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More About This Textbook
Overview
Is California beyond repair? A sizable number of Golden State citizens have concluded that it is.
Incessant budget crises plus a government paralyzed by partisan gridlock have led to demands for reform, even a constitutional convention. But what, exactly, is wrong and how can we fix it?
In California Crackup, Joe Mathews and Mark Paul provide clear and informed answers. Their fast-paced and often humorous narrative deftly exposes the constitutional origins of our current political and economic problems and furnishes a uniquely California fix: innovative solutions that allow Californians to debate their choices, settle on the best ones, hold elected officials accountable for results, and choose anew if something doesn't work.
What People Are Saying
From the Publisher
"Both [California gubernatorial] candidates may want to read the book's diagnosis of the potentially terminal problems that one of them is certain to inherit."—Wall Street Journal"A timely book with a lot of important things to say."—Newsweek
"Lucid analysis is spiked with wit and appealing turns of phrase that lift it above mere wonkery."—San Francisco Magazine
"Two of the shrewdest California-ologists now practicing . . . Mathews and Paul provide the best explanation we've yet had of the scope and sources of the state's governmental dysfunctionality."—American Prospect
"The authors do a great job of explaining what has been done to try to control the [budget] beast and how it became a depressing example of the law of unintended consequences."—Monterey County-Herald
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Meet the Author
Joe Mathews is Irvine senior fellow at the New America Foundation as well as a fellow at the Center for Social Cohesion, Arizona State University. He is the author of The People's Machine: Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Rise of Blockbuster Democracy, a columnist for The Daily Beast, a freelance journalist, and associate editor of Zócalo Public Square Mark Paul is senior scholar and deputy director of the California program at the New America Foundation. He was formerly deputy treasurer of California and deputy editorial page editor of the Sacramento Bee. Mathews and Paul are authors of the article "How to Fix a Broken State" in the March 2011 issue of Boom: A Journal of California.
Table of Contents
List of Figures ix
Prologue. Out of Luck 1
Part I Building and Breaking California
1 Crisis without Exit 7
2 History and the Constitution 16
3 Empowering and Shackling Sacramento 35
4 From Teachers to Janitors: Direct Democracy Demotes the Legislature 58
Part II The California Fix
5 Budgeting without Shackles 79
6 The Architecture of Political Frustration 105
7 Remaking Elections and the Legislature 126
8 Government from the Bottom Up 151
9 A More Direct Democracy 166
Epilogue. Good Rules to Match Its Mountains 185
Notes 193
Acknowledgments 211
Index 217