Is the rest of the country following California fiscally?

With facing a nearly $24 billion deficit in the great state of California, and some 38,000 of 168,000 state prisoners may be released. As Barack Obama is pushing universal health insurance, California will cut Medi-Cal for the poor. Education will be slashed, resulting in a shortened school year, thousands of laid-off teachers, school closings and an end to summer programs in a system that has plummeted from the nation's best to one of its worst, as measured by dropout rates and academic achievement. What makes this relevant to us as a nation is that California is our most populous state with one in eight people living there, and with a GDP larger than that of Canada. Now we are seeing that the social and fiscal policies of California the last few years are modeling that of the federal policies today. So as California has spent its way to fiscal devastation, so we to a nation are writing checks we can not cash.