Good evaluation.

And on the other side of the coin are the bankers, more than willing to take up the slack & fill that gap. In fact, they've more than encouraged it's growth.

See, believe it or not there was once a time when bankers needed skills & talent to make a buck. You had to choose who to loan to & how much very, very carefully because there was always the risk that, if you chose poorly, they wouldn't repay and you'd be out the cash.

But then they created credit rating agencies and tied everything a person did to that rating so, theoretically, no one could default on anything as big as a mortgage without screwing their credit rating -- and who would ever want to do that!?!?

So, filled with confidence and a lazy disposition, they hurried off and sold mortgages to everyone who could lift a pen. No need for a traditional banker's skills or talents; it was all money in the bank. (so to speak) Just issue a mortgage & rake in the cash!

Then the most damn fool thing in the world happened -- people discovered they could default on their loans just fine, declare bankruptcy & then just... you know... get on with their lives after all.

The horror!
Now the bankers only had two choices:

1) Go back to being skilled & talented, or
2) Find a type of loan NO ONE could discharge via bankruptcy -- the kind of loan you're stuck with forever, no matter what, by federal law -- and push the hell outta that until every kid gets saddled with one and they can lean back in their padded leather executive chairs once more and just count all the cash rolling in.

So is it any surprise to anyone which of those two options they've chosen?

"Same goes with the rest of the Republican drown-government-in-a-bathtub agenda that we are gradually implementing regardless of how many Democratic legislators and governors we elect."

No. It is not "regardless of how many".
It is because of the ones that are elected.

Remember how the lottery was supposed to be used to fund education?
Instead, once the money was available, it was spent on whatever was deemed to be the priority at that moment.
And it was not education.

If you want to talk tax reform then it has to be TOTAL tax reform.
No mix and match.
No part sales tax and a little part income tax and a bit of property tax and so forth.

Everyone knows that the state is paying smaller portions of fewer items..

And everyone knows that the state is looking for more money to pay for the reduced expenditures.

To reduce the prison population, and the drain they produce on the public coffers, I propose a return to spectacle violence, especially humiliating spectacle violence.

Additionally, and this is a serious problem among many western states, pensions for public employees were typically promised according to a growth model of the stock market that was in no way realistic. For reference I refer to Zakaria: http://fareedzakaria.com/2012/06/17/why-…

FTA:
"The numbers are staggering. In California, total pension liabilities—the money the state is legally required to pay its public-sector retirees—are 30 times its annual budget deficit. Annual pension costs rose by 2,000% from 1999 to 2009. In Illinois, they are already 15% of general revenue and growing. Ohio’s pension liabilities are now 35% of the state’s entire GDP."