California here we come….

Krugman opines:

…the California [fiscal and political crisis] still has me rattled. Who would have thought that America's largest state, a state whose economy is larger than that of all but a few nations, could so easily become a banana republic?

Krugman — rightly — blames the infamous Proposition 13 and, transitively, every bit of the Reaganite foolishness that followed. The greater danger the California crisis prefigures, a danger applicable to the country as a whole, could be more easily managed at the federal level but for the rightwing economic thinking that still pervades the land. The key battle remains political in character.