This Labor Day, some states were so broke they had to start their weekend a day early.

California is the state that made summer famous, but now it’s infamously tough times make it hard for people to notice when the state is horribly broke. The state budget has been late the past decade and they’re giving out IOUs for their bills, giving government workers days off without pay to cut costs.

Times are tough everywhere with this recession, but California unemployment is at 12 percent, even worse than the 9.7 percent nationwide. For my fellow the Los Angeles Times hemorrhaging more than 200 jobs last year rippled across the state and the Orange County Register just went bankrupt.  But I digress.

Four consecutive years of poor rainfall mean trouble for farmers and, oh yeah, three years of record-setting wildfires. I moved to work at the Santa Barbara News-Press when the record-setting Zaca Fire broke out in the summer of 2007 and the county has basically been on fire ever since.   The Tea Fire last November cost a lot of Santa Barbara people their homes- which couldn’t have happened at a worse time what with California having one of the five worst housing markets nationwide right now.

In places like Victorville where the housing market made the desert city the fastest growing city in America, houses lie empty and unfinished now that the bubble has burst. People who relied on construction jobs fed by the massive demand for new neighborhoods near Los Angeles are unemployed. There are few jobs there besides city work or nursing. When I was there working for the Victorville Daily Press, the cops all dated the nurses and everybody else joined the military, looking for a job away from the humdrum Mojave Desert.

The state’s prisons are overflowing to the point where they’re letting  felons out. Building prisons is the only booming construction in the state. The city of Adelanto is so broke they can only get money by building their  fourth prison.

While nationwide our summer was dominated by people trying to exercise their frustrations by acting like revolutionaries with rifles at town halls, we should be thankful campaign efforts don’t foray much into California- it could have gotten ugly since people there have enough to be angry about.

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