Making America California

City Journal ^ | January 25, 2021 | Joel Kotkin

[karpov]

As the Biden administration settles in and begins to formulate its agenda, progressive pundits, politicians, and activists point to California as a role model for national policy. If the administration listens to them, it would prove a disaster for America’s already-beleaguered middle and working classes.

Biden, suggests an ecstatic account in the Los Angeles Times, seeks to “make America California again,” and he will have plenty of help. Californians will run Health and Human Services, the Treasury, Homeland Security, and Energy. Former California senator Kamala Harris is vice president, and San Francisco’s Nancy Pelosi rules the House of Representatives. Progressives like Laura Tyson and Lenny Mendonca see the shift as embracing “California’s distinctive approach to market capitalism.” The Golden State, they insist, can “show the way forward” toward a more socially just future.

As a California resident for nearly half a century, I wonder if these worthies see the same state I do. California has its wonderful spots, great neighborhoods, beautiful vistas, amazing entrepreneurs, and great amenities, but it makes a poor advertisement for social democracy. It suffers the nation’s highest poverty rate and presents the widest gap between middle- and upper-middle income earners of any state. Minorities—notably African-Americans and Latinos—do worse in California’s metros than elsewhere in the country, according to a recent study that we conducted at the Urban Reform Institute. In Atlanta, African-American median incomes, adjusted for costs, are almost double those in San Francisco and Los Angeles; Latinos earn $20,000 more in midwestern and southern cities than in the enlightened metros along the California coast.

California’s vast inequality is sustained not by broad prosperity but by the presence of three of the world’s biggest technology firms—Apple, Google, and Facebook— whose shareholders generate huge capital gains.

[HighSierra5]

I live in Mexifornia and I wouldn’t wish this states policies on anybody. Make the U.S. Mexifornia again!

[airborne]

A Commiefornia politician just said he will introduce legislation to legalize hard drugs.

[No_Mas_Obama]

Not too worried - the Old Republic will collapse long before the entire nation is Kaliforniacated. Still it’s sad that a state which produced Presidents Nixon and Reagan now gives us someone as unserious and vapid as Kameltoe.

[Lurkinanloomin]

Making America North Mexico.

BOTH parties have been doing it for 30 years.

[Fiji Hill]

I would like to make America into California as long as it’s the California of 1968, when it had a conservative Republican governor, two Republican Senators (although one was a RINO), two of the most conservative Representatives in the nation, and a conservative Democrat, later to be a Republican, as mayor of Los Angeles.

[bobbo666]

The purpose of the rules is to destroy opposition, scorched earth.
That is fundamental to philosophy behind critical race theory and postmodernism. Divide everyone into warring groups. As soon as your enemies are reduced to small enough size and you’ve managed to get everyone else to ostracize them, destroy them and their means of production. That is purpose of lockdowns — destroy the (informed) middle class and small business owners. That is the last class that knows what it means to actually work, to succeed on your own, to take risks, to realize the reality behind personal liberty.
For communism to come to ultimate power, all of those values must be obliterated and forgotten.
We are 9/10ths of the way there.

[AZJeep]

MAMA - Make America Mediocre Again

[Vaduz]

Former California senator Kamala Harris is vice president.

Harris will never be able the be the first woman president Edith Wilson had that job first when she took over for Woodrow from 1919 to 1921.
Suck it up again Harris.