I think what the majority wants is lower taxes and more government spending. This is why the initiative process sucks.
That’s why I suggested penalising employers. The problem is the educational underachievement documented in the article. That will lead to a fall in economic wellbeing across the state.
Good. We can start with Meg Whitman. 
This is precisely the problem with California’s voters. No one wants higher taxes, and yet everyone has some part of the budget that is absolutely sacred and cannot be cut under any circumstances whatsoever. California’s voters need to wise up and realize that they can’t have it both ways.
[my underlining]
Two points in reply to this assertion:
First, as I understand it, California is not a pure representative democracy - it has a substantial component of direct democracy, and the voters appear to have a tendency to freeze taxes while increasing spending, via referendums. That’s not a flaw in representative democracy, but of the particular mixture of representative and direct democracy in California.
Second, you shouldn’t assume that the US model is the only type of representative democracy. Around the world, other representative democracies have shown a much greater tendency to keep government finances under control, through both tax increases and spending cuts. For a recent example, see the budget introduced by the coalition government in Britain last month:
For another example, just look north to Canada, where the Liberal government in the 1990s raised taxes, cut government spending, balanced the budget and started paying down the national debt. At the same time, the provincial governments were taking similar efforts to bring their spending under control. When the Conservatives took power federally in 2006, they continued that trend until quite recently, when they went into a deficit position as part of the stimulus package to counter the recession.
See this article from a few years ago, just before the recession: Economists praise Canada’s debt reduction record.
So, you can’t say that unbalanced budgets and high spending are inherent in representative democracy - they may be inherent in the US system, that does not give anyone the power to create that sort of fiscal discipline, given the constitutional entrenchment of divided government. By contrast, the parliamentary system of responsible government ensures that if the political will exists to impose fiscal discipline on the government, the government can do so.
I think that’s the point. It is a representative democracy system that has been broken by introduction of elements of direct democracy.
I didn’t claim it as a “flaw in representative democracy” but rather a representative democracy that has been hobbled by:
I don’t. And, in fact, the examples you offer – Canada and Britain – are, as you say, parliamentary democracies, which is a governmental system without the elements of division of powers that our system already incorporates.
I said nothing of the kind. I said that the system in California – which allows a referendum system to bind the legislature with expenditures and at the same time removes from the legislature the power to increase taxes in order to match increasing spending – is a system that will not work.
The California legislature is an artifact of a representative democratic system that does not have the powers necessary to operate in any reasonable manner.
re getting only 78 cents back for every dollar sent to the Federal coffers… Are the assumptions underlying those stats agreed upon by all or do some argue that there are other ways to look at the issue?
Even if they are “accurate”, in real dollars how do the amounts compare to California’s annual defecit?