The foremost dismantler of the state looks to be its own governor, who would terminate the state's health insurance program for working-class kids rather than create an oil-extraction tax on oil companies -- out of fear, we can only presume, that Chevron will pack up its oil fields and haul them to a lower-tax state. In his ideological rigidity, the governor is matched by the Republicans in the Legislature, whose burning desire to smash the state exceeds the most fevered fantasies of '60s Berkeley radicals.
Democrats are countering with -- in addition to their oil-tax proposal -- a plan to hike the tobacco tax and reach into the state's rainy-day fund, on the theory that enacting $24 billion in cuts, as the governor proposes, would be the social equivalent of the Flood. But they can't enact these measures without some Republican votes and a governor willing to sign them.
Which means they need to do what America's biggest banks and auto companies did -- turn to the feds. To date, a few prominent Sacramento Democrats have reached out politely to the Obama administration, but when the president's people declined their request, they stole quietly back into the night.
It's easy enough to understand the White House's reluctance to intervene. If it offers loans to California, what about the other 40-plus states that are confronted with deficits? And it's understandable that Democrats would prefer not to put the president on the spot. But the Flood cometh. The time for cutting your party's leader some slack has passed.
After all, the case for the feds loaning money to California is the same as the case that persuaded the government to help out General Motors and Citibank: It's too big to fail. One out of every eight Americans is a Californian. And if California, where the unemployment rate is already higher than in all but four other states, falls deeper into depression, it will substantially retard the nation's recovery -- as a downturn in Nevada, Illinois or even Texas would not. California leads the nation in underwater mortgages, and massive cutbacks in state spending would create a new wave of defaults and foreclosures, swamping the nation's (and the world's) banks with yet another cascade of toxic assets.
