A Comment on the State of the State

So yesterday I investigated government spending and control. Today I'm going to step down a governmental level and attempt to tackle problems in the California legislative system.

Two main parts of the election of Legislators in California lead to an inexperienced and ineffective legislature.
First, the ability of the legislature to determine the boundaries of its own electoral districts, which leads to what is known as gerrymandering, the act of redrawing electoral districts in order to manipulate the election in favor of a specific party. This in effect creates separate districts solely for each party, which in turn leads to the election of extremists on each side. Having extremists in the legislature makes for an inability to work across the aisle - legislators who cannot work together and cannot compromise.
Second, short term limits. People think badly of career politicians, and so think that they do not represent the people as well. With term limits we can keep career politicians from controlling the government. Or something. However, all term limits do is make it so that there are not enough people who actually know about the political system of California to be elected, and so people who know less must be elected. Thus we end up with a new crop of neophytes each election; people who know little to nothing about politics, who have to learn how to be legislators, as well as learn the content matter and figure out how to vote.
A highly connected problem is the tendency of voters to vote for people they like, not people who will do well for them. People vote for actors, movie stars, well known figures to lead their government - people who know nothing about politics, and thus do a lousy job of running the state.

Now that we've analyzed the failures in election of legislators, we should look at a major consequence of the above mentioned problems. Money is being cut all over California because of the failure of the California legislature and Governor to pass a budget on time, and their inability to pass a meaningful budget that raises enough money to pay for necessary services.
The first problem that leads to this is the necessity of having a two-thirds vote to pass a budget. A two-thirds vote is near impossible to achieve with the gerrymandered districts and resultant extremist.

Second, legislators are just people: people need incentives to compromise and get things done. They have no consequences for failing to pass a budget on time, and thus have no reason to compromise in any way to do so.
Last, California is an extremely large state; it has a huge population, and a huge economy. But the state government cannot run a deficit to keep up with said huge economy.

My proposed solutions for these problems are simple and as follows:

Get rid of term limits (if you don’t like the legislator, vote her out of office), and have an independent committee redraw the electoral districts in a fair, non-politically biased way.

In these ways moderation can be encouraged, lessening tension and increasing ability to compromise.

I am sadly unable to come up with a viable solution to my last articulated problem, of California’s large economy run by a state.