“Productive citizens and businesses are fleeing for places like Texas and Florida”
Perhaps some are, but I can tell you I had a business associate who moved to Austin (built a big home on a hill there), worked for Tracor. After five years, his wife paid us a visit, then called her husband and said that he’d have to find a new job back here because she had had it with “the Texas lifestyle,”( their neighbors were unfriendly because they weren’t “Texans”).
I had a chance for a promotion to Texas and turned it down (at the time Texas still allowed school teachers to hit their kids, and they were the consummate racists to boot). Texas, on it’s best day isn’t anywhere close to being California climate-wise. As for Florida, I understand why everyone there carries a gun, you absolutely do need the protection it affords on a daily basis. And I am left wondering if Florida is such a “happening place,” why it gets back from the Federal Government, twice what it pays to it.
Well, since we're continuing the conversation, let me throw a couple of charts for anyone trolling this thread.
Contrary to anyone who thinks things in California are just peachy...Here are few cold hard facts:
Bill Watkins at New Geography cites a census report:
According to a Census Bureau report, The Research SUPPLEMENTAL POVERTY REPORT: 2011 California has the nation's highest poverty rate of any state. By its Supplemental Poverty Measure, 23.5 percent of California's population is poor, while only 15.8 percent of the nation's population is poor. No other state is above 20 percent.
So California is #1 in poverty.
And as far as jobs and people fleeing the place, here is a chart showing domestic migration in California over the past few years:
This is the number of people leaving California and going to other states ("domestic migration")....and the "net" migration isn't looking so hot either for California:
Watkins seems to think MORE "immigration" is the answer--whether he supports Obama's executive order, I don't know.
But at least Watkins, a California-based professor of economics, acknowledges that California is in deep doo doo:
Unless there is some dramatic change, it is almost inevitable that California will suffer a declining population within a generation. The way to avoid this calamity is create an economic environment that encourages job growth and economic activity...
California needs to reform its business climate, reduce its debt and unfunded liabilities, and do so quickly.
I would agree with him. Frankly, though, I am sick of seeing California be an automatic LOCK for the Democrat operatives every four years....I still remember when it was a state that was considered a "battleground".
So my hope is it either becomes that battleground OR it loses so much population that its value in the electoral college diminishes.
Right now 20% of the electoral college votes are in California, and it is so Democrat-laden that no Republican seriously campaigns in the state.
Anyway, vette6387, take it easy. Hope you have a good afternoon.
Just going to chime in here.....
You totally sound like a Cali liberal....
I mean really....
I don't think you want to see the real statistic's.....
I'm a born and bred Californian. My family was the same....
But we left because of what I saw....over and over, and over....!!
You will have the last word....I know.