I am sure most people are happy to pay for services (like police) but what about unemployment and medicare?

CA's tax rates are plenty high enough to support their residents. They have simply made way to[o] many commitments that they cannot keep.

You can't talk credibly about California without accounting for Proposition 13 and the California initiative process in general.

In 1990 our total government spent 2.1 Trillion or 37% of GDP

In 2000 our total government spent 3.2 Trillion or 33% of GDP

Looks like the trend was reversed in the nineties.

The trick is to grow GDP faster than government spending.  That speaks to jobs, jobs, jobs.

And anyway your point is ideological.  And I don't know how government spending is possibly the problem when our budget was completely mutilated by Bush tax cuts.

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

from Jan 31 2005:

The new CBO data show that changes in law enacted since January 2001 increased the deficit by $539 billion in 2005. In the absence of such legislation, the nation would have a surplus this year. Tax cuts account for nearly half -- 48 percent -- of this $539 billion in increased costs. [1] Increases in program spending make up the other 52 percent and have been primarily concentrated in defense, homeland security, and international affairs.

Deficit goes up again under Bush....

The Mission
by William Rivers Pitt
2003 OCTOBER 10

An analysis of the facts, and the record, reveals Clinton to have been one of the most effective progressive Presidents in American history. By 1998 he had managed to create an economic system that filled the Federal treasury with unprecedented amounts of available money, and he had also managed to pass a variety of progressive social programs that benefited vast numbers of middle-class Americans. When Clinton stood up in 1998, with a massive budget surplus waiting in the wings, and cried, "Save Social Security first!" he was roaring a battle cry across the trenches that had been there since 1932. Such a surplus would fund social programs all across the country. Such a surplus would, at long last, settle the argument: An activist Federal government can be a force for good within the American populace, and once more, can be paid for with extra left over. The New Deal/Great Society wars seemed to be coming to an end.

This was why he had to be destroyed.

The rest is coda. The impeachment, funded by right-wing activists and business interests, stormed along by a mainstream media whose Reagan-era deregulated status led to a complete breakdown in journalistic ethics, and all buttressed by years of unsubstantiated scandals pushed along by congressional zealots with subpoena power, left the American population exhausted enough to vote against their own best interests in 2000.

The fallout from this has been extreme. Trickle-down economics have returned to America, with the inevitable economic downturn and unemployment riding sidecar. The Federal Treasury, once full to bursting, has been looted completely. This, in the end, was the mission. That money could not be allowed to stay in the Treasury, because the American people would have expected it to be used to fund the programs they depend on. The Bush administration moved every penny of that money into the wealthiest portions of the private sector, using September 11 and terrorism and fear and war as an excuse to storm the trenches their forefathers had been shooting into for over 70 years. It was a smash-and-grab robbery writ large.

those were the days.

see Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky
from wiki:

However, she was not re-elected. Losing in 1994 to her 1992 opponent, she was one of 34 Democratic incumbents who were defeated in the Republican Revolution. Her defeat was blamed on her vote for President Bill Clinton's controversial 1993 budget, for which she was the deciding vote. After the vote, Rep. Robert Walker (R-Pennsylvania) reportedly mocked her, jumping up and down and said "Goodbye, Marjorie" alluding to the fact that her deciding vote would cost her the seat.