Are the recent raves about a new California renaissance true?<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, California still faces existential crises.<\/p>\n The unemployment rate just went back up in July to 8.7 percent. That is significantly higher than the current national average of 7.3 percent. Such a high rate of joblessness is a bad omen when the Democrat-controlled state legislature is pushing for the mandatory minimum wage to reach $9.25 in a little over two years.<\/p>\n The \u201cwall of debt\u201d is not $35 billion. According to the State Budget Crisis Task Force report that was issued in January, California\u2019s debt ranges from a minimum of $167 billion to a staggering $335 billion.<\/p>\n To close the budget deficit, Brown cut expenses, but he also just raised already-high income, sales, and gas taxes to the nation\u2019s top levels. We won\u2019t know the full effect of those costs on either businesses or the ongoing exodus of the more affluent for months to come.<\/p>\n Yet why was California ever in a fiscal crisis at all?<\/p>\n World food prices are soaring. California has the best soils, weather, and farmers in the world. Silicon Valley hosts Apple, Google, Intel, and Facebook. The state hosts some of the nation\u2019s largest corporations such as Wells Fargo, Chevron, Hewlett-Packard, and Safeway.<\/p>\n The movie industry in Hollywood, tourism from Disneyland to Yosemite, the Napa wine industry, and vast deposits of gas and oil should make California more prosperous than Switzerland. Its top five universities \u2014 Caltech, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA, and USC \u2014 usually rate among the top 20 worldwide.<\/p>\n Yet despite what God and man have given the state, California has often squandered its inheritance. For all its costly investments in wind and solar power, California\u2019s electricity rates are the steepest in the nation.<\/p>\n The tab falls most heavily not on the green elites of the affluent coastal communities, but on the poor and middle classes concentrated in the hotter and colder interior. For many in Fresno or Bakersfield, keeping the air-conditioning on when August temperatures hit 100 is a fantasy from a bygone age.<\/p>\n Californians pay among the highest gas prices in the country. Again, those astronomical costs seem surreal, given that the state sits atop huge untapped deposits of gas and oil.<\/p>\n The California paradox of having among the highest taxes and among the worst services is also echoed in state-by-state rankings of public-school test scores. California continues to place near the bottom.<\/p>\n Do those sky-high California gas taxes translate into superb roads? Not yet at least. Reason Foundation\u2019s 20th annual highway report ranked California roads 47th in the nation.<\/p>\n In the last 20 years, 3.4 million middle- and upper-middle-class Californians have fled paradise for low- or no-tax states. In contrast, the state currently has the largest influx of residents who immigrated illegally. Although exact numbers are impossible to obtain, estimates suggest that about 3 million Latin American nationals are residing in California. Many are hardworking immigrants, but most arrive illegally, don\u2019t speak English, and don\u2019t have money or a high-school education.<\/p>\n Ensuring foreign nationals minimum parity with U.S. citizens requires huge state inputs in education, law enforcement, and health services. The 2012 census listed California as having the highest poverty level (23.5 percent) of any state in the union. A state with roughly 12 percent of the U.S. population is now home to 33 percent of the nation\u2019s welfare recipients.<\/p>\n What, then, is the state\u2019s strategy for recovery? More taxes, regulations, and government.<\/p>\n Apparently, officials in Sacramento assume that the state\u2019s rich inheritance, coastal culture, and natural beauty and climate will ensure that most Californians stay put, keep innovating, and pony up far more in sales, income, and gas taxes.<\/p>\n The exorbitant cost of living will simply be the shakedown price of being a resident of hip Newport Beach or Palo Alto \u2014 places believed to be safe, if not immune, from the turmoil growing elsewhere in the state.<\/p>\n So will California recover its past glory \u2014 or go the way of Detroit?<\/p>\n It may do both.<\/p>\n Coastal greens, progressive Bay Area gays, liberal urban elites, and hip dot-com workers will probably not soon flee the temperate, scenic corridor from Berkeley to San Diego. For at least a while longer, they will be wealthy and confident enough to afford the living costs that high taxes and myriads of regulations ensure.<\/p>\n Yet for the strapped middle classes in the interior of the Los Angeles basin and the Central Valley, there is a perfect storm raging. They can ill afford the soaring taxes, high unemployment, costly illegal immigration, escalating crime rates, substandard roads, record power and gas prices, underwater home values, and dismal schools.<\/p>\n In short, the California coastal corridor still resembles Germany, while much of the interior is becoming Greece.<\/p>\n Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His new book,<\/em>\u00a0The Savior Generals<\/a><\/span>\u00a0is just out from Bloomsbury Books.<\/em>\u00a0You can reach him by e-mailing<\/em>\u00a0author@victorhanson.com<\/a>. \u00a9 2013 Tribune Media Services, Inc.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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? Rolling Stone\u00a0magazine just gushed that California governor Jerry Brown has brought the state back from the brink of \u201cdouble-digit unemployment, a $26 billion deficit\u00a0and an accumulated […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","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":[16],"tags":[1014,1023,405,327,410,63,213,1052],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1Gj","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":3836,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/jerry-brown-modern-sisyphus\/","url_meta":{"origin":6467,"position":0},"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":5707,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/krugmans-california-dreaming\/","url_meta":{"origin":6467,"position":1},"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. But his\u00a0recent take\u00a0on California\u2019s renaissance is pure fantasy. I wish it weren\u2019t. Krugman starts with the\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":1101,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/jerry-browns-last-hurrah\/","url_meta":{"origin":6467,"position":2},"title":"Jerry Brown’s Last Hurrah","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 7, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services The most interesting current political question is not whether Barack Obama will triangulate after his party's midterm shellacking \u2014 he probably won't \u2014 but what in the world California's new old governor, Jerry Brown, will do in January 2011. At 72, Brown is\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "December 2010"","block_context":{"text":"December 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/december-2012\/"},"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":6467,"position":3},"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":407,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/bankrupt-california\/","url_meta":{"origin":6467,"position":4},"title":"Bankrupt California","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 12, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online I\u00a0thought of my fellow Californian Energy Secretary Steven Chu last week, when I paid $4.89 a gallon in Gilroy for regular gas \u2014 and had to wait in line to get it. The customers were in near revolt, but I wondered against what\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":10912,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/will-unfinished-train-overpasses-become-californias-stonehenge\/","url_meta":{"origin":6467,"position":5},"title":"Will Unfinished Train Overpasses Become California\u2019s Stonehenge?","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 25, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ National Review \u00a0 The misbegotten project, now stalling, should never have been started. \u00a0 Nobody quite knows who built Stonehenge some 5,000 years ago in southern England. 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Rolling Stone<\/em>\u00a0magazine just gushed that California governor Jerry Brown has brought the state back from the brink of \u201cdouble-digit unemployment, a $26 billion deficit\u00a0and an accumulated \u2018wall of debt\u2019 topping $35 billion.\u201d<\/p>\n