Posted on 01/22/2009 8:20:29 PM PST by SeekAndFind
California has apparently turned itself into Pennsylvania.
It's still our biggest, wealthiest state with 38 million people -- one in eight Americans.
It still has the sunshine, the beaches and the magnificent natural beauty that for 150 years have attracted and captured millions of migrants from New York and Pittsburgh to Des Moines and Mexico City.
So why, for the fourth straight year, has the number of people moving from California to states like Florida and Arizona exceeded the number moving into California from other states? And why was the annual net-exodus rate even higher in the 1990s?
Immigrants, legal and illegal, and a birth boom among mostly Latinos have kept California's total population growing every year. But last year its net loss of 164,000 in state-to-state migration exceeded every other state's. No. 2 was New York, which lost about 160,000.
A lot of Californians are moving back East today (if they can unload their devalued houses) for the same reason they and their ancestors moved out West in the first place -- to escape oppressive taxes, dead-end schools, traffic congestion and a breakdown of basic government services.
Sixty years ago, California was not just an empty natural paradise. It was a role model of good governance and opportunity.
Compared to the rest of the country, especially to over-governed, over-politicized, economically declining states like Pennsylvania, post-World War II California was a booming, upbeat utopia with lots of good jobs, cheap housing, low taxes and relatively few economic, cultural or moral regulations.
Back then, as urbanologist and longtime Southern California resident Joel Kotkin recently pointed out in a long article titled "Sundown for California," the state government was a positive force in the economic and social life of California that "laid the foundation for its remarkable ascendancy."
Sacramento operated in a pragmatic, nonpartisan, businesslike but progressive way, Kotkin says. While California boomed, the state government concentrated on keeping the public infrastructure (freeways, universities and water projects) in synch with the growing population and making sure it didn't do anything stupid to thwart business growth.
California is far different today. It's obviously a victim of global economic forces beyond its control, not to mention Washington-made fiscal and monetary malfeasance.
But Kotkin blames much of his state's fall from gold to rust on its own political culture. Over the last 30 years, he says, it has grown masochistically hostile to business and is now a rat's nest of partisan, liberal special-interest-group politics that any observer of Harrisburg or Albany could recognize.
Today California is helplessly trying to deal with a budget deficit of $42 billion-plus, a bloated and overpaid government work force, a poorly maintained infrastructure, collapsing housing prices, an unemployment rate of nearly 9 percent, a flood of illegal aliens and some of the highest mortgage foreclosure rates in the country.
Once the Golden State was famous for things like inventing new technologies, incubating our pop culture and being an irresistible mecca for young and restless dreamers. Now it's famous for insane politics, pioneering silly/costly environmental regulations and crippling taxes.
In 60 years, California's political "leaders" have done so much damage to their sunny paradise that they've made rusty old states like Pennsylvania look good again.
They did not specify a rate of net resident outflow just the gross numbers. MA may very well have the highest RATE of net resident outflow..
And your religion. Just ask Obama.
The firm I am associated with just shut down our manufacturing operation in the LA area. Even though the labor cost was really high, it was the regulatory burdens by the state and local govt. that shut the doors at that plant as opposed to our other facilities located in other states. California is a difficult state to do business in,and, they are competing with states that have lower costs on nearly every front.
Absolute BS. The California economic mess is mainly a problem of incompetent leadership. California has a massive spending problem. Revenue is way up, but no amount of revenue can keep up with the horrific increases in spending voted in by the idiotic liberal legislature and a moronic electorate that never saw a bond-issue they didn't like.
Even problems like Prop 187 are state problems. Prop 187 was passed prohibiting state spending on illegal immigrants, from welfare to school spending to instate tuition for college. A liberal California court struck down the law as unconstitutional. Republican Governor Pete Wilson appealed the law, but when Liberal Gray Davis was elected Governor, he withdrew the appeal.
California is stewing in a mess primarily of its own making. No doubt Presidents from Clinton to Baby Bush sought to flood California with illegal immigrants, but that was only a minor problem, especially in light of attempts to deny them services.
California is the reason it is facing bankruptcy and the dramatic problems in California are the reason that anybody with brains and means is getting the hell out. I'm bound here by my golden handcuffs, but as soon as I retire, I am out of here for the green hills of Virginia myself.
I think the count-down at this point is, 10 days until California is insolvent...
Between the state restrictions, health care costs, the very costly worker’s Comp program, and increased demands from unions for wage and benefit increases, business have been driven out of CA to either other states or to overseas locations. All I see so far from the Obamasiah Adminstration is more of the same - redistribution of wealth from those who make it to those who don’t - 1.5 trillion dollars of tax payer money is being requested in order to fund government programs, which will only serve to further weaken the economy. I don’t understand why it is so hard to understand that to improve the economy you need to increase the number of jobs through private industry, not government programs.
It is much more than the cost of living. If that was the only problem with California, and not the idiotic laws, and the environmental regulations, and sensitivity training and multiculturalism, and teaching homosexuality in schools, banning guns and oppressing gun owners, the continued attempts to get everyone out of cars and into transit, the continual parade of socialist oppression, then I wouldn’t be so anxious to leave. I can manage the higher cost as most of us can find a way to do. It is the stupidity of socialism and its oppressive laws and regulations and red tape and nonsense that have me wanting to leave the California Asylum for the Criminally Insane.
That’s just it. Those who chose to stay — and work and pay taxes — will be shouldering an ever-increasing burden and more and more freeloaders remain behind and more and more wealthy and taxpayers leave the stay. You say it makes it nicer for those left behind. I beg to differ. It will just make it that much harder on those left behind, as fewer and few taxpayers with good jobs have to support the California entitlement system.
Precisely.
You guys need to declare your independence. California should be broken up into 4 states. Southern California, Inland California, Northern California, and SF and LA could become Gaysia.
Liberalism is ruining the state. To many stupid people keep electing these fools to office.
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Good Luck with all that victim crap BILL!
Probably more like one in twelve Americans and one in twelve Mexicans. ;)
Gang ridden neighborhoods? Desolate, remote, crap holes.
Sorry, most people I know all say it’s the cost of living.
Yes, and I am afraid under BO and dem. control of congress it’s going to get a lot tougher to do business in the USA. Don’t these fools know we are bleeding manufacturing jobs? At some point, it gets so tough to be in compliance with regs. and the govt. takes so much of your profit, you realize it just isn’t worth it anymore. I fear it will not be many years till we reach that point at the current rate. You and I understand redistribution of wealth doesn’t work. Why don’t our leaders get it? Don’t know how you feel about the man, but we need another Ronald Reagan to lead this country out of the wilderness.
They have a lifetime pension and lifetime healthcare and lifetime raises. They have.
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