An expanded version of a recent letter of mine in response to Joan Walsh's column "Party On, GOP."

49 of 50 states are constitutionally required to balance their budgets, admirable in principle but a disaster in the viscerally, hysterically anti-tax climate that Republicans have created nationwide. In California and elsewhere, ballot initiatives and a culture of Republican scare tactics (taxes = communism) have pretty much taken raising taxes, the most logical way to fund schools and pubic infrastructure, off the table. Suggesting that employed people actually pay to keep social institutions from crumbling into dust is a recipe for political suicide. People who think nothing of dropping half their yearly income on an SUV start foaming at the mouth at the thought of being asked to cough up a few hundred more a year for income taxes.

Obama and the federal government are being asked to clean up the messes that shortsighted state governments have to some extent created for themselves. Because in the current economic climate tax increases would (it is widely agreed) make matters worse, borrowing is the only way to repair the damage caused by decades of neglect of the nation's educational, health and transportation structure at state and local levels. And the only jurisdiction that can borrow right now is the Federal Government.

What would the results of the stock market implosion be if it had happened to a nation with a well-funded educational system and universal health care (i.e. if the Great Society had been funded and maintained)? I suspect there would have been no implosion, since the ruse of the Trickle Down Free Market fixing everything would not have gotten the traction it has gained since the Reagan era. That the Clinton administration failed to meaningfully shift the paradigm back toward paying for the society you live in shows the complicity of Democrats in the debacle as well.

An even more important question is this: what if state governments, which we're told in Civics class are "laboratories of Democracy," had not succumbed to the anti-tax, anti-public education, anti-public health, anti-infrastructure disease that has been going around like the clap in a fraternity house since the tax revolt of the '70s, and in the South since long before that? (OK, in Louisiana we have never known anything else, except maybe for Huey P.'s singular experiments in the '30s, which had been transformed into out-and-out kleptocracy before Long was even dead.)

Obama's argument that spending a few trillion now to head off a larger cost later is compelling. Only optimists or the very inattentive believe that that cost will be only in dollars. The current crisis may mark the end of America as the predominant economic superpower. But the list of items in the stimulus bill--especially in its earlier versions, before much direct aid to states was cut--looks like a laundry list of things that the state governments should have been doing for themselves all along; things that self-imposed constraints on taxation and budgetary procedures have made impossible. Nobody likes paying high taxes; property taxes in some states are debilitatingly high. But even calling for a rational discussion about the tax structure will get a state legislator or governor on a one-way bus to Pariahville in a hurry. An example is the Stelly tax reforms put in place (after much struggle) in Louisiana. The idea was to raise income taxes and lower sales taxes commensurately, since income taxes are a relatively fairer and more reliable revenue source than sales taxes. This lasted a few years, and then our boy governor, Bobby Jindal, had the Stelly income tax increases rescinded--without returning sales taxes to their pre-Stelly levels. The one word used most often to describe Jindal down here is "smart," as in, "he seems so smart!" I have yet to be presented with the evidence.

I understand the need for many of the constraints on state taxation and spending, and even agree with them. State governments can't float bonds because they are too irresponsible to borrow responsibly; state budgets must balance because state legislatures are populated by the opportunistic and the mathematically-challenged, who can't be expected to avoid causing catastrophe otherwise. State constitutions are Tolstoi-length collections of randomly juxtaposed micromanagerial amendments. Ballot initiatives (and in California, a truly bizarre system for simultaneously recalling elected officials and selecting their successors) introduce an unpredictable chaotic principle into any attempts at coherent fiscal planning.

And this hodgepodge of dysfunctional state governments is unlikely to get better any time soon. I have so solutions to propose, but maybe it's time we think about the role of the states in causing our current decrepitude. (States charter banks, too, by the way.) Here is one place where Americans really need to start thinking different. I've lived in Massachusetts, California, New Jersey, North Carolina, and now Louisiana, and only the Bay State has anything I'd characterize as a mostly functional government (this could be the haze of childhood nostalgia and native pride talking).

Ideas, anybody?