At least it's not the states officially running/endorsing social media like they do with lotteries. Yet.

Do not let perfect be the enemy of good.

Money for social programs must come from somewhere.

Using tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, gambling (for example) to raise funding for socially beneficial programs seem better than not doing it.

Taxes tend to discourage things, so that kind of makes sense. However, the California Legislative Analysts Office has produced a detailed report showing that this practice of dedicating taxed funds to specific spending has already gone badly wrong with many of these funds being forced into the general fund particularly during budget crunches such as what is going on now. The most reasonable practice is to put all tax revenue into a general fund that is allocated as necessary by representatives. This allows budgets to be balanced without breaking laws while also responding to the priorities of the day which always change.

And I'm sure that all the revenue will go directly to "Social Security and mental health support" in perpetuity...

Pretty sure it effectively has. Doesn't the state have different regulations have an effect on the rest of the country?

https://www.npr.org/2022/09/09/1121952184/the-impact-of-cali...

> VOGEL: It's such a large market so that anything which California acquires for its own product sold in its state is going to resonate among national and global companies. If you don't want to have to make separate products for California and the rest of the country, you might as well just make them according to California's standards.

Not sure if this was intended as sly humor or not. Between Covered CA and Medi-Cal health care is already relatively cheap or even free to those with the lowest incomes. And contrary to what critics claim, progress is being made with the high speed rail link both in the Central Valley and close to both San Francisco and Los Angeles.

1. California is trying to construct rail. The project is the most expensive rail that has ever been built and basically no track has been laid. The company that was initially trying to do the build left to go build rail in Africa because it was less dysfunctional.

2. California has dramatic experiments in cheap/free healthcare and is facing a giant budget shortfall due to it. Right now it is asking the Fed to backstop it's healthcare spending but that seems extremely unlikely.

So even California can't run free healthcare it seems, and it has been unable to build any train track due to extreme bureaucratic paralysis.