Nine years ago, California Democrat Gray Davis became the first U.S. governor in 82 years to be recalled by voters. The state’s 20 million taxpayers still bear the cost of his four years and 10 months on the job.

◼ $822,000 Worker Shows California Leads U.S. Pay Giveaway - Mark Niquette, Michael B. Marois & Rodney Yap/Bloomberg

Davis escalated salaries and benefits for 164,000 state workers, including a 34 percent raise for prison guards, the first of a series of steps in which he and successors saddled California with a legacy of dysfunction. Today, the state’s highest-paid employees make far more than comparable workers elsewhere in almost all job and wage categories, from public safety to health care, base pay to overtime.

Payroll data compiled by Bloomberg on 1.4 million public employees in the 12 most populous states show that California has set a pattern of lax management, inefficient operations and out-of-control costs. From coast to coast, states are cutting funding for schools, public safety and the poor as they struggle with fallout left by politicians who made pay-and-pension promises that taxpayers couldn’t afford.
“It was completely avoidable,” said David Crane, a public-policy lecturer at Stanford University.

“All it took was for political leaders to think more about the general population and the future, rather than their political futures,” said Crane, a Democrat who worked as an economic adviser to former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican. “Citizens should be mad as hell, and they shouldn’t take it anymore.”

The Case of the Missing Job Generator: Entrepreneurs, not government bureaucrats, have been the authors of past economic recoveries

◼ Lawmakers typically have reduced tax and regulatory burdens to facilitate the entrepreneurial process. The sharp recovery from the awful recession of the early 1980s is a key example of these doctors at work. - William Beach/Heritage Foundation

While millions of Americans intuitively understand the importance of innovation and entrepreneurship to our economic well-being, this understanding does not run very deep in Washington. Nowhere else in this country will you find as many people who believe that government creates jobs and that innovation automatically occurs once government cuts a subsidy check.

When the latest recession struck, Washington decided not to enlist the army of innovators and entrepreneurs to lead us back to prosperity by making their economic lives easier. Instead, policymakers embraced a more than $1 trillion government-directed economic stimulus program.

◼ What Oklahoma knows, but Obama doesn’t: Protect public-sector jobs, imperil the employment rate - Tina Korbe/HotAir

...If Oklahoma wants to continue to enjoy a low unemployment rate — and if the national administration seriously wants to energize the economy, lawmakers at every level of government would be wise to continue to develop policies with primarily private-sector job creation — i.e. entrepreneurship — in mind. ...Lots more, at the link.