Something tells me that this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of absurd California state spending. Check out the proposed budget for 2010-11 at http://ww

Something tells me that this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of absurd California state spending. Check out the proposed budget for 2010-11 at http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/pdf/BudgetSummary/SummaryCharts.pdf http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/pdf/BudgetSummary/SummaryCharts.pd... . The Department of Business, Transportation, and Housing will spend $12.5 billion or 10.5% of the total budget. The CHP is included in this amount, spending around $2.5 billion. If CHP comprises such a small percentage of the total budget and yet their salaries are so out of whack with their peers in other states or the people of similar skill-sets in the private sector, surely there must be abuses/distortions in the other line items of the budget. My last sentence is not necessarily a logical conclusion, but it makes me wonder how much of CA's budget crisis could be solved by normalizing expenditures with those of the 49 other states (which would probably entail pissing a lot of public employees off, fighting with some powerful unions, and cutting a few public works projects). I don't presume to know the answer, but once you give a mouse a cookie and a glass of milk and the mouse forms a union with all the other mice to get cookies and glasses of milk, and then the birds, bugs, and other critters form their unions to get similar deals, can you ever take the perks away and return things to their natural state?