Armed & Dangerous also sees California as a leading indicator:
But what happens when there is no “somebody else” left? California’s voters posed that question today when they rejected six referenda designed to raise taxes or borrowing, all of it allegedly intended to pull the state out of a $21-billion-dollar hole. Exit polling made the voters’ reasoning clear; they don’t believe that allowing taxes to rise will produce anything but ever larger deficits as politicians recklessly overspend on behalf of those politically favored interest groups. The state of California is now facing imminent bankruptcy.
The U.S. as a whole will almost certainly face the same problem before the end of Barack Obama’s administration in 2012. Social Security obligations were due to exceed collections in 2013; even before Obama quadrupled the federal deficit this meant a giant blazing meteorite was already hurtling straight at the heart of the Feds’ dinosaurian finances. And the second-order effects of Obama’s socialism-lite economic policy are pushing tax revenues rapidly downwards as investors cut back economic activity in order to avoid being skinned (that is, skinned worse than they already are – the top 1% of earners already pay 39% of all income taxes).