According to his Washington Post Writers Group bio, The Washington Journalism Review once named George Will “Best Writer, Any Subject.” Seriously? We've documented Will's repeated false statements regarding global warming. We've even documented Will peddling misinformation about his beloved baseball. This Sunday brought another Will column in The Washington Post, which means more colossal twisting of the facts, this time about the causes of California's fiscal crisis.

Will asserted: “California, a laboratory of liberalism, is spiraling downward, driven by a huge budget deficit.” He later catalogued the supposed problems with which liberalism has saddled California: “liberalism's redistributive itch” that created the current income tax structure, which causes people to flee from California and “intensifies the effects of business cycles on the state's revenue stream”; “liberalism's mania for micromanaging life with entangling regulations,” which caused business to flee; “compassionate liberalism,” which made California “an importer of Mexican poverty”; and “servile liberalism,” which causes the state to be “run by and for unionized public employees.”

That's a lot of name-calling, but shockingly little actual evidence that liberalism caused the problems California faces. So let's clear up a couple of facts for Will. First, about those taxes: California relies heavily on income taxes because of conservatives' actions. In 1978, California voters passed Proposition 13, which enacted a conservative wish list on taxes. It required that all property taxes throughout the state be limited to one percent of property values; it limited yearly increases in property taxes due to rising home values; it required all state tax increases to be passed by a two-thirds majority. So, California's tax structure as well as its inability to raise enough revenue to cover its budget is the result of conservatives getting their way on taxes, not liberalism gone wild.

And it's not like this is some arcane information. Conservatives regularly discuss the California tax revolt with glee.

Another problem with Will's argument that California's problems can all be traced to liberalism: In the time period he is discussing, Republicans controlled the California governor's seat for most of the time. Will quotes statistics from two overlapping time periods: 1990-2007 and 1992-2006. During the 1990-2007 period, Republicans controlled the governorship for all but five years. Indeed, from 1983 to the present, Democrats only controlled the governorship from 1999-2003, when current Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) defeated Gray Davis in a recall election.

So, to sum up, Will is blaming liberalism for California's fiscal woes despite the fact that the state's tax structure is shaped by a system conservatives put in place and even though Republicans sat in the governor's chair for almost the whole time period Will is discussing.