Post III of III: Calif.'s scary sneak preview -- What happens when one of the two major parties does not see a political upside in solving problems?

From The Washington Post:

Californians pride [themselves] on the crystal-ball quality of our state. Auto emissions regulations, the tech boom and bust, Ronald Reagan, Hispanic immigration, the anti-tax revolt, the mortgage bubble, the struggle for gay rights, most movies, the popularity of Richard Nixon, the unpopularity of Richard Nixon, plastic surgery, and Tiger Woods's marital problems were all tested in the Golden State before being released to audiences nationwide.

The next likely item on that list is not a happy one, however. California is in a total fiscal crisis. It's had to slash state services to the bone and will have to cut further. It's gutted the University of California and lost its credit rating. . . . [T]his picture is probably coming to a theater near . . . all of us.

California's fiscal crisis will look sadly familiar to close watchers of the national checkbook. That's because California is not having a fiscal crisis so much as a political crisis. The trigger may have been the recession, but the root cause was written into the state constitution, and it was visible long before the housing boom went bust.

What happens when one of the two major parties does not see a political upside in solving problems and has the power to keep those problems from being solved?

[T]he long-term deficit problem, which is driven largely by health-care costs, is startling. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that debt will reach 300 percent of gross domestic product come 2050 -- and that estimate might be optimistic. But solutions seem unlikely. No one who watched the health-care bill wind its way through the legislative process believes Congress is ready for the much harder and more controversial cost-cutting that will be necessary in the future.

There is no doubt that minority parties generally profit in elections when the unemployment rate is high. But given that reality, what incentive do they have to help the majority party lower the unemployment rate? Further out, there is no doubt that the majority party has an incentive to prevent a fiscal crisis on its watch. But what incentive does the minority party have to sign on to the screamingly painful decisions that will avert crisis?

In another system of government, that wouldn't much matter. In our system of government, which requires a supermajority in the Senate for most projects, it matters a lot. On Jan. 20, for instance, the Senate is expected to vote on raising the debt ceiling. Generally, this is a bipartisan vote, as the debt is a bipartisan creation. This year, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell reportedly told Majority Leader Harry Reid that if he wants an increase in the ceiling, he owns it and needs to find the votes for it. That's the sort of budgetary brinkmanship that brings us back to California.

The lesson of California is that a political system too dysfunctional to avert crisis is also too dysfunctional to respond to it. The difficulty is not economic so much as it is political; solving our fiscal problem is a mixture of easy arithmetic and hard choices, but until we solve our political problem, both are out of reach. And we can't assume that an emergency, or the prospect of one, will solve the political problem for us. If you want to see how that movie ends, just look west, as we have so many times before.