California Department of Transportation announced it was suspending up to 100 construction projects ^[1], prompting a protest outside of the office of state senate leader Darrell Steinberg. The state is currently $42-billion in the red, despite having some of the highest taxation rates of any state in the country. To give you an comparative idea of how much money that $42-billion deficit is, remember that the entire highway infrastructure portion of the current national stimulus bill only allocates $30-billion, and that’s for all 50 states.

California voters approved bond measures last fall to fund these state infrastructure projects, but irony of ironies, nobody wants to buy the bonds. Would you?