Iain M. Banks wrote a series of novels — the Culture books — about a far-future civilization where technology and human ingenuity finally deliver what every generation since the Pharaohs has dreamed of: enough. Enough food, enough housing, enough medicine, enough room to live a meaningful life. It is a beautiful vision. And it is not science fiction. It is the natural endpoint of a free society that lets its builders build.
California, once the engine of that future, is now demonstrating how to drive into a ditch.
Consider what happened in Sacramento this quarter. Assembly Bill 1383, a bill to roll back core pieces of the 2012 Public Employees’ Pension Reform Act (PEPRA), sailed through the Assembly 70 to 2. Seventy to two. The bill lowers the retirement age for public safety workers from 57 back to 55, sweetens the formula used to calculate their pensions, and — by the Legislature’s own estimate — adds more than $300 million a year to a system that is already roughly $168 billion underwater at CalPERS, $39 billion underwater at CalSTRS, and another $91.5 billion in the hole on retiree health benefits. Add it up: roughly three hundred billion dollars in promises the state has not funded.
That number is not an accounting curiosity. It is your tax bill. Because California’s constitution treats pension promises to government employees as untouchable, every dollar of “unfunded liability” is a dollar that voters — and their children — will ultimately pay. Some smaller cities are already writing pension checks worth more than 15% of their entire general fund revenue. That is money that could have paved roads, hired firefighters, fixed parks, or — and this is the part that should make every Hemet resident furious — simply stayed in your pocket.
Look at what we get for it. CalPERS just walked away from a seven-year legal fight to claw back overpayments from four retired annuitants who allegedly broke the rules about double-dipping after retirement. After seven years and untold legal fees, the agency settled. That is the level of competence currently being entrusted with three hundred billion dollars of your money — and the same agency now wants the Legislature to pour more in.
Let me say what should not have to be said: I am not anti-firefighter. I am not anti-cop. The men and women who run into burning buildings and confront violent criminals deserve dignified retirements, and the deal we made with them in 2012 — PEPRA — provided exactly that. PEPRA was not a betrayal of public servants. It was the bare minimum required to keep the system solvent so that today’s hires would actually receive the pensions they are being promised. AB 1383 does not help those workers. It hands a short-term political favor to union leadership while quietly raiding the retirement security of the very people it claims to protect.
And it does so at the precise moment when California should be moving in the opposite direction.
Hemet is not Atherton. We do not have venture capital fortunes to tax. What we have is a community of working families, retirees on fixed incomes, small business owners, and builders — people who actually make things and serve their neighbors. When Sacramento lards another $300 million a year onto the pension system, it is not the wealthy enclaves of the Bay Area that pay first. It is cities like ours, where every percentage point of CalPERS contribution comes out of services we can already barely afford. Every dollar that goes to retroactive benefit sweeteners is a dollar that does not go to a paramedic on shift, a pothole on Florida Avenue, or a small business owner whose sales tax already props up the general fund.
Banks’s Culture did not get to abundance through bigger bureaucracies. It got there because the rules made building rational. Capital flowed to people who created value. Regulation existed to prevent harm, not to protect incumbents. Government did the things only government can do, and stopped doing the things it does badly. That formula is not a fantasy. It is, more or less, exactly what built California in the first place — the freeways, the aqueducts, the universities, the aerospace industry, Silicon Valley itself. None of that was built under a regime where one in six dollars of city revenue was funneled into retroactive pension sweeteners and where the agency managing the money spent seven years failing to recover a few hundred thousand dollars from four retirees.
The path back is not complicated. It starts with refusing to make a bad problem worse. Every state senator who represents the Inland Empire should be on record opposing AB 1383, and every voter who plans to still be living in California in ten years should make sure they know where their senator stands. It continues with electing local officials who will negotiate hard at the bargaining table instead of nodding along to whatever Sacramento sends down. And it ends — eventually, painfully, but necessarily — with a serious conversation about constitutional reform that lets future taxpayers say no to deals today’s politicians cannot keep.
The future Banks imagined is on the table. So is the future Detroit got. California gets to choose. Hemet gets to choose. Vote like you understand the difference.
