“If California were its own country, it’d be third world by now. Haiti-like.....a few pockets of prosperity with lots of poor.
The thing keeping it afloat is the taxpayers from the other 49 states.”
Unfortunately you are woefully misinformed (or you are just shooting off your mouth ignorantly). California is a net contributor TO the Federal government and substantially so. In fact, California on an absolute dollars basis is the top contributor TO the Federal Government, and our economy is the largest in the country by a wide margin.
You might want to review the chart in the link below. Maybe even the state where you live is, in point of fact, one of the numerous “freeloaders” that get back more than they pay.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_taxation_and_spending_by_state
Yes, I’ve seen data like what Wiki presents elsewhere. It does a good job in defining exactly what the revenue side of the government income from state is but woefully incomplete in its description of the specifics of the payments to the states.
My questions on data like this would be something like this:
Does it include things like EITC payments to California citizens?
Are things like overall SNAP expenditures broken out from the total to show state data?
I just find it difficult to taken in that a state budget like CA has with its deficit and some pretty serious resource and energy problems, that it is such a producer that it is the “engine of the world” so to speak.
My point, perhaps made with a bit of hyperbole, is that California is not in a healthy fiscal situation.
Productive citizens and businesses are fleeing for places like Texas and Florida, while at the same time illegal aliens are invading—and getting government sanction in the form of drivers license.
The state budget is being threatened by its own Death Panel program. Pensions are facing a major crisis. The state is being led by the mentality of the bankrupt philosophy of the Democrat party.
In 2012, California residents were 12% of the nation’s population but 33% of its welfare recipients. Has that improved under Brown and Obama?
Add to that the state’s unique place in the degradation of the culture (see Hollywood, San Francisco) which creates and sustains a perverted worldview, and I think one can make a case for California being a place one might want to visit but not live.
I fully recognize there are good, decent hardworking citizens in the state. Sadly they are being rapidly replaced and outnumbered. If America is in decline, California is on the fast track.