That’s the prescription for the economic crisis coming from the remaining media observers of California state government. For people like Dan Walters and George Skelton, the collapsing economy and the budget mess aren’t calls for innovation and plans for recovery. Instead they are an excuse to shoot down any and all new ideas in favor of a mindless neo-Hooverism, a mentality of giving up on everything and just quietly suffering as we wait for the economy to magically recover as if it were some sort of angry god or inscrutable force of nature and not a product of human activity that can be directed and changed by collective effort.

Over at the California High Speed Rail Blog I gave a pretty thorough evisceration of Dan Walters’ attack on high speed rail. Walters claimed “now is not the time to build a railroad” – which is bizarre considering that 75 years ago in the depths of the Great Depression, we took on some of the largest and most important infrastructure projects in the state, such as the Golden Gate Bridge, the Central Valley Water Project, and Shasta Dam.

Today George Skelton arrives at the same neo-Hooverite conclusion, albeit from a different direction. Skelton’s column attacks Arnold Schwarzenegger for his reckless tax cuts, but also bizarrely throws in his support for the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine and high speed rail as supposed “evidence” of irresponsibility:

He has a pattern of supporting exotic ballot measures that authorize discretionary spending without the revenue streams to pay for them, thus piling more of a burden on the bleeding general fund.

One example: the nearly $10-billion bond measure last November to make a down payment on a bullet train from Los Angeles to San Francisco. That will cost the treasury $647 million annually for 30 years.

Example two: the $3-billion stem-cell research bond in 2004, costing the state $200 million annually for 30 years.

Skelton is throwing the baby out with the bathwater here. Like Walters he seems allergic to the notion of “economic recovery.” High speed rail and stem cell research are the 21st century equivalents of the Golden Gate Bridge and Shasta Dam – infrastructure projects that will provide jobs and economic activity for many decades to come.

Using bonds instead of new revenues to pay for ongoing budget expenses is stupid. Using bonds to build a train or a biotech research institute is extremely smart. That’s what government bonds are there to do.

But not for George Skelton, not for Dan Walters. Using bonds for their intended purpose – to provide economic recovery and long-term benefits by building big projects with a proven track record of success around the world – offends their hairshirt sensibility. Their prescription for what ails California is to bleed us dry – to leech all good and necessary spending out of the economy, to refuse to utter the phrase “economic recovery” and to eschew the policies and innovations that would make recovery possible. All in pursuit of a shared misery that is supposed to somehow make the present crisis tolerable.

The crisis engulfing California is an indictment of the entire political system in our state, from the structure of government to the failed leadership of its politicians to the neo-Hooverite mindset of what media remains to cover Sacramento. It is a strange and sad irony that people who benefited all their lives from the massive investments of the Great Depression are now insisting we lower our horizons and suffer in the Great Recession. They have no vision for our future, no conception of economic recovery. It is time they left the stage to those people willing to actually try and salvage California’s future.