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Posted on 06/16/2026 5:15:15 AM PDT by MtnClimber
California shows what happens when one party gains total control: soaring costs, shrinking opportunity, and a government that no longer serves its citizens.
By any measure, California is a failed state—and a national embarrassment.
Taxes? It has the highest income and gas taxes in the nation.
Roads? A Reason Foundation survey ranks it 49th among the states.
Mass flight? Between 250,000 and 350,000 more Californians leave the state than move in each year. Housing, gas, insurance, and electricity prices? The highest in the continental U.S.
Illegal aliens, the poor, the homeless, the foreign-born, and welfare recipients? The largest numbers in the U.S.
Public K–12 schools? Test scores in the bottom quartile.
Poverty? Twenty percent live below the poverty line.
So, what happened to the nation’s most richly naturally endowed—and once best governed—state?
The Left took total control—after millions of the embattled middle class fled. Millions more impoverished immigrants, legal and illegal, took their place. Left-wing Silicon Valley spawned some of the wealthiest elite liberal enclaves in the world.
The result was a neo-feudal society that was hardly democratic.
Millions of subsidized poor compose the bottom. A beleaguered middle continues to shrink. An ultra-rich apparat of left-wing coastal professionals and investors rules from the top.
As upper-bracket taxpayers fled, taxes rose on those who remained to fund expanding entitlements for newly arrived poor would-be residents. In turn, even more of the middle class left.
The remaining pyramidal economic structure ensured a Democratic monopoly—further entrenched by changing balloting laws, gerrymandering voting districts, vote harvesting, fueling public employee unions, and ignoring or undermining popular referenda.
In 2014, Californians voted for Proposition 1, a $7.5 billion water bond designed to solve the state’s chronic water storage deficit.
Included was $2.7 billion specifically designated for new reservoirs, as the last major reservoir had been built
(Excerpt) Read more at amgreatness.com ...
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VDH ping
This is what voter fraud gets you. John Thune would like to see the whole US suck like Cali.
We’ve failed our children. We allowed them to be indoctrinated with Marxist ideas. Much of today’s young people would rather everyone be dragged down to some low level than have opportunities that allow success, (with work and luck).
Remember, under communism, shared misery is no misery at all.
Cloward-Piven meets Kalergi-Coudenhove.
As long as California has mail in ballots and Democrats control the counting, the state will remain Democrat.
Why does John Thune hate America? The country that let him flourish to demi-god status? I don’t get it.
The critical “mass” is eating CA from the inside out and where it goes next I have no idea. Sometimes I think it’ll be MI but then again, maybe we’re not as much of a blue state after all. But then again,...
In sum, import poverty; romanticize illegal immigration; demonize the middle class; drive out private-sector capital; and exempt elites from the consequences of their own ideology—and you’re left with a state where democracy dies, along with everything else.
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Trump should have been working on fixing California than Iran... Someone’s priories are screwed up...
By any measure, California is a failed state.
Name a democrat controled state that isn’t.
Well, they blatantly cheated in the LA mayor race and nothing is even talked about being done. Looks like its just gonna continue unabated.
Thomas Sowell once pointed out that the “rule” of history was corrupt failed states. The brilliant, leading empires that dominated culturally, economically, militarily and had functioning governments that improved the lives of their populations were rarities. For every Egyptian Empire, Persian Empire, Athenian Democracy, Roman Empire, British Empire, American Empire, etc., you have a dozen if not a hundred failed Rwandas, Somalias, Sudans, Bangladeshes, Haitis, etc. Its no different with US states. At one point, California was one of those leading states. Probably from roughly 1890 through the 1980s with the 1940s through the 1960s being the golden years. And within 30 years, it went from Golden State to Hellhole with no clear prospects of coming back any time soon. Let it be a cautionary tale.
Plenty of states have had Republican control for a long time yet don’t have these problems.
Hmmm.
With the income tax revenue surge from the SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI IPOs, and the surge in property tax revenue from all of them buying houses paying $5,000 in Proposition 13 property taxes at prices that will raise the taxes to $50,000 ... California will probably be fine for a while.
Critical “mess”.
Disagree completely.
1. It’s not an either/or situation. Trump has shown numerous times he can handle more than one problem at a time.
2. Iran is a bigger problem than California. It affected world peace, oil prices, sponsored terrorism, and threatened nuclear war.
3. California will be corrected by the moving out of citizens, corporations and finances.
4. Trump trying to pass the SAVE Act IS him trying to deal with California.
And the status quo with thoon is something the overwhelming majority of Republicans just totally love, except some credit goes to the less than a handful (Tuperville and Blackburn that one knows of, could be others) who are uh, leaving at the end of this term.
Parts of California are ruled by a Latino mafia.
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