{"id":10472,"date":"2017-08-10T12:07:02","date_gmt":"2017-08-10T19:07:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=10472"},"modified":"2017-08-10T12:07:02","modified_gmt":"2017-08-10T19:07:02","slug":"is-california-cracking-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/is-california-cracking-up\/","title":{"rendered":"Is California Cracking Up?"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ National Review<\/em><\/p>\n

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With poor education, a budget deficit, and crumbling infrastructure, Californians shouldn\u2019t be focused on idealistic social programs.<\/p>\n

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Corporate profits at California-based transnational corporations such as Apple, Facebook, and Google are hitting record highs.<\/p>\n

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California housing prices from La Jolla to Berkeley along the Pacific Coast can top $1,000 a square foot.<\/p>\n

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It seems as if all of China is willing to pay premium prices to get their children degreed at Caltech, Berkeley, Stanford, UCLA, or USC.<\/p>\n

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Yet California \u2014 after raising its top income tax rate to 13.3 percent and receiving record revenues \u2014 is still facing a budget deficit of more than $1 billion. There is a much more foreboding state crisis of unfunded liabilities and pension obligations of nearly $1 trillion.
\n<\/p>\n

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Soon, new gas tax hikes, on top of green mandates, might make California gas the most expensive in the nation, despite the state\u2019s huge reserves of untapped oil.<\/p>\n

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Where does the money go, given that the state\u2019s schools and infrastructure rank among America\u2019s worst in national surveys?<\/p>\n

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Illegal immigration over the last 30 years, the exodus of millions of middle-class Californians, and huge wealth concentrated in the L.A. basin and Silicon Valley have turned the state into a medieval manor of knights and peasants, with ever fewer in between.<\/p>\n

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The strapped middle class continues to flee bad schools, high taxes, rampant crime, and poor state services. About one-third of the nation\u2019s welfare recipients reside in California. Approximately one-fifth of the state lives below the poverty line. More than a quarter of Californians were not born in the United States.<\/p>\n

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Many of the state\u2019s wealthiest residents support high taxes, no-growth green policies, and subsidies for the poor. They do so because they reside in apartheid neighborhoods and have the material and political wherewithal to become exempt from the consequences of their own utopian bromides.<\/p>\n

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Blue California has no two-party politics anymore. Its campuses, from Berkeley to Claremont, have proven among the most hostile to free speech in the nation.<\/p>\n

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A few things keep California going. Its natural bounty, beauty, and weather draw in people eager to play California roulette. The state is naturally rich in minerals, oil and natural gas, timber, and farmland. The world pays dearly for whatever techies based in California\u2019s universities can dream up.<\/p>\n

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That said, the status quo is failing.<\/p>\n

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The skeletons of half-built bridges and overpasses for a $100 billion high-speed-rail dinosaur remind residents of the ongoing boondoggle. Meantime, outdated roads and highways \u2014 mostly unchanged from the 1960s \u2014 make driving for 40 million both slow and dangerous. Each mile of track for high-speed rail represents millions of dollars that were not spent on repairing and expanding stretches of the state\u2019s decrepit freeways \u2014 and hundreds of lives needlessly lost each year.<\/p>\n

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The future of state transportation is not updated versions of 19th-century ideas of railways and locomotives, but instead will include electric-powered and automatically piloted cars \u2014 all impossible without good roads.<\/p>\n

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Less than 40 percent of California residents identify themselves as conservative. But red-county California represents some 75 percent of California\u2019s geographical area. It\u2019s as if large, rural Mississippi and tiny urban Massachusetts were one combined state \u2014 all ruled by liberal Boston.<\/p>\n

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Now, a third of the state thinks it can pull off a \u201cCalexit\u201d and leave the United States. Calexit\u2019s unhinged proponents have no idea that they are mimicking the right-wing arguments of the Confederate states that prompted the Civil War.Like South Carolina residents in 1861, Calexit advocates seem to assume that federal law should apply everywhere else except in California. Many of these California residents also believe that the federal Environmental Protection Agency should always override local ordinances, but not so with another federal bureau, Immigration and Customs Enforcement.<\/p>\n

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South Carolina started the Civil War by shelling and capturing federal property at Fort Sumter in Charleston Bay. Calexit wannabe secessionists similarly assume that thousands of square miles of federal property \u2014 from California federal courtrooms and post offices to national parks such as Yosemite to huge military bases such as Camp Pendleton \u2014 belong to the state and could simply be confiscated from the federal government.<\/p>\n

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Calexit proponents assume California can leave the union without an authorizing amendment to the Constitution, ratified by three-fourths of all the states. And they fail to see that should California ever secede, it would immediately split in two. The coastal strip would go the way of secessionist Virginia. The other three-quarters of the state\u2019s geography would remain loyal to the union and become a new version of loyalist West Virginia.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Buying a home on the California coast is nearly impossible. The state budget can only be balanced through constant tax hikes. Finding a good, safe public school is difficult. Building a single new dam during the California drought to capture record runoff water in subsequent wet years proved politically impossible.<\/p>\n

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No matter. Many Californians consider those existential problems to be a premodern drag, while they dream of postmodern trains, the legalization of pot-growing \u2014 and seceding from the United States of America.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ National Review   With poor education, a budget deficit, and crumbling infrastructure, Californians shouldn\u2019t be focused on idealistic social programs.   Corporate profits at California-based transnational corporations such as Apple, Facebook, and Google are hitting record highs.   California housing prices from La Jolla to Berkeley along the Pacific Coast can […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[79,11,16,847,41,1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-2IU","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":6467,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-myth-of-a-california-renaissance\/","url_meta":{"origin":10472,"position":0},"title":"The Myth of a California Renaissance","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 12, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Sacramento's strategy for recovery is more taxes, more regulation, and more government. by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0National Review Online\u00a0 Are the recent raves about a new California renaissance true? 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It's estimated that more\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "California"","block_context":{"text":"California","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/california\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3836,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/jerry-brown-modern-sisyphus\/","url_meta":{"origin":10472,"position":3},"title":"Jerry Brown, Modern Sisyphus","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 14, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services California Gov. Jerry Brown must rapidly close a $25 billion budgetary shortfall. But right now it seems almost a hopeless task since the state's disastrous budget is a symptom, not the cause, of California's much larger nightmare. Take unemployment. It currently runs 12.6\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "California"","block_context":{"text":"California","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/california\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":167,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/its-hard-to-screw-up-california-but-we-try-our-best\/","url_meta":{"origin":10472,"position":4},"title":"It’s Hard to Screw Up California–But We Try Our Best","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 16, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner There is a sort of upbeat\u00a0New York Timesarticle\u00a0arguing that California \u2014 in part, thanks to passing the highest sales and income taxes in the nation \u2014 might be coming back, a sort of recovery that can guide the rest of the US to a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "California"","block_context":{"text":"California","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/california\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5707,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/krugmans-california-dreaming\/","url_meta":{"origin":10472,"position":5},"title":"Krugman’s California Dreaming","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 11, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online It is rare, even in the case of Paul Krugman, to read a column in which almost everything that is stated is either wrong or deliberately misleading. 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