Posted on 01/19/2018 5:20:59 AM PST by Kaslin
The alleged success of the California model is one of the more intense controversies in the nerdier corners of public policy debate.
For many progressives, California's metastasizing liberalism proves you can have Scandinavian-style social policies and tax rates and still have robust economic growth. For conservatives, California is like a bumblebee. On paper, the damn thing shouldn't be able to fly -- and yet it does. Thus the cottage industry on the right of prophesizing California's inevitable demise.
What's always bothered me about the whole argument is how it leaves out important factors. For me, the biggest one was always geography and the climate that comes with it. I live in Washington, D.C., where the winters are cold and wet. We get more freezing rain than snow. The summers are equatorial. August is like one extended scene from "Barton Fink," with everyone pretending not to be drenched in sweat.
If Amazon's Jeff Bezos got off his derriere and rolled out a weather machine, I would gladly spend at least 10 percent of my annual income to have the weather of Santa Monica or Palo Alto. Los Angeles has 284 days a year of sunshine, and California has 840 miles of mostly spectacular coastline. Is it any surprise that people are willing to pay extra for that?
The state also has a lot of beautiful and famous people whom less beautiful, less famous people like to live near.
The point is that California attracts an enormous number of rich people who think it's worth the high taxes, awful traffic and even the threat of tectonic annihilation to live there -- for reasons that literally have nothing to do with the state's liberal policies. Indeed, most of the Californians I know live there despite those policies, not because of them.
No offense to South Dakota, but if it adopted the California model of heavy regulation, high taxes and politically correct social engineering, there'd be a caravan of refugees heading to states such as Wyoming and Minnesota. (I suspect South Dakotan pride would keep them from heading to North Dakota.)
Anyway, there's a new data point to inform the debate that hopefully will be more difficult to ignore: California is the poverty capital of America.
The Census Bureau has come up with a new and better way to measure poverty. The standard model doesn't take into account all sorts of factors that matter in the real world -- the overall cost of living, including food, housing prices, utilities, medical care and taxes.
This is just common sense. The median household income in Mississippi is about $41,000 per year. In California it's about $65,000. Does anyone doubt that $41,000 goes a lot further in Biloxi than in Los Angeles?
According to the standard poverty measure, Mississippi ranks first in the nation with a rate of 20.8 percent. California ranks 16th. The Census Bureau's "Supplemental Poverty Measure" places California first in the nation with a poverty rate of 20.4, and Mississippi falls to fifth.
Wealthy liberal Californians can be quite smug about how they can afford their strict land-use policies, draconian environmental regulations and high taxes. And wealthy Californians can afford them -- but poor Californians are paying the price.
California has some of the highest housing costs in the country. Energy costs, according to a Manhattan Institute study, are as much as 50 percent higher than the national average. A million California households spend 10 percent of their income on energy alone.
To be clear, California spends an enormous amount of money fighting poverty. The problem, as Kerry Jackson explains in the winter issue of City Journal, is that California remains stuck in the past. While the rest of the country embraced welfare reforms that emphasized work, California's bloated and heavily unionized welfare bureaucracies -- with nearly 900,000 state and municipal employees -- clung to the old model of relying on policies that encourage dependency, not self-sufficiency.
A cynical interpretation holds that this is a feature, not a bug. Just as California's prison guard unions have fought reforms that might reduce the prison population -- fewer prisoners, fewer prison guard jobs -- California's poverty bureaucrats have a similar incentive. "In order to keep growing its budget, and hence its power, a welfare bureaucracy has an incentive to expand its 'customer' base -- to ensure that the welfare rolls remain full and, ideally, growing," Jackson writes.
But one needn't subscribe to such theories. I have no doubt the Democrats who have a stranglehold on state politics are sincere in their belief that the California model is enlightened. But such delusions may just be another luxury of living in California.
With apologies to our California FReepers, California, outside of the rural areas is a $hit4ole. The streets are filthy, the traffic is horrendous, the crime rate is ridiculous and one thing no on ever talks about, out of the top 10 cities with pollution, 6 are from California.
Progressive my a$$. Moonbeam makes Maduro look like a piker.
The Dem strongholds all share the same fatal flaw (including those in Europe envied by US liberals): There is no room for reproduction; the American populations die out, and they require a constant infusion of foreigners to even keep the lights on. I’m not saying the American populations flee (though some do); they are literally dying as a “race” - as are Europeans.
Here in NJ more than 30% of residents speak a language other than English at home; that will climb even higher as more have to be trafficked here to replace graying, dying Americans (who themselves are increasingly childless).
I wouldn’t even want to visit California, yet alone live there, when I think about all those fires they have there and the recent mudslides.
California has more poor people than any other state in a couple areas. Sanctuary cities and states bring lots of illegal residents to jack up the population numbers to get more seats in the federal government. They also get much more federal monies which robs the legitimate tax payers from other states. Sanctuary cities are a power grab.
The state was so damned rich it’s taking longer than usual for Socialist policies to hollow it out.
Don’t you ever find it curious that the same Brown Shirt Meida outlets that publish articles saying that “We need to reduce our population because...” (and always have a photo related of a bunch of white babies) will publish an article within days if not hours explaining why we need to import more people from 3rd world shitholes “for our economy”. Something to ponder
Having visited several times, I concluded that California simply has too many people. California is over populated.
It “works” only if you are a lunatic.
The answer to that stares us right in the face: Those pushing 0 population growth are just moving the “excess population” from the Third World into the West, while most Westerners are content to die without breeding at all.
The scenery and weather are attractive. What it has become makes it very unattractive. Unfortunately, I have family that lives there. Some by choice - go figure? Other family that is currently stuck there due to a work assignment. My work occasionally (once every 2 to 3 years) sends me that way.
Therefore between work and family I end up out there once every other year or so. As an observer that drops in periodically, I can say conditions in CA are getting steadily worse, not better.
Net internal migration is out of California. If not for immigrants, California would be losing population. Net internal migration is into Texas. About twice as many people move from California to Texas as vice-versa.
No wonder they want more immigrants.
If California is working why does half the state want a new state?
Gov Brown has declared a state budget surplus. Is this true or is it ignoring other items such as the state’s local and the state pension system for government workers and teachers? What about the infrastructure growth and maintenance? Is it ok or has money been diverted to benefits and entitlements?
If these areas of finance are neglected, the fact that the private tech sector and other private companies pay a lot of taxes to the state is negated. Property values are high there but that can go down, remember 2008.
Moonbeam is a self admitted liar, he admitted it on a national TV program, but the democrats have such a lock on the minority vote along with all the illegal voters they have been able to register that they can pretty much do whatever they want in California. And it is apparent that what they want to do is destroy the entire state.
There is a significant number of elected officials at both the state and local level that actively work for only one thing......La Raza and the transformation of of all of California into an extension of Tijuana.
The question is self-evident to many who live in California and to some of those who visit California on a regular basis; therefore, the question is redundant.
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