Go Southwest, Young Man

Far left California politician Gavin Newsom tours Texas to discover why it’s eating the formerly Golden State’s economic lunch, vows not to change a thing.

OK, that last past is mine, but really, what part of its strangling morass of legislation will California politicians ever reduce in order to stem the tide of businesses and jobs from fleeing the state?

At the Wall Street Journal, John Fund writes:

It wasn’t your usual legislative hearing. A group of largely Republican California lawmakers and Democratic Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom traveled here last week to hear from businesses that have left their state to set up shop in Texas.

“We came to learn why they would pick up their roots and move in order to grow their businesses,” says GOP Assemblyman Dan Logue, who organized the trip. “Why does Chief Executive magazine rate California the worst state for job and business growth and Texas the best state?”

Ed Morrissey does his best to help these befuddled California politicians out:

In fact, those jobs are moving so quickly that the politicians can’t keep up with them.  While California’s delegation visited Texas, another major business announced its intention to move.  Fujitsu Frontech, a major high-tech company, will move its manufacturing facilities from Foothill Ranch, California to New York. The announcements of the move didn’t indicate how many jobs this entails, but it’s probably not minimal, and California can hardly stand to lose any at the moment.

Newsom wants to position himself as a “pro-jobs Democrat,” but that’s been an oxymoron in California for decades.  If Newsom wants to reverse that trend, he’ll have to start eliminating the red tape that forces business owners to take as long as two years to build and launch locations, as Carls Jr/Hardees executive Andy Pudzer told the group.  The state needs to rid itself of its penchant for regulation, especially demonstrated in the episode concerning the California Air Resource Board’s use of a questionable study authored by an academic fraud that not only threatens to put independent trucking companies out of business, but also honest scientists that blow the whistle on the unseemly relationship between state-based Academia and regulatory boards such as CARB.

And that doesn’t even start to address California’s ridiculously high taxes, and the overly progressive nature of its income tax system that guarantees revenue crashes during economic downturns.

Victor Davis Hanson has long been writing about California’s mandarin leftwing ruling elite and their magical thinking:

Our elites liked the idea of stopping new gas and oil extraction, shutting down the nuclear power industry, freezing state east-west freeways, strangling the mining and timber industries, cutting off water to agriculture in the Central Valley, diverting revenues from fixing roads and bridges to redistributive entitlements, and praising the new multicultural state that would welcome in half the nation’s 11-15 million illegal aliens. Better yet, the red-state-minded “they” (the nasty upper one-percent who stole from the rest of us due to their grasping but superfluous businesses) began to leave at the rate of 3,000 a week, ensuring the state a Senator Barbara Boxer into her nineties.

Yes, we are proud that we have changed the attitude, lifestyle, and demography of the state, made it “green,”and have the highest paid public employees and the most generous welfare system—and do not have to soil our hands with nasty things like farming, oil production, or nuclear power. And now we are broke. Our infrastructure is crumbling and an embarrassment. My environs is known as “Zimbabwe” or “Appalachia” for its new third-world look that followed from about the highest unemployment and lowest per capita income in the nation. Again, thanks to the deep South, our schools are not quite last in reading and math. So of course, like the Greeks, we are mad at somebody other than ourselves. Californians are desperate for a “them” fix. But who is them? “Them” either left, is leaving, or has been shut down.

In 2009 article titled “Who Killed California” Troy Senik of National Affairs noted, “From 2004 to 2007 more people left California for Texas and Oklahoma than came west from those states to escape the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. California is in the midst of a man-made disaster.”

Barring the last resident of California switching off the Al Gore curly-fry light bulbs on his way out, don’t look for that trend to reverse itself anytime soon.