Some sad news about the golden state of California

I read some sad statistics in today's newspaper from an article by Arthur Laffler. It had to do with California, a state I once was proud to be from. Take a deep breath – here we go.

Let's start with public education. California employs 231 full-time equivalent educators per 10,000 population while the US average is 286 per 10,000 people and Texas, with a much lower tax rate than California, employs 345 educators per 10,000 population. So the taxes which are so high in California apparently haven't bought us more educators. What are we getting for our money? Students in California ranked fourth from the bottom of all 50 states according to the US Department of Education test scores of children in grades K through 12. But, you say, maybe it's because we're such a large state. Not true. Compared to the four other huge states (New York, Illinois, Florida, and Texas), California is dead last in test scores.

Here's what really irritates me about these statistics. California's educators are paid at a much higher rate than other states' teachers. In addition, they are more highly unionized. The California teachers union is the largest single contributor to political campaigns in California over the past decade. And we wonder why their salaries go up much more than their test scores do. And guess which party gets the huge majority of the teachers' money?

Are you ready for some more discouraging statistics? California highway personnel are paid much better than any other state's highway employees, yet our highways out here are ranked dead last of all 50 states. Building roads here costs three times what it costs in Texas. California's corrections employees are the second-highest-paid corrections employees in the US, but we don't have enough prisons. The same thing is true for fire protection employees and hospital employees – we pay them much higher than other states do, but we have fewer of them. We also have one of the nation's highest poverty rates (13% above the national average in 2011).

None of this is good news for California. But I don't see any hope as long as liberal Democrats continue to run the state legislature. They've never met a tax they don't like.