This is the evil person or thing that is always blamed for what happened in the past that put us into a condition we are currently struggling with. Hitler blamed the people in the insane asylums for infecting his country so he could start abusing them and conducting medical experiments on them without objection by the population. He viciously attacked the gypsy population so he could expand his reach for more guinea pigs for his medical experiments.
Ultimately he blamed everything on the Jews. He blamed the bad economy, the inflation rate and "profiteering" on a larger group of people.

Who knows who would have been next if his regime had not crumbled, maybe the Catholics, maybe the Communists? The point is that the people of Germany constantly had their attention misdirected by the government. The government had mismanaged itself into crisis after crisis. As most government often do, they blamed someone other than themselves for creating the problem and their solution was more government control by the very people who had created the crisis.

A recent article from the Las Vegas Review Journal has this to say…

"As California teeters, Democrats are left to contemplate how this living laboratory of liberalism -- with its smothering taxes, intrusive regulatory apparatus, generous social services and well-fed, heavily unionized public sector -- could now find itself on the brink of collapse."

Rather than conclude the obvious -- that decade after decade of high-tax, anti-business, anti-growth policymaking designed to sate an ever-expanding state is ultimately unsustainable -- a handful of liberals have found their culprit: Proposition 13, a measure limiting property taxes passed by voters in 1978.

Time magazine calls it the "root of California's misery." Leftist commentator Harold Meyerson argues that Prop 13 started the state down "the road to insolvency."

What a joke.

To believe this twaddle, you'd have to believe that California has been hamstrung in terms of raising tax revenues since 1978 thanks to the restraints imposed by Prop 13. That's nonsense. California remains one of the highest taxing states in the nation, with an income tax burden that can hit 10 percent. Even property tax collections have gone up consistently since 1980, increasing -- on average -- a healthy 7 percent per year in Los Angeles County alone.

According to the Tax Foundation in Washington, D.C., California residents suffered the 11th highest tax burden in the nation in 2008.

The group also put California's business climate at 48th in the nation and noted that its top individual income tax rate is the highest in all the land.

"Supporters of increased state spending have spent 31 years trying to make Proposition 13 the boogeyman," writes Joel Fox, former president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, in a Los Angeles Times commentary. "The measure has been held responsible for a freeway collapse during an earthquake and even for O.J. Simpson's not-guilty verdict in the 1995 criminal trial. But for a great majority of Californians, the boogeyman label doesn't stick."

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