Posted on 05/04/2018 3:23:08 PM PDT by MarvinStinson
Let me just say from the outset that I still miss California. When I see news about my former state, it’s like reading the details of a train wreck after having safely disembarked a comfortable time ago.
I and my family got to live in Orange County for seven glorious years and another year in the Bay Area when the state was not convulsed with insanity on stilts.
It was sunny nearly every day, with low humidity. There were no bugs. Our local amusement parks were Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm. We did, as Californians are fond of boasting, go to the beach and then later that day drive up into snow-covered mountains just to say we did.
The Sunday edition of the Los Angeles Times, for which I worked as a news editor at the time, was so big and fat with ads that Times staffers swore that a deliveryman in Beverly Hills once hit a chihuahua with a paper, killing it.
Which brings us to something entirely implausible — the state-of-the-art bullet train, now under construction. Somehow, we got along fine without a bullet train from Los Angeles to San Francisco. A maniacal pipe dream of Gov. Jerry Brown, its price tag was increased last week to $77.3 billion. The train’s projected opening date has been pushed back another four years, to 2033.
When this thing is done, they claim, you will be able to zip between Southern California and Baghdad by the Bay in only three hours. Minus any time spent restoring track after a particularly bad earthquake.
Of course, you can get to Frisco faster if you hop on one of the many daily flights from LAX to San Francisco International Airport or vice versa. And by the time the railroad opens up, we might even be able to beam there, courtesy of Cal Tech and other brainy places.
Meanwhile, California is in the midst of yet another fiscal crisis. It’s fast becoming the mother of all welfare magnet states while welcoming a surge in illegal immigration. In January, Gov. Brown announced a $1.6 billion deficit by next summer. The total estimated public debt of the Golden State is $1.3 trillion.
What a curious time to throw billions at a train to the future. Can you imagine how many fares it would take to recoup even a microscopic fraction of the expense? Even if passengers jump aboard and pack the roof like on the trains in Calcutta.
The cost alone is so staggering that it defies perspective. But here’s some. The Big Dig, the fabulously costly patronage highway project in Boston that began construction in 1991 and opened in 1998, cost $22 billion, including interest. That’s nearly 10 times the initial projected cost of $2.8 billion.
In 2006, a main artery of the system was named for Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, Jr., the former Democratic U.S. speaker of the House, who used his enormous influence to secure federal tax dollars.
The “Chunnel,” the English Channel tunnel that has connected Great Britain and France since 1994, cost only $21 billion. The Large Hadron “Super” Collider, which opened near Geneva, Switzerland, in 2009 and measures particles traveling at nearly the speed of light, cost a mere $6 billion. Even the Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990, cost only $4.5 billion to $6 billion.
California’s fiscal folly would be laughable if everything that started in California did not wind up on our doorsteps from Alaska to Georgia. In what may be a harbinger for advancing illegal immigration, just this past week, state Senate President pro tem Kevin de Leon, Los Angeles Democrat, named the first illegal alien to occupy a state office, a student grant advisory committee.
California has 40 million people, more than a tenth of the U.S. population, and 53 members of Congress. Its economy is the sixth largest, at $2.4 trillion GDP (in 2015), behind the United States, China, Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom and just above France and Brazil, according to International Monetary Fund figures crunched by the Brown administration.
Its politicians stride across the national stage as larger-than-life figures. Think of Ronald Reagan and Nancy Pelosi. Reagan is best known for winning the Cold War and restoring America’s confidence and prosperity. But that was yesterday. Today, well, Mrs. Pelosi, the current House Minority Leader, was boasting last week about being a judge on RuPaul’s Drag Race All-Stars show. That’s where men who dress like women compete in various events.
“This idea of people believing in themselves, being themselves, taking pride in themselves, is not just a lesson for politicians but for everyone in the country,” Mrs. Pelosi told the Hollywood Reporter.
California — a train wreck in progress. It’s impossible to look away.
I hear they have awesome bougainvillea there
I hope you don’t buy any of our produce, lumber, fish or dozens of other products we ship around the world from California. Born in 1933 and raised in the state along with two brothers and three sisters and I hope I live long enough to see Cal-Pers go BUST and Jerr Brown get lynched for it
Liberalism killed CA.
The insanity is both disturbing and fun to watch.
I’m glad I left CA. Its gotten worse and worse and people seem to like it.
This is not the state that was home to Ronald Reagan.
Good riddance.
JERY Brown THE Man that turned California into a cesspool. Literally.
SoCal born and raised. Played in the orange groves as a kid and had many friends who were late for school in the winter because they were up in the wee hours lighting smudge pots. Bought my “dream” house only to see the orange groves across the street ripped out within six months. That was 1977. Endured another ten years and then bailed. Been back to visit friends and relatives a few times but would never consider moving there again.
There are days that I miss it, though.
Btw, I have excellent perception and I see things in CA improving. And thanks to Trump era, it seems even the leftist in CA overplayed their hand in CA as well. CA liberalism is starting to backfire in their faces. Lots of people in CA are talking about it. Trump woke up the entire country and it seems the same is now happening in CA. That's the real current state of affairs in CA. ☺
My mother keeps asking if I will move back once I retire. I tell her that I cannot afford it. When my uncle’s small old house with two bedrooms, one bath, small yard, and separate garage is valued at over $1 million, and I own two much nicer houses valued at far less in what is actually an expensive state—why would I give up my higher standard of living? Why would I want to live in a shanty when I can live comfortably almost anywhere else in the country? Why would I want to surround myself with CA lunacy? And so forth. CA is beautiful, it is where I was born and raised, but the state I love has become a dysfunctional mess. I’d love to move back, but until the insanity is cured, I’m looking at retiring in the Deep South. There are actually very nice places to live outside of CA.
I blame the California voters, citizen or not.
I went out this morning and picked a fresh orange and peeled it and ate it.
The store manager made me pick up all the peels and told me to never come back to his store.
That's fine. And I never asked anyone to move here or to come back. In fact, I'd like to see maybe 10 million more people leave the state.☺
Btw, you're not the only one who left and would love to come back. I read an article not long ago where it indicated a high percentage of those who'd left over the past decade or so, would like to return or would return if they could.
Nothing stays the same and the liberal control of CA is changing and in decline as well, IMHO.
I’m wondering if part of the reason CA opposes deportations of illegals, is if they are chased out, housing prices would collapse.
I certainly hope you are right. I’d love to see CA return to being the Golden State instead of being the Iron Pyrite State.
I notice that the general election ballot only allows one to choose between two Democrats for any given seat, so I lack your optimism that the liberal hegemony is changing. I do continue to vote in CA elections, but I just have one vote. And it is more than negated by the fraud.
I don’t know. I think a lot of the problem is overbearing regulations, onerous environmental impact studies, and other anti-growth policies that keep down new construction and drive up prices.
Per this webpage, there are about 3.7 million passengers annually between SFO and LAX. Assuming these are all round-trip passengers, and based on Kayak etc prices of such tickets running around $150 all-in, that is $555 million in direct revenue generated from this traffic.
If this rail bondoggle costs $77 billion (and I'm sure that's a lowball estimate) and assuming ALL 3.7 million current airline passengers use the rail vs air (a HUGE assumption), it would take 139 years for this thing to break even....and that is excluding interest costs.
To be fair, California doesn't hold a monopoly on statists running the government. Indeed, MA and HI were the only states in the union where Hillary won ALL counties...at least Trump won a few in CA.
That said, to use a Yiddish/New York phrase, oy vey!
Yes, and the biggest wisteria in the universe in Sierra Madre....
Having lived in the wine country for 50 of my 56 years, I think many Freepers and other conservatives don’t ‘get’ that many Californians are socially very liberal but are indeed prone to bouts of fiscal common sense, such as Prop 13 and other less radical elections.
If one thinks of the typical California Republican as hippy who happens to successfully own a business and thus has a functional knowledge of budgets and the value of money and the discipline to vote for something/someone sensible even if a social conservative would find their views on abortion, gay marriage or ‘cultural diversity’ abhorrent, one might not be too far off (yes, the anomaly of Prop 8 aside).
And, the whole sentence could compete in a bad writing prize. To wit--
I and my family got to live in Orange County for seven glorious years and another year in the Bay Area when the state was not convulsed with insanity on stilts.
“...But when it finally happens, things are going to get ugly.”
And as an unarmed law abiding citizen you don’t want to be anywhere near when the Progressive Ghetto starts fighting and burning!
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