What's wrong with California isn't liberalism.

Conn Carroll:

The California Republican Party is functionally dead. And how is California doing, now that liberals have successfully terminated the state's remaining conservatives? [...]

California is the state that produced Richard Nixon and the Reagan revolution. As late as the 1993, Los Angeles elected a Republican mayor at the same time a Republican governor was in Sacramento. The reason the California GOP is dead--which Conn doesn't say--is Proposition 187, otherwise known as the Blame Brown People for Everything Act, which Gov. Pete Wilson supported. That was pretty much the end, Ahnold notwithstanding.

The real cause for California's fiscal crisis is simple: They spend too much money. Between 1996 and 2012, the state's population grew by just 15 percent, but spending more than doubled, from $45.4 billion to $92.5 billion (in 2005 constant dollars).

No, the real cause Proposition 13, authored by Republicans, which freezes property taxes at the purchase price in one of the most expensive real estate markets on the planet. What also makes California ungovernable is it's constitution, which allowed something like Prop. 13 to pass in the first place.

Anti-tax populism isn't very Democratic or liberal, Conn.