As we see things now, what plagues California is what might be considered an economic scissors. Unemployment is high, housing may never recover, and government revenues are falling. On the other hand, the consequences are education is failing, we cannot build prisons fast enough, and services are being cut for those least likely to defend themselves. Perhaps California will realize a one-time gain from Facebook's IPO. If so, what will rescue us in 2013? That is, of course, unless we have a major earthquake. Rather than massive budget cuts we suggest revenue increases from solar.

Mathematically, we measure the strength of societies all over Planet Earth by how well they treat their weakest. Needless to say, we are not very happy with California's scores. It is at the very least professionally disappointing to have predicted the current chaos and not have been able to do much about it. We've looked at dozens of failing countries over the years and we certainly don't like living in one. And we don't think our children or anyone else's should live in one either.

At one time we rather laboriously worked through all the economics at county levels for all 3300-odd of America's sub-countries. Recovery takes (1) some competent management at major companies (2) a lot of solar power especially from schools, government buildings and even residences [yes, we toured Solyndra years ago] (3) standards-based education (a letter in itself) and (4) maglevs (but almost nothing like what CHSRP proposed) and supurbs. We'd be happy to provide webpages, powerpoints or whatever you'd like in excruciating detail. What neither we, nor California nor the US has is much time. When a country gets to the point where maglevs are no longer magic, we get Zimbabwe, where there is no (zero) solution.