The state is sinking, and its wealthy class is full of hypocrites.
There was more of the same-old, same-old California news recently. Some 62 percent of state roads have been rated poor or mediocre. There were more predications of huge cost overruns and yearly losses on high-speed rail — before the first mile of track has been laid. One-third of Bay Area residents were polled as hoping to leave the area soon.
Such pessimism is daily fare, and for good reason.
The basket of California state taxes — sales, income, and gasoline — rates among the highest in the U.S. Yet California roads and K-12 education rank near the bottom.
After years of drought, California has not built a single new reservoir. Instead, scarce fresh aqueduct water is still being diverted to sea. Thousands of rural central-California homes, in Dust Bowl fashion, have been abandoned because of a sinking aquifer and dry wells.
One in three American welfare recipients resides in California. Almost a quarter of the state population lives below or near the poverty line. Yet the state’s gas and electricity prices are among the nation’s highest.
One in four state residents was not born in the U.S. Current state-funded pension programs are not sustainable.
California depends on a tiny elite class for about half of its income-tax revenue. Yet many of these wealthy taxpayers are fleeing the 40-million-person state, angry over paying 12 percent of their income for lousy public services.
Public-health costs have soared as one-third of California residents admitted to state hospitals for any causes suffer from diabetes, a sometimes-lethal disease often predicated on poor diet, lack of exercise, and excessive weight.
Nearly half of all traffic accidents in the Los Angeles area are classified as hit-and-run collisions.
Grass-roots voter pushbacks are seen as pointless. Progressive state and federal courts have overturned a multitude of reform measures of the last 20 years that had passed with ample majorities.
In impoverished central-California towns such as Mendota, where thousands of acres were idled due to water cutoffs, once-busy farmworkers live in shacks. But even in opulent San Francisco, the sidewalks full of homeless people do not look much different.
What caused the California paradise to squander its rich natural inheritance?
Excessive state regulations and expanding government, massive illegal immigration from impoverished nations, and the rise of unimaginable wealth in the tech industry and coastal retirement communities created two antithetical Californias.
One is an elite, out-of-touch caste along the fashionable Pacific Ocean corridor that runs the state and has the money to escape the real-life consequences of its own unworkable agendas.
The other is a huge underclass in central, rural, and foothill California that cannot flee to the coast and suffers the bulk of the fallout from Byzantine state regulations, poor schools, and the failure to assimilate recent immigrants from some of the poorest areas in the world.
The result is Connecticut and Alabama combined in one state. A house in Menlo Park may sell for more than $1,000 a square foot. In Madera, three hours away, the cost is about one-tenth of that.
In response, state government practices escapism, haggling over transgender-restroom and locker-room issues and the aquatic environment of a three-inch baitfish rather than dealing with a sinking state.
What could save California?
Blue-ribbon committees for years have offered bipartisan plans to simplify and reduce the state tax code, prune burdensome regulations, reform schools, encourage assimilation and unity of culture, and offer incentives to build reasonably priced housing.
Instead, hypocrisy abounds in the two Californias.
If Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg wants to continue lecturing Californians about their xenophobia, he at least should stop turning his estates into sanctuaries with walls and security patrols. And if faculty economists at the University of California at Berkeley keep hectoring the state about fixing income inequality, they might first acknowledge that the state pays them more than $300,000 per year — putting them among the top 2 percent of the university’s salaried employees.
Immigrants to a diverse state where there is no ethnic majority should welcome assimilation into a culture and a political matrix that is usually the direct opposite of what they fled from.
More unity and integration would help. So why not encourage liberal Google to move some of its operations inland to needy Fresno, or lobby the wealthy Silicon Valley to encourage affordable housing in the near-wide-open spaces along the nearby I-280 corridor north to San Francisco?
Finally, state bureaucrats should remember that even cool Californians cannot drink Facebook, eat Google, drive on Oracle, or live in Apple. The distant people who make and grow things still matter.
Elites need to go back and restudy the state’s can-do confidence of the 1950s and 1960s to rediscover good state government — at least if everyday Californians are ever again to have affordable gas, electricity, and homes; safe roads; and competitive schools.
Discussion (26)
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Thank you for the article. California is now where Venezuela and Greece (which adopted socialism in earnest in with Panpandreou in the 1980s) were some time ago, that is, beginning to feel the full effects of socialism and environmentalism, as codified in California's law books by Left wing politicians, Democrats and cowardly semi-socialist 'me too' RINOs, over the last 20 years or more. For example, the recent water 'crisis' in California began with a drop in rain fall but was made far worse, at least as far the people in California were concerned, by the myriad poisonous environmentalist regulations on storing and using water, which included the legislatively mandated dumping of water into the Pacific at the rate of hundreds of millions of gallons per minute to meet certain environmentalist water requirements. There are three deadly trends now mandated for California's future, dependence on 'alternative energy sources' (The LA Times recently glowingly reported the closure of our last nuclear power generation), water restrictions, and higher and higher taxes (The city of Los Angeles just proposed billions more in taxes to pay for homeless housing.) These trends are certainly 'not negotiable' as far as the Democratic politicians who rule California are concerned. California's fate will be exactly the same as that of other cities and states ruled by the Democrats for decades, Detroit, Chicago and Illinois, etc., long term decay and eventual financial and social collapse. If Americans don't change their habit of voting for politicians, Democratic and often Republican, who promise them something for nothing, a life of comfort and ease without working for it, not only California but the rest of America will be, in the years to come, the same impoverished pest hole as Venezuela or Greece.
Why have you not moved yet? By staying there, you are perpetuating the madness by funding it with your taxes. Paying for the rope that the state government is slowly stretching your neck with, so to speak.
Will California ever thrive? It is right now. with a good union job or a government job life is great. When Hillary wins money will be printed and the coffers will be full. Life is great here in Cali. Just dont loose your job or spend money on no needed items. Taxes are due to raise significantly. Game the system and dont spend. For the ordinary person its the Grapes of Wrath. For those involved with the tech business it will take 20 plus years to wipe way the proceeds. So yes and no. It is thriving for the few. just step over the 10 plus thousand homeless in San Francisco and dont look back.
Isn't that classic for how to turn a state into a socialist government, how to break the backs of the middle class, it's so blatantly on purpose. But we politically correct sheep sit and watch the wolves attack.
As a former resident of the once golden state (65 years) and now out of the disaster that was my home for so many years. By the early 1990s It had become obvious to me that the state was on a trajectory leading to collapse. When my property tax bill for a home I had owned for 27 years hit $12,000 for a home that sold for $60,000 in 1971 I knew as a retiree I had to leave. In fact I would have left many years earlier had it not been for a son in high school, getting enough years on the job for myself and my wife to retire with a decent pensions. By the new millinium all our decisions about the future were predicted on college graduation and retirement dates and our departure from where we had lived our entire lives I concluded our only hope was to leave for a state the still has some rationality. and whose residents cringe and laugh derisively at my home state's unabashed idiocy on display daily. I in fact keep my former residency in Lalaland to myself lest the locals judge me to be another fool from California. Our property taxes for our current home and a summer heat escape are less than 1/4 of our California property tax bill as are the lunatic price the house would now fetch. Our housing costs and property taxes in our now home state of Nevada are covered by what we no longer shell out in state income tax leaving us the $12,000 handed over to the brigand politicians and their overpaid local government robber barons in California to pay for overseas vacations and a second car. When will California recover. The answer is Never. A state's reputation is much much like the reputation of a young lady. Once sullied it is impossible to cleanse.
This trend goes back decades. Back in the late '80s at a California university, I'd point out to establishment instructors the long term non-viability of their agenda. Even back then, middle & upper-middle class families were fleeing for cheaper and freer economic climates. The left-intellectuals would say they didn't see a real problem with this, since these people were being replaced by new residents, largely from the south. I'd have to ask just how viable the state would remain when people making mid-5 to 6 figure incomes who paid the highest taxes and also consumed minimal social services would leave to be replaced by those making a barely taxable $20k/year and who'd be making large demands on social services. Nobody seemed to think this was a problem, and labeled me a racist for even suggesting it. I didn't feel bad when I too left.
A State exists because of the borders that were drawn to designate the area. The economy, moraltiy and vitality of a state are created by the people. The once great State of California is just a memory. The people that created the "Golden State" are either dead or gone.
Need a VDH consult. If Xenophobia is the fear of the foreign, what is the antonym, the Greek equivalent for fear of the native? Seems that it's what afflicts America's elite, and it'd be helpful to have a name for it.
"One-third of Bay Area residents were polled as hoping to leave the area soon." Sometimes I do think we need a wall around both the Bay Area and LA to keep them penned in. It is perfectly understandable why they want to leave. Unfortunately when they do they don't leave the mindset that created their hellholes behind. They proceed to vote the same way they did in their old homes and contaminate their new home with the very same idiocies they fled.
Regardless of the subject matter, the words written by this author nearly always, and almost perfectly, reflect my thoughts. His specific knowledge of California's particular socio-economic and political circumstances are obvious, and he's right-on, breaks-down the complex and effectively illustrates the big picture. Why don't more American's pay attention?
Mr. Hanson, You could add the following item to California's self-inflicted failure: California's Renewables Portfolio Standard (RPS) is one of the most ambitious renewable energy standards in the country. The RPS mandates the fraction of electrical generation that must come from renewable energy. The RPS program requires investor-owned utilities (IOUs), electric service providers, and community choice aggregators to increase procurement from eligible renewable energy resources to 33% of total procurement by 2020 . According to the Brookings Institution, wind power is twice as expensive as conventional power, and solar power is three times as expensive. These higher energy costs are passed on to electrical ratepayers, depressing economic output and disproportionately hurting the poor, who spend a larger fraction of their incomes on electricity. Another consequence is net economic output in states with RPS is reduced. I find your columns to be among the most worthwhile. Steve Welstand Ambivalent in California.
Victor, Excellent points! Regards, Vernon
Mirrors the progression of our multitude of national problems, eh? Maine, where I live, is headed in the same direction.
We need less people in California. We have outgrown our infrastructure and our environment.
There is no hope for California as, there isn't a future hope for America. We are and have become a two caste system, like India, or Mexico. All of the meager solutions you suggested? You might as well add a request for the "Second coming of Christ" or "Allah"( which is more than a real possibility, and more likely) depending or your religious preference.
Hello Mr. Hanson, This writing and "Can California be Saved?" are unfortunately spot-on. These are some of the reasons that helped our decision to leave California. It's such a disaster and too many people don't realize it, care or want to face it. My field of work is drying up in California as did my position. With my wife as an RN, her opportunities were much greater, but without two large incomes, things were going no where. She had other companies courting her outside the state and gave such incentives to move, it just made sense to leave. After 31 years in the state, we just couldn't see continued opportunities of personal growth and ever getting ahead to meet our goals. We have moved to Arizona for so many of the reasons you stated, it's unreal and again unfortunate. Housing is half, gas prices where we have relocated to are .60 to .80 cents PER GALLON lower, home and auto insurance is cheaper, certain foods are less and the list goes on. A person could say 'yes, but the pay is half also', however, in our case it's not. We'll see if Arizona is the right place for us or not, but like Stockton, San Bernardino and Detroit, the antics of the liberal "leaders" in California will eventually catch up with the entire state and we'll be glad to have moved on. Best Regards, We've Had Enough
I'm of two thoughts: if it's so expensive to live here, WHY DO THEY KEEP COMING? And two; why do we keep building new houses when our infrastructure is virtually collapsing around us? Is there an ultimate breaking point at which we can say; "No more! California is closed"?
We left Marin County for the Sunshine State five years ago and never looked back. This article along with Drudge headlines about the evictions at The Reserve Apartments in San Jose shout warnings to the socialist left, but they don't seem to hear.
"Will California Ever Thrive Again?" NO! A thousand times NO! Just a slow and steady decline to Third World status undiminished.
"After years of drought, California has not built a single new reservoir. Instead, scarce fresh aqueduct water is still being diverted to sea. Thousands of rural central-California homes, in Dust Bowl fashion, have been abandoned because of a sinking aquifer and dry wells." As the professor has noted previously, the state of California was mostly desert land prior to the arrival of the gringo. The gringo built the aqueduct system that made the large population of California possible. Dams further east such as Hoover and Glen Canyon bring water and electricity from afar but that is no longer enough.
"Public-health costs have soared as one-third of California residents admitted to state hospitals for any causes suffer from diabetes, a sometimes-lethal disease often predicated on poor diet, lack of exercise, and excessive weight." Mestizo illegal aliens eating a diet not commensurate with their metabolism. Especially dairy product. Lots of nacho chips smothered with melted cheese.
"the failure to assimilate recent immigrants from some of the poorest areas in the world." It is the failure of the immigrant to assimilate and not the failure of the state to assimilate. MOST OF THOSE ILLEGALS JUST DO NOT WANT TO ASSIMILATE!
sir: california will never thrive w/ the social democrats at the helm, w/ their stated goals of immigration and social leveling. my guess is that it will turn into a sort of socialist shit hole w/ good weather, along the lines of greece, and dependent upon federal bailouts from time to time. when the feds go t.u., then california will be t.u. a shit hole, w/ lots of nice places to brunch and lunch, if you have steady work in the porn industry. john jay p.s. oh, the democrats will thrive. the elites of the worker's vanguards always do.
"In response, state government practices escapism, haggling over transgender-restroom and locker-room issues and the aquatic environment of a three-inch baitfish rather than dealing with a sinking state." That is whole nature of the United States today as reported by the media. An attention to triviality, superficiality, sensationalism and sentimentality.
"The basket of California state taxes — sales, income, and gasoline — rates among the highest in the U.S. Yet California roads and K-12 education rank near the bottom." It is not the schools that are so bad as the students that are so bad. Mostly illegal aliens and schools populated with gang members that create mayhem. It has been studied to death that where a school has a minority population of 2/3 or more the school becomes a place of anarchy.
"Nearly half of all traffic accidents in the Los Angeles area are classified as hit-and-run collisions." Illegal aliens driving drunk.