Summary of Important San Diego Politics

Via Meadia has an interesting cocktail-napkin summary of the most important issue in San Diego right now, poignant because it's the same issue that faces the state and the country:

The Battle of San Diego is now in full swing. Last summer, voters there approved Prop. B, a ballot measure to reform a pension system whose cost had quintupled in 12 years, eating up revenue for other activities. As politicians struggled to pay off the pension obligations, libraries closed their doors and roads deteriorated. Voters had enough. No longer would they accept service cuts (or tax hikes) to pay to keep unionized public employees in the lifestyle to which they had grown accustomed.

The biggest threat to democracies around the world is the inability of the electorate to accept higher taxes and/or decreased services, and the inability of their politicians to communicate to said electorates that we can't keep going into debt forever. The greatest threat is not China (who is loaning us the money to allow us Western democracies to keep running!) and certainly not Al Qaeda. Sustainability is certainly an important term to consider here.