As a recent retiree and life long Californian my wife and I after she retires in 2010 will be packing up and taking our considerable life accumulation with us.
We will with a broken heart be leaving the state that gave both us a superlative public education through professional school at virtually no cost to ourselves or our parents (student tuition including a charge for unlimited admssions to all campus events cost me from $38-$58 through grad school in 1966)
My son attended my alma mater grasduating in 2006 but his student fees (can’t call it tuition because our orwellian democrats insist that public colleges & universities have no tuition) were $1700 a quarter. Worse yet to get a BA in four years now means you have to attended all four quarters so what cost me a maximum of $116 a year in 1966 cost our son $6,800 a year. You say why four quaters a year. The answer is because the California colleges and universities have cut back on the ratio of class offerings to student enrollment forcing students to hang around for more terms to get their degrees.
The home that my parents owned for 35 years and on which in my last year in college (1966) they paid $380 a year in property taxes today is owned by a cousin’s son and now groans under a $5,000 tax bill that is well over $5,000 a year.
In 1961 when I was paying $38 a semester for for student fees the state sales tax was 3% and my average income parents and relatives did not even have to file a state income tax form. I myself did not feel the bite of state income taxes until the early 1970s though I earned a well above average salary and was single.
California’s tax insanity began in 1958 when the democrats took control of the state legislature, a control they have retained to the present day.
In the last 35 years I have witnessed California going from a high wage state to a third world low wage hellhole with a small high rolling elite, its infrastructure decay from the best in the nation to the worst west of the Mississippi River(relative to population), the state’s public schools tumble from the top in the nation to next to the bottom in terms of student achievement, and the extinction or exit of its Historic landmark business institutions (Unocal, Bank of America, Mc Donnell Douglas, Lockheed, & Crocker Bank to name a few).
When I travel to the liberals much damned low tax states such as Texas, Florida, Arizona, Utah, and Nevada I find them to have an infinitely superior infrastructure compared to California, superior public services, new public schools, and an absence of idiot nanny state regulations. When out odf state I realize how horribly conditions in California have degenerated since Governor Moonbeam and the small is beautiful hippy dippy sixties crowd seized the political system in 1974.
If the California coastal communities real estate market does not collapse as have those in inland areas of the state we will liquidate the property assets we have acquired by judicious living and thrift and head out for retirement in no state income Texas where our current $10,000 a year property tax bill will cover most of the mortgage on $250,000 house in that state’s winter warm southern Rio Grande Valley.
Opps I nearly forgot to mention the $6,000 a year we presently shovel out for state income taxes and the just raised vehicle license fees will pay for most of the mortgage on a 2,000 sq. ft. summer home in Utah’s high country so we will not suffer the discomfort of the liberal tax addicts much hated Texas summers. Believe me we have already checked the facts and know that our property taxes in Utah and Texas will be a fraction of what we now pay as a mortgage on a house we purchased 23 years as a buy up in California’s make it tough to build regulation regime set up by the democorrupt lib power mad bureauweenie control for your own good high cost housing market.
Our master’s degree 26 year old civil engineer
son and his soon to be wife, an electrical engineer are also planning a move to Texas to join up with his three third generation Califonia cousins already resident in the Lone Star State and thriving there.
Ohio, Massachusetts, and New York are in full decline but the impending economic disaster that is brewing in California will make the chronically misgoverned and economically long faltering Northeast look like a utopia as the present flight of the young, affluent, well-heeled retirees, and educated out of California turns into a flood.
