Should I Stay or Should I Go? Catholics Discern Moving Over Social Values

Catholic ‘value movers’ have relocated from places like California and Chicago to Idaho and Florida, motivated by a desire to escape encroaching immoral policies and live in more like-minded communities, with others considering following in their tracks.

Jose Galvan wasn’t necessarily eager to move away from the Golden State. After all, the husband and father of four describes himself as a “born and bred” Californian. He’d spent most of his life in northern California and was fond of his Sacramento parish and Catholic community.

But his sense of belonging began to fragment in recent years. Pandemic restrictions limited access to the sacraments at his local parish for more than a year, a measure that Galvan found detrimental to his family’s spiritual wellbeing. This coincided with the imposition of a political agenda by the state government that he said ran “counter to our Catholic faith,” including taking steps to make California an “abortion sanctuary” and mandating instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity to elementary school students.

Altogether, Galvan said the state he loved had become “an unfriendly place for practicing, faithful Catholics.” California’s sky-rocketing cost of living—39% higher than the national average—also didn’t help.

“I couldn’t in good conscience continue to live somewhere that is so very expensive with so little regard for our beliefs,” Galvan told the Register.

And so, after a long period of discernment and a similarly long search for housing, the California native left. The Galvan family, including his mother-in-law, relocated to Eastern Tennessee in June 2022, drawn by its affordability, natural beauty, slower pace of life, and more pervasive Christian culture.

Jose probably made a wise move, leaving California.

How California Destroyed Its Middle Class!:

The decline of California under one-party Democrat rule has been one of the long-running themes of this blog.

Today Victor Davis Hanson discusses how California’s wealthy destroyed the middle class with policies whose baleful effects they knew wouldn’t fall on them.

“The irony is that, as we created more wealth and more leisure, because of the very success of the middle class citizen, the middle class citizen and his central role in western government was forgotten.”

“California in the 1960s had the largest middle class in the United States. California had the finest educational system. California invented the idea of a modern freeway and a modern airport.”

“California had a state where two-thirds of the people lived with one-third of the precipitation, and yet they built the greatest transference of water with reservoirs and aqueducts the world had ever seen.”

“California had the most successful oil, timber and mineral industries in the world. They had some of the finest universities…Again this was a product of, both democratic governors and Republican governors.”

“However, today when we look at California, it’s got the highest number of homeless people in the United States. Half of all of America’s homeless live in California.”

“One-third of all the welfare recipients in the United States live in California. One-fifth of all Californians live below the poverty line.”

“California yet has the highest taxes in the country in the aggregate, the highest property taxes because of the enormous assessed evaluations…highest sales tax at over 10 to 11%, highest income tax at up to 13.2%.”

“The result of all of that that is is the middle class finds itself unable to pay and be competitive with other businesses in other states.”

“They look at all of these higher taxes, and they say themselves ‘I’m willing to pay it if I’m economically viable,’ but the regulations that the state creates fall heavily on the small farmer, the hardware store owner, the tire [store?] owner, but not necessarily on the Silicon Valley corporation that has an array of lawyers, or legal teams, or analysts, or economists, that find ways not to pay it.
“So the middle class leaves, they vote with their feet they go to places where it’s more conducive for middle class livelihoods. We’ve lost somewhere between 8 and 12 million people of the middle class.”

At the same time, America has allowed in 20 million illegal aliens, half of which have ended up in California.

“We have not built an aqueduct in California in about 40 years. The schools that were rated in the top 10 percent of comparative state rankings are now in the bottom 10 percent. The airports are decrepit.”

“That the more taxes I pay, the worse schools I get.”

“In this period, there was about five trillion dollars in market capitalization that grew out of Silicon Valley alone.

We created sort of a medieval caste, a wealthy caste of Barons and Lords that were not subject to the consequences of their own ideology. So they had so much wealth they felt they were exempt from worries about taxation.”

“We created a very, very wealthy elite that was not subject to the consequences of their own ideology.”

Whether out of virtue signaling and guilt, or whether out of contrived political necessity, they made a political alliance with the very poor of California. And the poor said “Give us more entitlements, tax the middle class, transfer that money to us we need it.” And the wealthy said “Yes, we will open the borders. We’ll transfer money, but you have to vote for issues that we’re in favor of. And we’re in favor of them precisely because they don’t affect us.”

Of course, the left’s disdain for the middle class shows up in their language: They’re the “bitter clingers,” the “deplorables,” the “chumps and dregs of society.”

“Muscular labor was no longer essential to the American experiment. In other words, you could make/have things made overseas in China or southeast Asia or Mexico.

The great middle class territory of the middle west of the United States—Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana—started to become hollowed out.”

“We’ve taken the middle class, the backbone of citizenship. We’ve eroded it and destroyed it.”

Tags: California, Democrats, Economics, Social Justice Warriors, Taxes, trade, Victor Davis Hanson, video, Welfare State

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