The Razor’s Edge
Water is the same. Give California two wet, snow-filled years, as we have had between 2010-2011, and we look like Ireland. This year the gleeful environmentalists will watch the Kings and San Joaquin Rivers run unimpeded from the Sierra, in all their 19th-century glory. The 1920s-era reservoirs are full; the 1960s canals brimming with water. Those who damn Henry Huntington’s wondrous 1912 Big Creek Hydroelectric Project as ecologically hurtful will be out in force sailing all summer on his beautiful manmade eponymous 1912 lake. Even the cut-off West Side farmers may get a sort of irrigation reprieve: there is too much rather than too little water this year, as even the park benches at the lower rivers’ edges are now underwater.
But again there is no margin of error as we will soon learn again when the dry times come as they always do. We haven’t built a big new dam or a new major canal in decades as the population and its appetites soared, and the postmodern cynicism about “building things” became entrenched. So the huge snowpack this year will melt and with it millions of acre feet will flow to the ocean rather than be stored for next year. California can export $15 billion in food, and support 37 million — but only every third year on average when the snow and rain reach 125% of their yearly averages. We forget that when there is water here, there is usually money in California — more crops, more tax revenue; less pumping, less costs; more recreation, more tourist dollars. And when there is not, there is not so much.
Illegal immigration enjoys the same precariousness. I remember the days when we had somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000 illegal immigrants. They were surrounded by Mexican-Americans, Asians, whites, and blacks (and by a confident culture), and so by needs learned English and assimilated, intermarried, and integrated. It was rare to find an abandoned car in your vineyard that had swerved the night before and taken out 20 vines. I heard Spanish spoken, but rarely heard indigenous languages from Oaxaca or encountered those illiterate in both Spanish and English, who asked for translation help at a government office despite bilingual documentation.
But up that number of illegal immigrants (and with them commensurate disrespect for the federal immigration laws) to 4, 5, or perhaps even 6 million illegals, and then factor in a beleaguered second generation, whose parents were not legal, did not speak English, and did not have high-school diplomas, and we reach the proverbial tipping point. What would that look like superficially in an average week? A bag of trash stuffed with Spanish-language bills and ads tossed beside your mailbox; going to the store and hearing one English speaker among ten non-English speakers, while waiting, waiting, waiting in line as the poor checker struggles with all sorts of multiple and expired plastic food stamp cards; seeing dozens of the unemployed milling around Wal-Mart or Home Depot dour and looking for cash work; or preferring to wait for a Monday doctor visit rather than dare go to an emergency room (the last time I tried I was considered a veritable freak for speaking English, having health insurance, and a more serious condition of a broken arm). Give California 200,000 illegals, and it assimilates them; give it over 4 million and a new ideology, and it begins to become overwhelmed.
Let us end with development. We did not object to growing to 37 million, but most certainly to accommodating them. So let us limit nasty oil pumping off shore. Let us curb awful timber cutting. Why not save the noble smelt and idle superfluous acreage? There is surely no more need for more neanderthal hydroelectric projects of the old blast-away sort. New nuclear plants would be even worse. Tasteful open spaces are great along the coastal corridor, so let us stop most new ugly housing construction there and all that it brings. Who is to say you should still live in California when someone in Oaxaca, someone far needier, cannot? I could go on, but right here, I fear, is a recipe for an energy hungry, food hungry, wood hungry, power hungry, overtaxed and undereducated state, where one cannot find an affordable house on the coast, and not sell a cheap one in the interior.
I leave on a note of optimism. All this is self-correcting. Jerry Brown cannot hike the income and sales tax much or hire legions of new SEIU employees or up dramatically the salaries of state workers or lower the standards at the UC or CSU university systems or open wide the border or cut off more water, because we know where it all leads — to pushing us either onto or over the razor’s edge.
Another sobering post from Dr. Hanson. And while this is specifically a post about the difficult straits Californians are facing, some general issues are pushing the denizens of the rest of this nation toward a tipping point as well:the most obvious being the price of gasoline but also the fast-rising price of food, over-taxation (I live in New York), over-regulation of commerce (and pretty much all else), and well, I could go on but the same general pressures in California are affecting most other locales. I am genuinely concerned about the state of the average folks just trying to negotiate the perils of living at this razor’s edge.
California is getting exactly what it deserves via the voters. My only regret is having the wealthier Californians move to other states. Other states feel about Californians about like California feels toward illegal Mexican aliens. Don’t need them and don’t want them. They also don’t learn to speek the local lingo or adopt the local customs. Other reasons are numerous.
This is true. California has become an embarrassment to the nation. Where once it offered a dream of freedom & the good life (as good as it gets in America), it has become a massive Mexican barrio held in place by SEIU mobsters and a bankrupt liberal Anglo elite. They need a major Tea-Party insurrection to get them back on course.
You are absolutely right. As a native Californian, I have seen this state deteriorate for the past 50 years. In a year (2010) when the rest of the nation told the federal, state and local governments that they were sick and tired of the big government nanny state, criminal levels of spending and leftist elites, California voted in a lefty governor and returned to office most of the big government incumbents.
In 5 years my plan is leave this state along with my six figure income. I’m sick of this state.
Sorry to say, Gone, but my lovely Cape Cod, part of the People’s Republic of Massachusetts, also embarrassed itself by sending back Frank, McGovern and the other kleptoCrats last November. Scott Brown was a miracle, and then the place returned to its roots of liberal guilt, unions, Brattle Street pinheads, etc. This time they were ready, and had the Organizing for America loons in every slum weeks in advance of the election (unfortunately, there are lots of slums where the manufacturing base used to be).
One city, Lawrence, lives completely on state aid. The school superintendent couldn’t pass an English proficiency test. The Mayor, who gives his speeches in Spanish, simultaneously held the elected posts of State Representative (salary, $70k, plus pension) and Mayor (salary, $110k, plus pension), claiming that neither was actually a full time job. He was sort of right. The fire department had to be disbanded for lack of tax revenue, the schools are under a state stewardship, and the unionized DPW hardly shows up, so there’s not a lot for him to manage. Thank God for Red States to counterbalance this crap.
It will not happen. Only be deportation of all illegals and all non-citizens will you even BEGIN to correct the evils.
It will not happen.
Very well stated.
I’m a native Californian who moved out in 1977. A visit three years ago to family still living outside San Diego gave me a first hand look at how much had changed over those many years.
I don’t believe Californians have the desire and willpower to make the major changes that would be required to adequately address all the current problems.
I was born and raised in California, and with each mounting horror story of how that once-beautiful state is descending into a third-world wasteland, I thank God for His giving me the wisdom to leave as I did in 1976.
Everytime I go back to visit family (many of my kin are still stuck there), I’m stunned by the degradation of virtually every aspect of California.
Many talk about how California needs to undergo a renewal with a resurgence of conservatism, but I don’t see a path for that to happen. Californians could’ve made that first step in November 2010, but — like the captive who has bonded with his captor — feared leaving the cage of progressivism. When handed the key, Californians pondered it briefly, then cast it safely beyond their reach and instead chained themselves to the floor… just to be sure.
Liberal indoctrination in the media and in the schools finally bore its poisonous fruit. As a result, Californians are now convinced that progressivism is that which nourishes, protects and secures them. Like the longtime captive in his cage, they can never leave it.
California is the greatest state in the nation with a government filled with individuals that are an embarrassment to the state and to the nation. Liberal politics have ruined what was once great.
How right you are! California deserves what is getting because of it’s voters. It’s imcomprehensible how millions in California think that the top 5% can support them and their government indefinitely. Basics start at home and when people can handle their own budgets, how can we expect them to demand restraint and budget balancing from their goverment? Im tired of leaving within my means, paying my bills on time and saving for the future only to have taxation erode what I work so hard for. I say, let it go bankrupt so everyone learns the lesson once and for all! Or will they?
while I enjoyed and agreed on your previous articles, it’s now becoming to be a bore, always whining about how California has become such a waste land.I have yet to read about any good thing that still exists in the Golden state, for goodness sake, there must still be something left.
The Giants and AT&T Park. That’s about it.
Also, going to a RiverCats game is still a good thing. But, you’re right. That’s about it.
I live in California, and there is *nothing* good left in this state. My husband and I will be leaving this year for a better run state.
I was born in California, I grew up in California…and it HAS become the wasteland Dr. Hanson described. In the neighborhood I live in (and mind you, this is in an “affluent” northern California town) on one side of me lives a couple who have a family of illegal immigrants living with them, providing housekeeping, yard work, child care, etc. I doubt those illegals get paid, they seem to be working for nothing more than room and board.
On the other side of me is a house filled with nothing BUT illegal immigrants. Last count? At least 25 people live in that house, a two bedroom, one bath house exactly like the one I’m in.
Jennifer, while I wish you the best of luck overall and congratulate you on your astute decision to move to another state, PLEASE make it somewhere other than Texas. While you may have voted “R” all your life, we just can’t take any chances here of being contaminated by the west coast mentality, such as it is. ;)
We have a good thing going here. :)
Jenny If you vote R, please come to Texas, the cultural and educational wasteland of America. Here, most people outside of the few places where thinking people actually reside (Austin, Houston), believe that the last great author was King James and most are members of the society to veto the 21st AND the 20th century. We have the highest school dropout rate, bar none, of any state in the country, and the lowest educational acheivement rate, and that includes Mississippii, which is really sad. Our air is the worse of any state in the union, and our infrastrucure can probably match California’s any day of the week, as far as being horrible. The idiots who traipse blindly to the polls and pull your precious “R” handle every election are responsibile for this wonderland-so come on and move here. But, don’t expect me to welcome you with open arms. I am the hell out of here ASAP!
Jennifer and Steve, please work out a deal where you trade houses. I think Steve will be much more at home in Cali, where it’s fashionable to look down one’s nose at Texans. And, Jennifer, even with its problems, Texas is probably closer to the ‘opportunity society’ that was the California of your youth.
California is STILL home to some of the world’s largest, most technically advanced military bases…which in turn leads to disproportionately large numbers of military culture/military FAMILIES in certain locations…which in its own further turn leads to noticeably higher levels of civility throughout those areas’ mixed military/civilian populations.
Seriously: compare being pushed, shoved, and fender-bendered at civilian supermarkets — let alone being actually INJURED in civilian retail stampedes (think WalMart on Black Friday) — to the sort of effortless orderliness that is a RULE not an excpetion at military Commissaries and Exchanges, and I may safely rest my case.
– Spikeygrrl in San Diego, proud Navy wife
Please lament on what good is left in the state of CA
Yet another excellent article by Mr. Hanson.
I would like to ask if we are experiencing a crisis of competence. I am myself an immigrant (of the legal kind) now an American citizen. I arrived to this land not knowing more than a few English words. It took me about two years to be completely fluent and about three to learn to write. Back then I learned my trade from those who had been building things for the previous three or four decades. Today is very hard to find men and women with equivalent skills in our management force. Soon will be my time to retire and it is plain to see how the legendary American competence fades away. Remember Katrina? That was a wake up call. Unfortunately we keep hitting the snooze button.
I know California deserves better than this. There is a Republic with a glorious heritage that managed to lead the world in prosperity. Unfortunately the same prosperity became the mother of all vices. Stuck in 1968 dear California continues to decay while her leaders fiddle.
California was once in a position to assimilate a major migration into it’s population from corrupted states in the east, and yet still, apparently, these legal migrants took their voting habits with them- the very habits that had ruined the states from which they left- and proceeded to ruin their new home state once again based, one presumes, on some kind of “…It’ll be different this time…” guilt based voting.
Congratulations. Third time’s a charm.
I think it’s a matter of misdirected talent. Far too many people with the ability to be productive, competent members of society were diverted into useless, parasitic careers. What can an Investment Banker or Lawyer or “Community Organizer” for that matter really do that’s useful to the rest of us? A handful of these people is all we really need, but we have over a quarter, perhaps over a third, of our workforce engaged in superflouous administrative activity.
fixing houses, cars or actually doing something like driving a truck or fishing has become so rare we have tv shows covering it.
Imagine a TV show in the 60′s watching crab fishermen. Entertainment used to bring us fantasy. Now it brings reality.
I was with you until you included lawyers and investment bankers in the same class as “community organizers”. While I might agree that they are equally unnecessary in large numbers, at least the former do not go around stirring up a dependency class and extorting tax money from those of us who are productive. But I have always wondered why the former make so much money compared to the rest of us. And there you can see the hand of government again, in unholy partnership with them, preventing the competition that would keep prices down by creating extreme regulatory barriers to entry. And in the case of lawyers, providing both the legal climate and the high acceptance level for frivolous lawsuits and ridiculous judgments.
I would like you to describe to me one currently pending frivolous law suit and one outrageous or extreme judgment and justify your explanation with the name of the case and the county where it is filed. I don’t think you can do it.
To quote Nancy Pelosi: Are you serious?
Liebect vs McDonalds was the beginning of some truly heinous lawfare abuse:
http://lawiscool.com/2010/02/07/liebeck-v-mcdonalds-restaurants-redux/
the declaration that prop 187 was unconstitutional (assuming that constitutional rights extend to non citizens)
Lawyers do go around stirring up trouble and creating dependencies, but just like “community organizers” most of them are convinced they’re doing good, important work that justifies their salaries (whether large or small). Lawyers create dependencies through the obfuscation of the law. In their minds, they are clarifying it though, by compiling case law, precedents, etc. The whole system is baroque (and broke, to borrow a pun), but it maintains demand for law degrees.
The entire concept that an average citizen needs advice from a specialist in order to comply with the law is repulsive. That we should encourage the most promising of our youths to spend their lives perpetuation and expanding such a tool of tyranny is horrible.
Remember, for every lawyer “running around stirring up trouble” there’s another one trying to stop him.
Because lawyers and activist judges make the laws more complicated and expansive at every opportunity they create the need for more lawyers. It’ self perpetuating.
I’m in law school now, I get to read about it every day.
A number of relatives of mine are lawyers. They mostly do real estate and other business law. Drawing up contracts, that kind of stuff.
Such work is an essential part of commerce in our country.
And both are overhead, doing nothing productive whatsoever.
Not competence.
Values.
I agree. Moral values are the foundation of competence. To put it in biblical words: “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom.”
I think that California’s financial situation will correct itself via a partial financial collapse, which will come when the state’s bonds can’t be sold because no buyers can be found.
The problems that can not be corrected within less than two generations, are the millions of ignorant idiot children that are coming out of our schools, the hundreds of thousands of severely brain-washed liberals coming out of our liberal arts colleges and universities, and the enormous number of poor, ignorant illegals who come here because Mexico has turned into a hell hole, and the U.S. refuses to secure its own borders or deport illegals.
Adding to the problems are an increasing number of liberal judges at all levels, who specifically and intentionally ignore the law, precedent, fairness, facts, and common sense, in order to conduct their actual mission, which is to force a hard left-liberal agenda onto all Americans. They are not really judges, but rather Marxist agents who have been placed in those powerful positions to force that agenda any way they can. The law and the constitution are completely irrelevant to them, and they will increasingly be dropping the pretense that they even attempt to consider the law or the constitution at all, when performing their duties.
All the above problems are direct consequences of Liberals. The liberal media is corrupt to the core, and it is intensely and unceasingly dishonest and without a trace of shame or integrity. These problems are built to last, and they are only going to get worse.
Even after the state’s financial collapse occurs, the liberals in Sacramento are well aware that the media will dishonestly blame the handful of Republicans that exist up there, while calling the liberals heroes over and over for months. Then we California idiots will re-elect the foolish, brainless, half-crazed liberals who caused all these problems and messes, just like we have for the last 50 years.
You mean like the 9th Circuit – the most reversed circuit court in the nation? I love the yellow warning signs in SoCal on the freeways of the man, woman & child running: “Watch out for illegals running across the freeway.” Arizona has a new classic warning sign, too: Return to the main highway, this area is known to have armed drug cartel & people smuggling operations, we can’t (won’t) protect you. Until people vote for an end to the entitlement state, California will fall further. Thanks for sending Pelosi, Boxer, Feinstein, Sanchez, Waters & the rest of their ilk to Washington – we need poster children for failed ideology.
We rebelled against King George III for less than this.
You’re right. The libs are already trying to blame the Republicans despite having been in power for almost 40 years. The people get the government they deserve. When the voters sent Moonbeam back, I knew what was coming (although to be fair, Whitless would have been Schwartenkennedy in a dress). Bottom line: They spent all the money but won’t stop spending. Do that at home and watch what happens.
You sum up California and the mess it’s in well. Whenever the few conservative voters do get a bill voted in, like the English only bill, or deporting illegal
(that does mean unlawful)aliens bill, or sanctuary city bill, they just take it before the courts and its gone. Laws here are selectively enforced. Even today on the news, college professors are educating the students on how poor Jerry Brown is being forced to cut monies to the state colleges because the republicans won’t agree with him. The children are always being dragged out as the martyrs, especially the cute ones. They are so predictable but the public eats it up. The entitlements that have been enacted are bankrupting the state and no one wants to let go, kinda like the monkey with his hand in the cookie jar.
Catino writes better than most native American college students!
“All this is self-correcting.”
No, it isn’t. The most likely scenario is that California will retain for another year or two its massive, costly, inefficient government without being able to pay for it. California will be deemed a state “too big to fail” and will receive a $40,000,000,000 bailout from Obama and Congress, who love to redistribute money that they borrow from the Chinese (and that our children and grandchildren will be forced to pay back).
After California gets a bailout, other states will feel free to increase spending without raising taxes. After another five or six bailouts, our pretense of federalism will end: we will become a nation run by D.C. politicians (with state names retained for use by the nostalgic).
Mr. T:
No, it is indeed self correcting; only you will not like the pain. There are no bailouts coming, only chaos. A crisis is too good a thing to waste or haven’t you been paying attention. The Left being as evil as they are will ride the Golden Bear into the ground. You see, when they of the Left don’t get their way they burn it down. They think they are safe in their hallowed enclaves but they are not. The only question is: who will stand up for California in its time of need? Who will lead in the darkest hour? Dr. Hanson beats the drum but who is dancing to the music? Hopefully you will and many others, your salvation depends upon it. Listen to the music, prepare for the day. Few in history have had the warning that we have, why are we not listening? Answer that.
I agree that it has to correct but what we won’t like most is the long correction cycle, i.e. past most of our lifetimes. I don’t see the liberal left as being that diabolical – just rather ignorant of social and economic affects and too easily seduced by the feel good, free lunch view of the world. The reason it will take so long to correct is that we will never vote out these left/liberal democrats – in the same manner that a dysfunctional family does not replace the parents no matter how bad things get.
The numbers are against change. Add up all public employees, the government dependency class, illegal immigration supporters and all of the extended families, friends and neighbors for each of those groups. Then add all of the sub groups that fear the social conservatism that comes along with fiscal conservatism and finally top it off with the landed gentry coastal eco-poseurs. In all of that, I think we have identified about 60-70% of our voting population that are not going to change their thinking even when the pain starts to rain down on all of us. It will still be someone else’s fault – the evil corporations, republicans, selfish tea party people, etc. Maybe their great great grandchildren will start to see the light.
No, no, no. The left really does burn it down when they lose. Look no further than their actions at the Statehouse in Wisconsin. The election didn’t matter! When the brown stuff hits the fan in Kalifornia, when the public employee unions lose their cushy benefits, when the “nice to have” (or must have if you’re a lefty) spending has to be cut off , you’ll see the left rioting in the streets.
you got that right …it will not be pretty. it will be deadly!
I wouldn’t expect a $40,000,000,000 bailout anytime soon.
Reading some of the comments, many Americans are looking forward to California slouching into the Pacific…
Why would that prevent a bailout? Our federal government repeatedly has shown that it will bail out commercial banks, large financial institutions, large automakers, etc. despite public opinion. Bailing out California would be immensely popular with public employee unions, most Californians, most left-wing voters, and many Mexicans.
The difference is that the Republicans took over the Congress last elections and all spending originates in the house. The debate now is over how much wasteful spending to cut. Ther will be no bail-outs. No way, no how. California can borrow until the bondholders are charging so much for carrying their risky paper that they simply cant afford to borrow anymore. And then that’s it. They’ll have to live within their means because the credit card is maxed. They cant raise taxes either, because those are maxed out too. Any higher and they will simply drive people and businesses away and the revenue will actually drop. California is about to prove Margeret Thatcher correct- “The problem with socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other people’s money”.
It’s long past time for the States that are responsible about their budgeting and spending to secede from the States that are not. This is a matter of survival, much like divorcing a spouse who has an uncontrolled gambling and credit-card debt habit.
Why, oh why do we have to hear this every time? OK, once again, per Tax Foundation.org, http://www.visualeconomics.com/united-states-federal-tax-dollars/, CA pays more than $100B in taxes to the federal government and receives just $0.78 of each dollar back. Were we to receive $1 back for each dollar provided, AT LEAST $22B of our $25B deficit would disappear. You want us gone? Fine, you pay for the 35 states that receive more than they provide. CA, NY, WA, OR, NJ, IL, MA, WI will happily take our money back. To whom, do we send the bill?
CA doesn’t pay squat. A small number of taxpayers in CA pay those taxes, its their money, not yours and not the states. And incidentally tax payers in states that don’t levy state income taxes are also subsidizing California by paying a higher percentage to the Feds than all else being the same taxpayers in California.
Well and truly said. The idea that CA “pays” $1.00 and only gets $.78 back is entirely akin to the liberal concept that everything you earn belongs to the government, whatever they allow you to keep is an “expenditure”.
Ahh the “we pay more to the federal gov’t than we get back” canard.
1) So what? Your STATE budget is a STATE problem. Fix your budget AND address the disparity in taxes going out and coming back in.
2) The liberals in Cali LOVE redistributing the wealth – well, guess what – that’s out of your state to those “poor unfortunates”. Kinda like the chickens coming home to roost huh?
3) Liberal Cali citizens keep pointing out how much taxes going to the fed and crying about it, but keep electing liberal tax and spend (lavish benefits to unions and welfare / gov’t program) politicians.
Clean up your mess – then lecture me.
I save over $1000 each month. On my salary, that’s huge. I have exactly 1 credit card, and I keep it managed. My neighbor on the left coast has maxed his credit card, over mortgaged his house, and when people point out he’s broke, he whines about taxes – while electing wealth redistributing socialists.
Fix YOU. I’m fine. And no, I won’t loan you any money. Oh, and were you to secede and “go your own way” – do you REALLY think your budget problems would get better?
CA pays more than $100B in taxes to the federal government and receives just $0.78 of each dollar back. Were we to receive $1 back for each dollar provided, AT LEAST $22B of our $25B deficit would disappear. You want us gone? Fine, you pay for the 35 states that receive more than they provide. CA, NY, WA, OR, NJ, IL, MA, WI will happily take our money back. To whom, do we send the bill?
So what are you going to give the rest of us for that extra $22 billion? As I see it, this is just deserts for not controlling federal level spending in the first place. A culture that depends on government handouts is beholden to cultures in other states which aren’t dependent on government handouts.
DADefender:
Since the political landscape of California indicates an affinity for those who like to practice redistributionist politics, you shouldn’t complain when you don’t get “your share”. Redistribution is all about picking winners and losers and you guys seem to be fully on-board with the Democrats who espouse it. If you don’t like it, stop electing politicians who do.
What a crock of rancid manure.
California does not send ONE DIME to the federal government.
Californians DO. Can you comprehend the difference? PEOPLE pay taxes to the fed.gov. The STATE does not. But THE STATE RECEIVES money FROM the fed.gov.
You do not have a revenue problem. You are already taking plenty of money from Californians, and the fact that ONE METHOD by which the state takes their money is only 78% efficient does not change the fact that THE STATE is taking that money and SPENDING ALL OF IT, and MORE.
You have a SPENDING problem.
Are we not allowed to assume that CA residents through their elected officials support this transfer? After all, if they did not doesn’t it follow that they would vote for politicians that oppose the big government that makes big taxes imperative?
Further, it’s my suggestion that an inordinate amount of those dollars go to Democratic party constituents. Which ‘receiving’ state’s blacks or Hispanics which you like to deny medicare?
Of course Californians support all that is going on in that state. Look at the November 2010 elections. They voted back into office all the socialists, such as Pelosi and Boxer, and elected a whole new bunch of socialists, including retread Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsome. They deserve what they get. And if the feds attempt to bail out California, there will be outrage all over America.
A bailout will NOT FIX California’s problem! The debt problem would return, as close to immediately as one can get. The problem is the electorate demands more than it can or desires to pay for. Fix that and the debt will be taken care of. Expect wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Why, oh why do we have to hear this every time? OK, once again: California doesn’t pay federal taxes, its residents and businesses do. And they will pay the same amount of federal tax whether they reside in CA or in any other of the 50 states. So, in theory, if each of these tax-paying businesses and residents should transfer to other locales and California did, indeed, “go away,” it would have no effect on the federal bottom line.
However, in the real world, if California does continue its downward slide, it undoubtedly will take a lot of businesses and former federal taxpaying residents with it in which case federal revenue will decline and the country as a whole will suffer for California’s recalcitrant ways. So, what exactly are you arguing here? That the rest of the country should try to mitigate potential harm at the federal level by paying California’s bills? That’s not a solution many will embrace. Far better for them to open their arms to our businesses and (legal) residents so that we all can continue to be productive federal tax payers elsewhere.
You are, perhaps inadvertently, making the conservative case for taxation and control at the most local level possible. We wouldn’t need to send so much money to Washington if the federal government were smaller and did less. Then there would be more tax revenue available to meet local and state needs. And if the state government were smaller and did less, there would be more tax revenue available at the county level, and so on. You get the picture.
I hope you realize you may have just caused a logic overload with CADefender!
The more the Feds returned to California, the more would get spent. The only difference – the “needy’, the illegals, the unions, the greens, the politicians would all be richer, and you would still be $25 billion in debt. How would this happen? Easy….the voters are idiots, would demand more and would continue electing the same politicians who got them in this mess.
Voter’s are Idiots…One cannot help but wonder what the cure for Voters is….. :: ))
Why is it that Californians pay a disproportionately high amount of federal income taxes? The answer is simple.
1. California, due to its ridiculous zoning policies, overbearing environmental policies, and government regulation of everything, has the highest housing costs in the nation. These policies also affect businesses, so other costs of living in California are high.
2. For people to be able to afford more costly housing (and most everything else), they must earn more. A worker in California is paid substantially more than a similar worker in almost every other state. (Alaska and Hawaii are exceptions.)
3. Because Californians have substantially higher incomes, they pay more federal income taxes. Federal income tax rules do not give people who live in high cost-of-living areas extra deductions.
If you don’t want to pay so much in federal taxes, loosen up zoning, dump the expensive environmental rules, slim down state and local governments and their billion regulations, and accept lower pay (since the costs of living will be lower). Do those things, and soon federal taxes taken from Californians will exactly balance federal expenditures to California and Californians.
States that receive more in federal dollars than they pay in taxes are hardly welfare recipients. The biggest beneficiary per capita is Wyoming, which is primarily federal land (BLM) and has two huge National Parks as well as an Air Force base and most of the nuclear missile silos in the US. It’s not their fault that they have vast open expanses that are exploited by the rest of the country. It’s really a win-win.
Sheesh,Whoa Cowboy, CADefender, I guess that one didn’t resonate very well with the blog folk. I think I’d move away from that defense and only use it in the privacy of your own home among like minded friends.
As I understand it the figures for how much tax money is replowed into each state relative to how much originates from that state haven’t been calculated since 2005.
My bet is that California is a lot closer to a taker state, if not an outright one by now, than it was in 2005.
We all love California, just not what you have done to yourselves. It is heartbreaking to see it and the fact that you do not seem able to learn from your electoral mistakes. If you love progressivism so much and the redistributive policies then lie in the bed you in California have made, but quit complaining about it and above all don’t expect the rest of us to bail you out because you know in your heart the money sent to bail you out will only be used to prop up the public unions, the eco-nazis and the over-regulators and it will surly only continue the failure of your governance. You were offered a chance in November of 2010 to start digging yourselves out, but turned it down. Big mistake. Huge.
You responders here amaze me. It is nothing but “you people” and “you made your bed now lie in it.” Did it ever occur to any of y’all that we conservatives did not make the bed in California? We didn’t vote for any of this crap and never did. The illegal alien problem is the result of the actions and non-action of members of the U.S. Congress and several presidents, Democrat and Republican alike, many of whom YOU blogposters voted for over the years, including those oh-so-swell “Texans” Bush I and Bush II who wanted and still want to eliminate the border. So all you Texans who post here in your anti-California smugness, think twice, for it was your boys who had a big hand in this mess, and Texas is on the same path of destruction despite your protests. And the Reaganites need to be reminded that their Illinois-born boy created the first amnesty. Finally, you are guests of Dr. Hanson’s Message Board. Do you all wish ill on him as well?
It’s curious that the same people who strenuously advocate for progressive federal taxation on income complain when such progressive taxation causes the wealthier states to pay more in taxes to the federal government than they receive in benefits.
typical liberal talking points.
1. That is the TAXPAYER money, not the states.
2. The states that you named have the biggest deficits of all the states.
I’m sorry but California taxes and productivity has paid for huge amounts of all the “responsible” states funding through the federal government redistributing our taxes. Since we have two senators just like everyone else, we have to face our money flowing to other states that are not as productive. The economy of California has paid for all these federal benefits for all the other so called responsible states since California became a state. The whole midwest has massive farm subsidies for people who don’t farm, the south has huge social welfare programs
The more the Feds returned to California, the more would get spent. The only difference – California’s “needy’, illegals, unions, greens, politicians would all be richer, and you would still be $25 billion in debt. How would this happen? Easy….the voters are idiots, would demand more and would continue electing the same politicians who got them in this mess.
Sounds like you are already conceding that California will never solve it’s internal budget problems and therefore has the right to demand “reparations” in the form of a bailout from the rest of the United States. Your reasoning seems to be that California has “given so much to the U.S.” that the time has come “to give something back.”
Californians who will eventually demand some sort of bailout when state bankruptcy is imminent seem to be test-driving this theme for later use. I have to tell you “It won’t play in Peoria.”
I could not have said it better. Exactly how I feel will happen. You can also thank Soros for that outcome.
Actually, Doc, Jerry Brown can.
If hiring more union workers, raising taxes and lowering school standards gets him and his party more net votes, he will do it.
Civic duty is anachronistic nowadays. What matters to the political class on both sides of the aisle are Party and Power.
The Republic has fallen.
I sincerely hope you’re right. I was born here, and I would like to stay. Further hikes in taxes, and further crashes of quality of life, and I don’t know that I can.
My brother left, and most of the people I knew in high school, who, like me, were born here. In some cases, their parents and grandparents were Californian. They didn’t stay because this state is no longer a place to raise kids.
You’re right – the productive leave, and the leeches descend on us in hordes. This state, short of a rush of sense to the head, is doomed.
Leave! You’ll find the rest of the country a marvelous place to live. I’m 3rd generation Californian and I left in 95. I was a flaming lib (Indoctrination U) until I found the rest of the country had this thing called “common sense.” What a wonderful concept! I live in Virginia now and love it – plus it has four whole seasons!
Lolly, I’m sure you’re right, but I have this aching attachment to the landscape that I just can’t let go of.
So the evil day may dawn, but until then, I will hang on.
Gee lolly maybe you just grew up,something that doesn’t seem to happen too often in liberal enclaves, where mass delusion appears to be a way of life.
If you move, and where ever you move to, please leave California voting habits behind!
Did and done! Us reformed liberals (kinda like reformed smokers) are more conservative than those who grew up with it honestly! Mostly because we KNOW how the other half thinks and how mind numbingly dangerous it is!
Sometimes, the herd just stampedes right over the cliff, even while knowing that the cliff is there. Just listen to your Nancy Pelosi’s or Barbara Boxer’s pronouncements.
So long pal…I’ll be joining you soon however, in my state New Mexico, the former Land of Enchantment!
Thanks for this excellent article which perfectly exemplifies the rampant, smug hypocrisy of the “liberals’” successful attempts to reduce everyone to the lowest common denominator by any standard….all in the nauseus name of “doing good”. It’s almost soviet in its comprehensiveness.
California is finished. Whites have been ethnically cleansed out of California. The WSJ reports that Whites went from 80% in 1960 to 40% today. Latinos are now 38%, poised to become majority.
Let us be clear what will happen. Dr. Hanson you will be taxed out of your property. As my family will be out of mine. Latinos don’t own much property. They are poor, having according the US Census Bureau a $16K gap in median household income, and much larger households (twice the size of Whites). Latinos also depend on the Welfare state. Latino girls have kids starting at age 16, routinely, while Whites have kids, mostly only when they can afford them. I have personally observed a Latino family ask for donations from the Charity I do some volunteer work for, in order to fund College expenses for the younger son (the older was in the program I did some work for). They drove up in the latest model Toyota Camry. Its a nicer car than the ten year old one I drive.
Whites are the functional minority in the state of California, and soon the US. We are basically Jews in pre-WWI Germany. Or Dreyfuss era France, whatever you prefer. Entirely predictable, Jerry Brown will follow the people who elected him. And push confiscatory property taxes on ordinary people, to finalize the ethnic cleansing of Whites in California. Then of course heavy taxes on the wealthiest will proceed.
But if I were you, I’d prepare for those confiscatory taxes on your property. You are stuck, unlike a renting Silicon Valley executive, or Hollywood mogul also renting. Therefore you are the easiest tax target. As predictable as the calender — California Latinos want the expansive Welfare state the supports their huge family formation, at the expense of White voters. The numbers have moved their way and its all over but the shouting.
Demography is destiny. California is over, its nothing but Northern Mexico now, and won’t change any time the next century. For Whites, it is time to face the facts and emulate powerful role models: Theodore Herzl, David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Dayan, and Golda Meir. Yes this is distressing. But this is the cost of diversity. Lets be honest — Whites as a minority can only expect the kind of treatment Jews have historically found in Europe. That is just human nature. California belongs to Mexico now, as surely as Gaza does to Palestinians.
get lost you racist creep.
you want everyone to act like jewish terrorists??
“Jewish terrorists?” Really? And you call him a racist?
I would say pot meet kettle, except you are both pot and kettle in this instance.
Jewish terrorists? Oh, please.
Look at any map and see the massive Arab nations that surround the speck of land that is Israel. You’re telling me the so called Palestinians (a created name for a ‘nationality’ that never in history existed) couldn’t be relocated to anyone of those areas?
“Palestine” appears to be just a manufactured convenience all the better to harrass and disposess Jews. If its so awful living amongst them, then why do Arabs flock into Israel to live and work there? Oh, right…because that’s where the freedom and jobs are.
Glad I could help.
Facts are not racist. What he has provided is simply the facts.
Projection. Thanks for your self-declaration and good riddance.
you are spot on about the car thing
you see these people in brand new 2011 ford f-150′s then they come haggling to lower prices or give out a freebie because they are poor
the main problem is that the american dream apparently now means vehicle of your dreams, homes and houses, great jobs, lifelong safety nets, and some imaginary mean, rich, white guy to pay for everything
VDH: There is not much that can be done to my wife or I that we cannot survive. Well, personal attacks might be harmful but given our age, the future is for the much younger and that future brothers us. What kind of future will our son and his wife have? Will they be able to raise a family if they so choose? Will the younger families in our neighborhood, in the Midwest, not California, be able to subsist and get by? California might be a rat’s nest of problems and yet its problems will harm the rest of the younger crowd nationwide.
Maybe we all should wish for that magical earthquake to throw California into the ocean but that most likely will not solve the problems California will inflict on the nation, or what New York, or Illinois, or Wisconsin, or Vermont, or any other such run down state will do to us all. It would be great if the country could work out its problems but will we or will we let the country go the way of Greece, a beautiful place to visit but who wants to work there?
Cheers and prepare your own survival kit.
As a Texan, my biggest concern about California is to make sure that when it slides off the razor’s edge the rest of the country won’t be required to pay for the lifeline. Well, that’s not quite right. I’m also concerned to see (from a distance) the spoliation of a once beautiful land. What a shame the Left can’t even acknowledge the facts of recent history, much less learn from them.
I was in Texas(Houston, San Antonio) last week, and it looks eerily like California of the mid-1990s. If you don’t get your illegal immigration problem solved, you can look forward to exactly the same problems as California. I seem to remember hearing or reading that Hispanics(Mexicans) now make up over 50% of students in the Texas School System. I hope I’m wrong. But I couldn’t find a fricking State of Texas belt bucket in downtown Houston. I know..I don’t know where to look, but one would think you wouldn’t have to look very hard for that. Mexican anything…no problem, it was everywhere.
At a middle school graduation about a year ago, the Principal proudly oversaw the saying of the Pledge of Allegiance in English and Spanish. A man in jeans, western boots, and wide leather belt with a large buckle stood up and noisily walked out after the Spanish pledge. He yelled, “This ain’t Mexico!” After the program, I quietly went up to the Principal and told her that while I deplored that man’s lack of manners, I completely agreed with his sentiment. She was totally flustered, since I was polite, used largish words, and wasn’t dressed in “Texan” garb.
The thing that leaves me most perplexed is how these dreamy-eyed lefties are walking blindly into their own destruction. The worst is when feminists defend Islam…
If you ever talk to that principal on the subject again, explain that he is supporting a second class status for Latino immigrants by not enabling them to remain apart from the larger nation rather than insisting they become a part of it.
Precisely. I am sure many here recall the brief push for recognition of Ebonics as some sort of second language spoken by African-Americans. There arose an effort to hire teachers fluent in it, to accomodate elementary curricula to those who used it and who correspondingly had trouble with conventional English usage and consequently scored poorly on standardized tests, etc. It was the perfect illustration of the soft bigotry of lowered expectations, and I had several black collegues who were very opposed to it. It was clear to them that the accomodation would create a permanent underclass, with Pygmalion-style elements of “accent equals destiny.” I suggested to my collegues that they could put a swift end to the effort to promote Ebonics by getting Governor Wallace to sign an executive order requiring Ebonics to be taught to all black children in Alabama schools. When Jesse Jackson supported Ebonics, it sounded like the right thing to do. But put Jackson’s words into Wallace’s mouth, however, and it would be revealed for what it was: candy-coated shackles.
10. CONSVLTVS Since 0′Zero, Texans and every other American have been whacked for Trillions to bail California.
And about a hundred foreign countries’ banks – including with around Four Trillion Dollars conjured with a wave of the Fed’s wizards’ wands (“monetized” debt) — and its printing presses!
Hate to break it to you, but Mexicans are in fact the largest ethnic group in Texas public schools. A lot of these are half-Mexican and half-Texan or American kids, listed as “Hispanic” to qualify for college scholarships, but the vast majority are full Mexican.
As for the total Texas population, only 48% is non-Hispanic white. Federal agents already not so jokingly refer to the Southern Judicial District of Texas as the “Northern Judicial District of Mexico,” and it’s almost as corrupt. My Mexican-born wife (completely Americanized, raised in the northern midwest – she’s a yankee) told me 20 years ago, “if I wanted to live in Mexico, I’d move back.”
Demographics are the future, so the Democrats will soon be in control of Texas. The borders must be kept open so future voters for the Partido Democrático Institucional can keep crossing.
I have 3 half Mexican-American children and have never listed them as Mexican. I just could not do it.
I am sorry to say this and fully understand the end result, but it is time to let it fail, let it fall and fall hard! it is time to stop trying to patch what doesn’t work only to have it limp along gathering more gangrene and boiling puss, let it die so the rats will flee and the real work can finally start… this goes for the other states too.
You are right. Those who want to leech this country will disappear as soon as they are not fed anymore. Let it fail. It will clean the air big time. Just one detail: let it be clear who is responsible for the failure: unbridled liberalism.
When that happens, they will move east.
Takers vs Givers. Liberals vs Adults. Pelosi vs Hanson.
Every good thing contains the seeds of its own destruction.
California, more than any other place, both the microcosm for the country and the warning about what is about to happen everywhere.
It may not be too late, but there certainly isn’t any time to spare.
Dr. Hanson:
Jerry Brown could not stop the collapse of California even if he wanted to. And he does not want to – it would mean undoing his life’s work – the public sector unions. He created them. He nurtured them. He cannot kill his children.
No, far from being corrected, this will get ugly and collapse quickly. The November 2010 election emboldened the Marxists running California like never before. It is now a one-party Socialist state – controlling not only the government, but the media, universities, arts and public schools. The GOP has surrendered and is leaving the state behind to let it die. The leftists are now going all-out to push California over the edge to create their leftist paradise – enforced teaching of gay studies to elementary school kids, radical “clean energy” requirements, draconian emissions requirements to retrofit on diesel trucks – you name it.
Mr. Hanson – understand it for what it is — it is a naked attempt to force out conservatives, Republicans and capitalists, especially white Anglo ones (and I say this ruefully as a Jew who is horrified by my leftist landsmen in the PRC – People’s Republic of California). In other words, this is now an all-out political version of ethnic cleansing.
Why do they do this? They believe that Obama will bail them out – even if he has to do an end-run around the GOP House to do it. If the House is needed, the Democrats will simply use their propaganda arm (a/k/a the “MSM”) to pour out “news” stories about how the failure of the GOP to bail out California will starve Hispanic children to death, and unless the GOP caves, the Latinos will never vote for them, relegating the party to forever being a regional party, incapable of ever again taking power.
But collapse California will. And in a state where Hispanics are now almost 40%, and where they are a majority of the youth – and well armed at that via their gangs like MS-13 – there is no doubt that the aging Anglos will be driven out. California will become Mexico’s newest state – California Arriba or California Norte.
Your Mexifornia nightmare come true.
I feel for you all in California, just not enough to support Federal funds to bail out your State. You in California have created this problem, granted most of those creators of Idiocy are along the coast from San Diego to well north of San Francisco. Perhaps California would like to become a Republic? Go for it!
Californians created this mess, and we definitely should be required to solve it.
All I (as a Californian) ask is that you take your moonbat relatives in when they flee.
All I ask (as a Texan) is that Californian transplants be permanently barred from voting in any state to which they relocate. You fouled your own nest, you don’t get to foul ours too.
Sorry, but your hard earned money will be coming to California. Taxpayers across the country will be bailing out this state. You will be paying for 30 years of gross incompetence. Your state will suffer at the hands of a California State Legislature that to this day cannot stop spending. You and your citizens from other states will share this burden, with or without your permission. Have a nice day.
Sparky: You maybe right about the bailout funding but what has not been determined is the strings attached to funding. The list of conditions republicans can require is rather lengthy and there is nothing the democrats can do about it except take it or leave it. Shutting down CA is not the same thing as shutting down the federal government (as if who could give a darn if you are a taxpayer and not a tax moocher). Either way its a win-win for the federal taxpayers.
In the best of circumstances if the CA communist were forced to swallow the poison pill (poisonous to them) then California will most definitely recover and be a great engine for the US economy. If they don’t take the strings then the state will implode fiscally and whatever administration that comes in to power after the implosion will be in essence the receiver for the state and will have to radically cut back CA state and local government and their pernicious leftist nonsense simply by virtue of not being able to fund them. One thing is for sure, Congress will not bail out California, Illinois, New Jersey, Michigan, New York or any other state that has been fiscally ravaged by democrats without severe strings attached.
Californians didn’t create the problem by themselves. All of the senators and congresspeople that YOU in other states elected over the years created the open border situation that has sunk Calfornia first. In 1994, we at least tried to attack the illegal alien mess by overwhelmingly voting for Proposition 187, which was sturck down by a federal judge appointed by a non-Californian president. And now folks, those former illegals who were granted amnesty in thireen actions by Bill Clinton (a non-Californian) and their children and kinsfolk are fleeing Calfiornia and coming YOUR way. And you are helpless to stop it because if you try, like they tried in Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Arizona, the non-Californian liberal media based in New York will esne it gets shot down. Welcome to California folks, you are already there.
So what do I do with my California architects license?
Line the bird cage apparently.
Thanks VDH – always a pleasure to read your thoughts.
Dr. Hanson:
As President of the United States, what three things would you do first?
As you well know, the federal government’s condition makes Jerry Brown’s California look like a small unimportant surface scratch.
Talking about those shacks, are we seeing the first shanty towns in America?
Having one million new immigrants come into America every single year is a dream come true. That’s if you’re dream consists of having Aztecs little advanced from those written about by Diaz mumbling Nahuatl at your convenience store using food stamps to buy chocolate Quik manufactured in Mexico which somehow made the parallel journey from Tenochtitlan.
Good one.
I’ll add: driving without a valid license or insurance, killing four kids on a schoolbus because the only prior experience you have of a car is watching them whizz past your hut; then whining that you’re a victim of misunderstanding and racism.
I look forward to watching Jerry Brown keep his promise to create an “all cuts” budget this year, once his plan to extract more blood from the California taxpayer goes down in flames.
The whining, wailing, knashing of teeth will be epic.
When the “free stuff” is finally gone, why would any self respecting illegal alien want to stay in California?
The leeches drop off the host once it is in its’ death throes.
Beth, what you say is only too true and I, for one, think California deserves what is coming on them. But, there is only one problem. When the leeches leave where will they go. Back to their countries of origin? Not hardly. All of California’s neighboring states will be the next ones invaded. Maybe Arizona saw the incipient flood next door and decided to take preemptive action? Every one of the western states that have generous welfare policies better be prepared.
Here in Arizona, we want Gov. Brewer to put the National Guard on the California border as well as the border with Mexico. We might even have to blow the bridges over the Colorado River when the end comes.
BTW, after Katrina hit New Orleans we saw what happens when an incompetent government is faced with an overwhelming disaster. What’s going to happen when an incompetent and BROKE government is faced with the aftermath of The Big One? That ought to be interesting…
Unfortunately the alien vampires will jump ship and begin sucking the lifeblood out of every state near California when they do finally drain the dying host.
Ready your socioeconomic crucifixes.
I believe the plan is to cut police, fire and teachers, but keep ALL the $180K/year diversity executives. And all the Boards where out-of-work politicians park themselves till they can run again.
Off topic, in my community people are buzzing about admission rates to colleges and universities. No hard facts yet. But kids who would have gotten into Berkeley last year, are accepted only by UCSB, kids who were a cinch for UCSB are accepted by San Jose State and so on. The buzz is that colleges are accepting far more out-of-state and especially foreign students because they can be charged more. Ironic if true: first jobs are outsourced, then later college slots.
My son (a non-Cali West Coaster) got into some private schools in Cali, but will not attend school there, (even Stanford) since you tend to work and live where you went to school.
He will probably attend one of the East Coast schools, and graduate with minimal debt, as far away from Cali as he can get. But the locusts will find DC, Virgina, MD soon enough. NY is soon to follow CA and MI down the drain.
Maryland is already well on its way to becoming California. Virginia is being overrun from the Maryland transplants and California companies that have relocated, but still have the sense to stay fairly conservative. But it’s a nightmare to live there now because of the traffic and population issues. Of course, the whole area would crash and burn if we actually shrunk the federal government, from whence cometh the majority of the local jobs.
It’s been fascinating to watch Governor Brown. So far he’s done exactly nothing constructive. There’s been a lot of “negotiation” but the Republicans won’t move from their position of insisting that new taxes are a bad idea, and Brown and his Dem friends can’t stop insisting that taxes are the only real solution to the problem. The media, of course, tries to present the idea that *both* tax increases and spending cuts are going to be needed to solve the budget problems, with the understanding of course that the spending cuts can be somehow wriggled out of, while the tax increases will be continued indefinietely. The same silly rationale is presented as common sense at the Federal level.
I’m not sure how we got to this point, so that we’re so stupid that we can’t even see that spending tremendous amounts of money we don’t have every year is eventually going to lead to disaster. No one seems to care, and as near as I can tell, the elites, led by Pelosi, Feinstein, Boxer, Brown, and Newsome, have fortified themselves in their suburban enclaves where *they’re* safe, while the rest of us are out here waiting for the riots to start. Interesting, and no one’s ever commented on it before (to my knowledge anyway) but the whole of the state’s leadership listed above is from the Bay Area. Boxer lives down here, but she’s from Marin County. Not that LA is that sane (never mind San Diego or Sacramento) but all of the crazies coming from one portion of the state?
Anyway, hopefully it won’t collapse until after I’m dead. I don’t have kids, so it’ll be someone else’s problem by then. Wish I could fix it, but it seems likely not.
Actually,we’ve already gone over the razor’s edge. CA is simply a lost cause. Things will continue to get worse. Liberals could care less about illegal aliens, bad roads & a bankrupt state. They are all safely tucked away in Lafayette, Black Hawk, Palm Springs, Marin County or Monteray w/ their SUVs, gated communities & yoga teachers & chanin blanc. They simply don’t give a damn about the rest of us unless we are illegal aliens, Hollywood actors or a member of their meditation group. Calif. went to hell in a handbasket years ago & simply keeps sinking deeper into the abyss. No one speaks English in any service industry now. Kids know more about global warming than Abraham Lincoln & the Cold War. We have become a state full of idiots run by fools.
People complain too much. Those who only bothered to have one or two children in such a prosperous place shouldn’t complain when other people, from a different culture, from a different land (whose ancestors owned the place anyway) decide to take it over. I’m sure the conditions, compared to where they came from, are quite satisfactory to them.
That this would happen to California and other places was obvious to anyone with half a brain 35 years ago who bothered to read about the Lebanese civil war. The Maronites loved their lifestyles, the Shia had children. Guess who ends up winning? This isn’t Rocket Science folks. God said to be fruitful and multiply. Darwin talked about survivial of the fittest. Pick your belief system-neither provides much comfort to the childless.
Stop subsidizing them and they won’t have so many kids.
I beg to differ. The statistics are against you. The poorest countries nave the highest fertility! Look at Mexico!
Cuban Bob-No one subsidized Central Americans or Lebanese Moslems to have children. It’s what comes naturally if you don’t do things to prevent it.
Dr. Hanson is correct about some of the things he says, but appears to not face their implications. The United States took California, Texas, et al. from Mexico because the American population increased due to immigration from Europe as well as domestic growth. Americans eventually stopped having children ,became more concerned with their pleasures and gave up having larger families. the Mexicans, in the meantime, took advantage of this hedonistic decadence (whether it was the Summer of Love or Endless Summer, take your pick-all were guilty) and are taking what they consider to be their land back.This is just history at work-the migration of peoples. You might as well get angry at the tides (or surf).
All the op-eding in the world won’t really change this. If you don’t like the way the world is going, have your own children and don’t tell them that things like manual labor and military service are beneath them. If you’re not actually willing to do these things (I am), then stop complaining, enjoy being a minority in Mexifornia, and die quietly in some nursing home under the care of a Latina CNA, who hopefull will be kind to you despite yur prejudices.
Not to split hairs here, but the US didn not “take” Texas from Mexico. We won our independence from them through a good, old-fashioned war and became our own Republic (which, by the way, included New Mexico and part of Colorado). Only later did we decide to join ourselves to then-nascent United States, which is why ours is the only state flag which can be flown at the same height as the stars and stripes. Additionally, I believe it’s why Texans have an independent streak which helps protect our values and fiscal policies from outsiders, whether they be transplants from over-taxed states like CA and NY, or immigrants.
Well in that case, my personal favorite “solution” for Lebanon’s, and the Middle East’s, Teeming-Islamic-Masses problem would work just as well for teeming illegals:
It’s called Dibromochloropropane … available at a reservoir near you (if you’re in Kabul).
It was never “their” land. They may be told that now – but it’s a lie. Some white Spanish ranchers were in California but declared it uninhabitable.
It was Spanish land with parts of the west coast owned by both England and Russia. All land was bought and paid for (12 million paid to all three parties – regardless of size of property).
Actually, it was Native American land. Most inhabitants of California did not speak Spanish, English or any other European language prior to 1848. They never considered themselves “Mexican” or “Hispanic.” The overwhelming majority of Hispanic Californians came after that date.
Professor VDH:
Pretty grim reading, but all too true. I was a Califronia resident (Riverside, Azusa, and San Bernardino) from ’75 to ’95. Graduate business school degree from Pepperdine.
Glad to be an American expat working in Europe; since ’95 to the present. If and when I return to the US to live, I doubt that it will be in California.
Expat in Warsaw
More socialism is the only solution. Let them drink deep and drown in the waters in which they have swum since 1960. Too many people in the California? What would the USSR do? It would issue residency permits then arrest and deport anyone without them. It would have its secret police sweep through employment records, looking for illegal hires. It would load trains with whole peoples for internal resettlement. It would issue press releases on the anti-socialist activities of the Kulak, then arrange for their disappearance. Socialists can solve these problems: they have in Russia, Ukraine, Ethiopia, Vietnam, China, Cuba, the very places Boxer, Brown, and the academicians admire. Stay the course!
@Beth…They will just transfer to a different host (State). Where I am from, a previously quiet suburb of Philadelphia, and strong Republican district. I have seen over the past 15 years an influx from Philadelphia and New Jersey. You would think they learned their lesson. They fled the high taxes, failing schools, and intrusive local government only to then demand it in their new home. My garage and car have been broken into 3 times in the past 2 years. I will not send my 14 year old son to the very same high school I graduated from, due to high violence and lowered standards. My property taxes are going up every year. My assess ability to jobs is drying up due to foreign labor and others who are undercutting me so bad, I cannot even make a dollar on a job. Worse, the dependent class is growing and voting in Democrats with their great ideas. At the grocery store my ¼ full cart that I had to skimp by and seriously pick and choose, I get to the register and see shopping carts full of meat and other stuff I couldn’t afford…and then the WIC and other cards come out. It’s just getting out of control.
I’ll see your son and raise you a younger brother. Things have gone downhill so fast that my parents pulled my younger brother out of the high school I graduated from not two years earlier.
Goodbye California.
I loved living in Southern CA in my 20′s. The weather, the girls, the scene – great times. Then I got the Hell when I started making money. The taxes, the housing prices, the guns laws, the crowding and illegal immigration, the feeling of a state that has lost all control – except over me. Not where I was going to raise a family.
Sad to see them going down – glad it’s in my rear-view mirror.
Mr. Hanson wrote, “we know where it all leads — to pushing us either onto or over the razor’s edge.”
Exactly as planned! It’s simple. The left wants to “fundamentally transform” the USA into . . . something else. But! The USA is the richest, most successful, most powerful nation on earth, so how does one accomplish the transformation? Easy. Destroy that success. Tax the producers, the most successful. Diminish private property rights of the “evil rich”. Create a homogenous class, an egalitarian society, with just a few elites in the ruling class.
Destroy the USA, then re-build it into a socialist system like NorKor or Cuba or Zimbabwe. You won’t like it, but the ruling class will (and that’s who counts, of course). Just ask Nancy Pelosi.
Capitalism is the unequal sharing of wealth, Socialism is the equal sharing of misery, with the exception of the elitist ruling class, they still live like royalty on the misery of the rest, which is Obama,s and the Democrats plan for Them and Us.
“Why do they do this? They believe that Obama will bail them out.”
Obama’s largesse will be constituted by the dollars of the remaining working class.
It is the ultimate redistribution program.
In his boots on the ground (wheels on the ground?) journeys through California’s heartland, Dr. Hanson sees the living truth. There’s no way the insulated liberals shopping at Gelsen’s in Pacific Palisades are going to encounter the people of the enclaves about whom Hanson writes. Those code-enforcement-challended enclaves are an abstraction to the Coast people, so they don’t really exist.
On over-reglation: My neighbor, a professional painter, says that at a high-end paint store in LA, the contractors have returned every gallon of a new “environmentally correct” paint thinner because it ruins their brushes and bubbles like some evil stew. The older product (the one that works) is no longer allowed to be sold in the city. You can bet that the geniuses who devised the new regulations never touched a paintbrush in their lives. This is the template of the current administration in Washington and the EPA .
VDH:
From 1998-2000 I lived in California, in the Bay area. We were only there for two years as it was all we could take. Since I have not been back since, I can only imagine how bad it is now.
The thing that struck me most was the level of hostility toward the business community. The hoops that had to get jumped through on a daily basis were incredible. So much so that when the owners sold out, they vowed to never have employees or a physical presence in the state again.
I have thought for a long time that the complete breakdown, when it comes will happen much more quickly than people anticipate right now. Maybe investors just stop buying the bonds, maybe some midsize cities (or larger) start to default on debt. Who knows?
What we do know is that a lot of the paying class is leaving for better opportunities elsewhere. That group of business starting, job creating people for the most part now give California little or no consideration, or can’t wait to leave.
Not a recipe for success, and very,very little time to try to get it on track.
Dr. Hanson loves his State, feels loyalty to it and hopes for the best. The best will not happen. California has passed the point of no return. It is now impossible for that State to reverse the course of deterioration on which it was set decades ago by Progressives. Collie-forn-ya is destined to assume finally the conditions forced upon it by the illegals they so eagerly( and so non-racistly) invited. Take solice you stupid Californians; as you live in a third world toilet created by your own insanity, at least you can say you were not Racists. And after all, isn’t that the only thing that matters?? Just don’t come crying to the Hoosier, Hawkeye and Longhorn States to bail you out. Pathetic fools!
Well said there. The problem is these oh-so-chic degenerates will flee, as they always do, to greener (whiter?) pastures, and then proceed to snobbily deride the local “rednecks” for their racism and bigotry, and haughtly mount their smug high horses of moral superiority.
I would like to shoot them all, come the revolution.
“The problem is these oh-so-chic degenerates will flee, as they always do, to greener (whiter?) pastures, and then proceed to snobbily deride the local “rednecks” for their racism and bigotry, and haughtly mount their smug high horses of moral superiority.”
You need to finish your thought…..”and haughtly mount their smug high horses of moral superiority as they begin to campaign for the very same policies that destroyed the state they just fled from.”
I also have news for everybody knocking Californians (I’m one). Our state began to be destroyed by the out-of-towners who flooded the state in the 60′s and just kept coming. The gays and the hippies and the radicals certainly weren’t homegrown but imported (we thought from New York).
It’s taken them 50 years to bring the state to its knees, while driving out every native. I stopped caring 25 years ago, but again, don’t entirely blame the natives. The out-of-towners……like locusts……invaded out state and they WILL be coming to your state next.
You sound like you come from Minnesota, the land of Backseat Ballots Al Franken; New York talk show legend, revered by all 14 of his listeners, 7 of whom wiggled one hand free of the straightjacket to tune him in.
Well thanks, lolly – you’re right – but the sentence growing unmanageably long.
“Haughtily”, btw. :)
*grins* I know how to spell – honestly, I do!
Well gee, Grantland, thank you for you final solution. I am not a degenerate, and I was born in raised in California and have voted and behaved conservatively since being in-utero 48 years ago. Californians didn’t let in the illegal aliens, the federal government did, and that includes that “great” conservative Ronald Reagan (who was neither born nor raised in California, and who, by the way granted the whole pack of them their first amnesty. I may also remind all of you out there that Charles Manson was from Ohio, and most of Hollywood is from elsewhere, and always was. California’s greatest contribution to the U.S. was Gen. George S. Patton, who was from San Gabriel, I believe.
“I am not a degenerate”
I beg to differ. Though you might not snort coke by the bucket, I have no doubt that you would blanche with horror were someone to say “wetback” at a cocktail party.
How about rounding up the Mexicans at gunpoint, putting a boot to their brown behinds, and sending them back to where they came from, all of them? How about mobilizing the guard, rolling in the tanks, and liquidating the gang-bangers with extreme prejudice? How about shutting the border with steel, and shovelling every last lump of Mexcrement back across the Rio Grande?
Horrified? Unthinkable? Then you must rot in your degenerate paradise, and bear the label.
As he has already pointed out – we’ve already tried that at the ballot box and we were overridden by a federal judge who thought it was “not very nice!”
How many times did we/they vote to ban gay marriage? Twice while I was still there and three times since. IT.DOES.NOT.MATTER! The statists WILL have their way with that state no matter what!
Well Grantland, at least I don’t flee like a coward clutching his skirts to another state, to armchair complain about “degenetates” from a safe distance. I’m still here fighting. And you’d never make a living as a mindreader because I have no problem kicking out the “wetbacks” and building a wall. Why not take the surplus alligators that terrorize Florida golf courses backyards and transplant them to the Rio Grande, something I have no problem suggesting at the few cocktail parties I have been invited to — which is I why I am not invited to cocktail parties in the first place, because I speak my mind exactly as you do. It takes one to know one, my fellow degenerate.
The news of California’s demise is premature. Whether by choice or by circumstances it will reform since it has no choice. The enclaves can only last so long. They to will have to pony up to keep the rest going. Their income allows for a higher pain threshold but they do have a threshold. When the bite exceeds 50% on an ongoing basis no matter how many clever lawyers and accountants keep finding avoidance measures its game over and time to hit the rest button. Very,very few people are wealthy enough to fork over 50% of their annual revenues (the 50% includes the ones who think they are clever when thinking they will be living of tax exempt and cap gains, not just ordinary income) and continue to live the life style they are currently living and maintain the spending. And those very few are not enough to float the state. It won’t be pretty and it will be painful but eventually CA will have no choice but to hit the rest button.
Reform is not coming soon, and it’s not just taxation that’s the issue. Jerry Brown just signed a law requiring 30 percent (up from 20 percent) of power production to be generated from renewables by 2020. So not only do Californians feel they can defy logic, they can defy the laws of physics as well. Combine this with the recently signed cap-and-trade (that by their own admission won’t do a thing about carbon levels) and it spells economic doom even without punitive tax rates
Very astute, CrackerMike, and spot on! Except, all the hot chics in Hollywood can move here to Houston when the Golden State finally crumbles into chaos. I will welcome them with open arms . . .
Give California 200,000 illegals, and it assimilates them; give it over 4 million and a new ideology, and it begins to become overwhelmed.
Well, they are there because you Californians hired them. You may like cheap vegetables, cheap construction, and cheap gardening, but you make up the difference with higher taxes to provide school and social services for them.
You can’t have it both ways.
California has also been the model for the sex-drugs-and-rock’n'roll way of life since the sixties. The resulting moral corruption has spread to the rest of the country. They got Reagan for a while but they did not learn their lesson. So did the rest of the country. You can’t have it both ways. You are right.
You don’t see Joey behind the counter because you aborted him. José came just to fill Joey’s place. Continue the charade: small families, abortion, vice instead of virtue, bring the barbarians in to do the hard work, entertain yourself with base spectacles… That was the Roman menu. You know how they ended. Don’t expect a different result this time around.
It took awhile, but the Barbarians acquited themselves well at Tours, Granada, and Vienna. Lets keep our eye on the bigger picture.
In the 1950s, when California was beautiful and a good place to live, we had something called the Bracero Program. Mexican farm workers were allowed to legally come into the state to work during planting and harvesting season. They had to be provided with living quarters and other amenities, then they were expected to return to Mexico. They were content, as best I can tell, with this program.
Then the AFL-CIO and a Democrat president and Congress discovered that this program was “exploiting” these workers. It ended and the illegal immigration flood began.
And let us not forget that we have priced our own labor out of the competition by the minimum wage and all the regulatory overhead that mandates not just health and safety, but working hours in many industries in pursuit of health and safety. Thus the legal worker has an income ‘floor’ they are not officially allowed to go under, and have an overhead that grows with each regulation that requires tracking by a business for each worker.
Until we recognize that hard work is no stigma, and that low pay is better than none, and that there are risks involved in any job that each individual should be able to figure out on their own… until the idea of a ‘competent’ bureaucracy is finally abolished, we will find that our workers cannot compete at the low end and thus cede a vital portion of our society to others willing to do hard work for low pay and no overhead. It isn’t ‘just’ the hiring of these people, but the reasons why our own citizens are precluded from such work that matters.
Memo to California’s Gov Brown: Your efforts to take the tax issue to the people via an election is a pathetic attempt to pass the buck. You wanted the job; do it. You created the public unions in the first place. Good luck.
Let me write something astonishing. Andrew Cuomo may become the best governor of New York in my lifetime. He has forced a budget balance without raising taxes. We still have problems, but at least are starting to address them.
There’s certainly no end to my astonishment as I never expected this from Andrew. As always, life is full of surprises.
Detroit-California-PostMod Higher Education, Greece, Portugal, Welfare States on the Road to Bankruptcy—the proof of the pudding is in the eating and these are the prime examples of left-lurching pudding. Not very tasty.
“Jerry Brown cannot hike the income and sales tax much or hire legions of new SEIU employees or up dramatically the salaries of state workers or lower the standards at the UC …”
Wanna bet?
Dr. Hanson,
I cannot tell you how much I get from reading you. It is problematic to “see too much.” In this most recent offering you address a sort of internal malaise, the cure described by you and few others being a reality-based, not pragmatic, value system which even those barely initiated into the classical tradition will recognize. I am one of the barely initiated.
Someday, perhaps, we will come to understand why “forward thinking” is mostly owned by the utopians and not the realists. The old saw about history repeating itself if unstudied is out of date. My conviction is that history will repeat endlessly, whatever our knowledge of it, because humanity’s tipping point is always just on the edge between the reasoning and unreasoning and, therefore, an applied realistic approach to life and its problems is cyclic at best.
phenomenal point
unlike these statists and mentally deranged narcissists that believe in the perfectibility of humanity the truth of the matter is that history will repeat itself forever…
nevertheless, that still doesnt mean we should abandon history and fail to try to protect our civilization because if the statists win then humanity fails– it’s not co2 that will do us in but the noxious fumes from the statist’s delusions that will xrush us if we dont fight them all the way
and, as you suggest, push the dial back for a few more centuries till the next generations get apathetic and sloppy
The enduring wealth of a nation, or a state, is primarily in its people and their culture, not its natural resources. Now that California’s dominant culture is one of “takers” – believing that someone else should pay their way – it is lost until the culture changes.
“Mexifornia”; The conquest of California by the Mexicans, with nary a single shot fired, or any form of surrender. (Although many lives were lost to gang violence and traffic accidents).
Politicians like Brown couldn’t care less of the living conditions from where their winning votes originate. Until the Governors mansion is reduced to a used construction trailer, this trend, nor status shall ever change.
There is no governor’s mansion. Brown refused to live in the one the state built for the previous governor, and finished just as Brown entered office the first time, and they sold it. There hasn’t been one since. Schwarzennegger and his wife talked about buying that house and giving it to the state, but as far as I know, they never actually did it. I doubt Brown would live in it now if they had.
So; All you lucky Mexifornians are paying Browns mortgage? How endearing! I’ll bet my Social Security allowance that he’s got illegals doing his house and lawn work too.
gotta disagree with the viewpoint that these problems are self-correcting. That’s only true if you consider death a “correction”.
People like to believe that things can’t get worse. They can always get worse.
They also like to say “Failure is not an option!”
nonsense. Failure is always an option.
self correcting? where is the money going to come to fix the roads once authority has collapsed, which it already has in the outlying areas? The likelihood is for a 100 year economic collapse in the region, something similar to what happened to Mississippi after 1865.
No one living today will live long enough to see any kind of recovery in California. The prognosis is down, down, down, and then a decades long flatline on the bottom.
As a fifth generation California grandmother, I have seen the best things of this state be reduced to its present quagmire. It is the fault of our legislators, Democrats and Republicans alike who have completely failed us. For our lawmakers to not tend to the budget responsibilities is, in my view, criminal. It is the basic Job Description of our legislators to keep our state and our nation fiscally responsible.
The last election in California was a real stunner for those who are careful with their own pocketbooks. Most of the liberal elites, who make up the state’s voting majority, get their money from grants that come from those awful rich people and capitalistic corporations they so enviously and vehemently hate. And since grants are structured to be completely spent, (and it doesn’t matter what the money is spent on)as long as its gone, or they get nothing the next go-round! Such a policy is nothing short of madness as there is no incentives or recognition for coming in under budget. My developmentally delayed cousin has to spend her state stipend or she loses all funding, so the staff decided she comes to my house for a visit in the van that also brings along numerous staff members to be dropped off at the casino while she visits here. This is MORE than a waste of money. My cousin has little no idea where she is and who she is seeing. So, Governor Brown, those kind of “costs” can be adjusted to be applied to really CARE FOR the most needy in our society if just common sense is applied to the dispersal of precious funds.
Dear Dr. Hanson:
It seems almost certain that Governor Brown will solve this years version of the ” Great California Budget Crisis” through a thumping rise in business taxes and other confiscatory measures. Illinois, much like California politically, just did the same thing. There will be no systemic changes and no effort to change the culture of entitlement that exists in the public sector unions and in other long-established client groups. The deficit will be papered over for the current fiscal year and Mr. Brown will happily announce that “This is the best of all possible worlds.”
Meanwhile the pathologies that you describe with such wrenching detail will continue to fester and expand. When the crash comes, as it will, it will somehow be the Republicans fault.
My dear VDH, this is all self-correcting, if you mean in the same manner as a toddler poking a light socket with a knife is eventually self-correcting.
In both cases, it is extremely unlikely that the mental makeup of the actor(s) will change appreciably without severe consequences or adult intervention.
They are simply having fun exploring things they do not comprehend and are oblivious to the imminent threat their acts are creating for themselves and potentially everyone around them. And what’s more, they don’t care.
If you take the knife away and remove the danger, they will wail, scream, kick, hold their breath and try to turn blue.
Irresponsible adults wish to avoid that ear-piercing scene and either let baby keep the knife only in a different setting, say…with the family puppy. Or, they put a plug over the outlet and hope the baby can’t figure out how to take it off.
Our problem is, we can’t baby-proof our “house” well enough. America is too big and our babies are too quick for us, they will be spraying the RAID can in the cat’s eyes tomorrow before we know it.
This, of course, is all “self-correcting”, if the baby sets the house on fire or is mauled by one of the family pets, but that may be simply too much to hope for…or, for the soft-hearted…against.
So, we apparently wish to hire more and more permanent nannies. We will have so many nanny-watchers that we will have to live outside in the doghouse. And then someone, possibly the head nanny…will compare us to the fleas.
if california is only 25 billion in debt then i am the front runner for the 2012 presidential race
Given the 2012 GOP field, you could very easily be the front runner if you declared.
In which case, maybe CA’s deficit really is “only” $25 billion.
That doesn’t include under-funded state employee pension and insurance obligations.
Not to impune your sources, but a good friend and former California Highway Patrol officer, confides to me that tickets written by the Highway Patrol are paid to the counties they are written in, not to Sacramento. Just saying.
Really? You honestly think that Jerry Brown will accede to common sense limitations? Are you a wagering man? Common sense and the modern Left will never meet.
The push to implement the “diversity” agenda, upon America, is a calculated plot by the left to Balkanize the country. By dividing us, and destroying assimilation, the left can create a people and a country that do not view themselves as a homogenous people, i.e. Americans. The left plays one group against another, manipulating them, not to the benefit of the country, but to the benefit of the politicians. Because to the politicians, it is all about themselves, and their hold on power rather than about what is best for the country. Could we call those politicians, the domestic enemies, they themselves were supposed to protect our freedoms from?
Many of our parents, were immigrants from other countries. They came here with a desire to become Americans. My own Italian parents, came here as children, through Ellis Island in N.Y.. Although, they spoke Italian, they never taught their children that language because, they wanted us to be Americans.
Immigrants need to have the desire to be Americans first, and hyphenated Americans second. And both they, and our government, need to respect the immigration laws on the books.
kjatexas, it is exactly the same in Canada. Exactly. And speaking of Mexicans, I heard just the other day that they are here too. Lining up and milling about just across the border, looking for work, then going back across the border when their work is done. But more to the point, we are a nation divided and torn asunder by ethnic politics. For example, the very first announcement the leader of the Liberal party made after our minority Conservative government fell, was to declare that he would restore the family reunification program that the Conservatives had put a stop to. Now, no one likes to come between a man and his family but in Canada there have been colossal abuses of this program, not to mention it is also a burden on the country because many elderly immigrants can not work and contribute to society and their health is often poor, which puts even more stress on our fragile health care system.
Well said, and my arguement to some of my more liberal friends. Its not that were racists or anti immigrant, just that we recognize that todays immigrants (legal or illegal) may be coming here for the same reasons as the past, but their attitude is vastly different. And we are watching the decay of the civil society, and traditions long held be pushed aside.
“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as ‘bad luck.’
Robert Heinlein
True it is self correcting, but the self correction is going to be pretty ugly. It will make one of those disaster movies, that show LA after the collapse, with nothing but drug dealers left, look pretty tame. Jerry Pournelle wrote a book called Lucifers Hammer that describes many of the things that will happen, with the big difference that this disaster will not be caused by nature, but purely by leftist gov.
Once all the productive CA residents have finally left, even including the rich lefties in Hollywood, SF, and Silicon Valley, who will eventually be looted too, and only parasites are left, it will get pretty ugly. But provided all the parasites finally leave, once the productive host is destroyed, maybe some hardy colonists will return to the empty desolate acres still left, and they may be similar to the hearty souls that settled CA originally. Then, provided these new pioneers are smart enough to have learned their lesson, and not let the lefties get a foothold again, maybe the state can recover.
There is one big thing that could happen to prevent this reality though, a fed bailout. If the dems manage that, then the entire USA becomes the host, and the parasites will drag down the entire country. That must be prevented at all costs. It is already too late to save CA from leftist disaster, but we might still be able to save TX.
Dear SFC_Swede….
I understand completely. Also used to live in NH, and the influx of “Massholes” is ruining the state.
I believe we are at the point where there are too many TWANLOCs (those who are no longer our countrymen).
My suggestion is for each state (or county) to hold a referendum. You would decide to follow either liberal (high taxes, multiculti, and all the other foolishness) or conservative values (small govt, low taxes, unifed culture, native born vs mass immigration).
Once that vote has been taken, you have to live with the consequences for 40 years, or two generations. People with a conservative bent can live in liberal areas, and vice versa as long as state/county agrees (but can be limited in some instances, e.g. no illegals in conservative areas or in cases of limited local job pool). However, there are NO voting rights unless you live in an area that matches your affiliation. People in liberal areas must pay for their chosen form of govt, as must conservative areas. NO redistribution by fedgov.
No break up, no civil war. People have to live with the consequences of their decisions (and boy howdy would I love to watch the Pelosis of the world live with what they have wrought).
Fed gov has only limited constitutional duties (Defense, InterState Commerce), and costs much less.
My California county would be able to throw off the stranglehold of LA and SF.
Dr. Hanson, always loved your insight and comments but I hear your feeling of the same helplessness that I feel. CA is just the iceberg we can see above the waterline. Due to economy and other factors, we have been brought pretty low on the financial situation but I have had many great things in my life and perhaps it’s time to just not expect much. Things have been going down this road for a long time so Obama and the economic situation (that I am not sure on who to blame), it has been speeded up. I see Hispanic people that may not be legal but maybe should be and others that need to go home. I see people that need help and can’t get it and others who feed off the system. As a member of the Tea Party, perhaps we did some good in 2010 but I see some of them getting really nuts on a variety of subjects. They seem to love a Palin, Huckabee type candidate that has no chance of being elected. I am a Romney supporter but I guess it is asking too much to want a candidate that is not as exciting as a Baptist preacher or a Cheerleader, as people they are probably nice people but the country is in serious trouble and we need a serious candidate. I think we all have about had it and not really knowing what to do. Hope you have some answers.
Right, we need a serious candidate, not the guy who enacted Romneycare.
We don’t need someone who has one foot in each camp, a “compromiser”. Continuously under someone like Obama it would take 15 years to achieve a socialist form of government. Under someone like Romney it would just take longer. When the Republicans compromise they always give something away.
“Thank you for leaving California. If you are the last native departing, please turn off the lights on your way out…”
That we have achieved this end, all during my brief lifetime.
Depending on the time and nature of the collapse, this could well be self correcting. If it comes soon and in the form of a chain reaction of defaults and bankruptcies, many of the parasites will flee and a new class of entrepreneurs will swoop in and purchase land, buildings and equipment at pennies on the dollar.
If there is a decent into social chaos (looking at how union thugs behave in WI that is an equally likely prospect in CA)then there will be a long period where people will abandon California and allow it to lie fallow as various remaining gangs try to seize and horde whatever wealth and resources remain. (By lucky coincidence, the first part of Atlas Shrugged is being released as a movie soon. You can get a cinematic foretaste for yourself!). There will be a longer term correction, but more unpleasant and very drawn out. California in that condition will resemble one of the third world nations Robert D Kaplan writes about.
“We were given paradise and we managed to f**k it all up.”
Is this Robert Di Niro’s lament in Casino, or the liberal-lefts’ lament about California?
And what a paradise it was. I came here out of college in the late 60′s and lived the good life at the beach. It was a time when even someone earning as little as $5,000/yr could realize the California dream. Yeah, we f**ked it up big time.
While this is a well written piece, I don’t know why we should care. California has made its own bed and now needs to lie down in it. I suggest that we block their area codes like any other terrorist part of the world. California has been forcing its will on the rest of the country for far too long.!
“… I don’t know why we should care.”
Because it is highly likely that the federal government will use our (and our descendants’) tax dollars to bail out California, the state government that’s “too big to fail.”
Why we should care is because we have a federal government trying to turn the whole United States into California.
I live in the last bastion of CAL common sense: Orange County. By shear luck, my Father legally emigrated here in the early 60′s. He knew that education would was a way to better ourselves, so he really pushed education. His brother’s likewise ended up in OC. My mother’s family member eventually landed in LA County, and the difference is night and day.
We worked since 16 and sacrificed and either went to university, or worked up the ladder. Even when his union in 74 called a strike, my dad did not take the unemployment money, and instead worked in the fields to make money, and actually made more than then the field workers that were there. In OC, we have 1 MBA, 2 college grads, a hospital director, three small business owners, an HR director and more.
Our LA relatives are welfare dependent, lazy, dumb, in other words, typical slugs. They work crappy jobs, bitch about their low salaries, yet decry Republicans as keeping them down, yet drive brand new SUV’s, have ghettos parties all the time, have cable and cell phone and video games. When one of the many out of wedlock kids turns 18, they start crying about the cost of community college… Yet, if they cut back the weekend cases of beer, cable and cell phones alone, they could afford to pay for it, but won’t make the sacrifice.
The only difference I can see is the geography. We grew up in, that was then, majority Anglo schools. The LA crowd, typical Chicano oppression based education.
Sadly, OC has Santa Ana and Anaheim. And their influence is slowly spreading to the rest of the county. In about 20 years, OC will be just like LA. Even now, the stores and malls are starting to succumb to the Illegal Alien Nation.
I remember knowing some illegals when I was young, they were always single young men that worked, saved money and returned home. Now, I run into entire families, from babies to teens and mothers, all on the dole, intent on staying and bilking the system, and say as much out loud. It’s a different mindset.
Well, perhaps not the last bastion. I live in Placer County (moved here from Orange County years ago). We, of course, have taken some big hits just like everywhere else, but we’re managing very well. Our real estate values are holding their own, our welfare rolls are still relatively small and as yet, knock wood, we haven’t had the need for a county sales tax. We do have one of the most conservative electorates in the state (and are represented by one of the most conservative Congressmen in the country), but I’m sure many would scoff at the idea that conservatism has anything whatsoever to do with our relative prosperity.
Our neighbor Sacramento County is in dire straits just like LA County. They look longingly across the county line, licking their bloody chops, and proposing yet again a new law that would require counties to put their revenue in a state pool to be redistributed per capita and on the basis of “need.”
Perhaps when OC goes the way of LA (and, like you, I believe it will eventually), you’ll consider joining us up here.
i live in oc too but i beg to differ
oc has proudly elected Barbara Boxer version 4.0 aka lorena sanchez (or was it loretta– they are two sisters much like the witches in oz)
one problem with the california electorate is the very environment we find so intoxicating in california: the weather
for example, i might use the heater of our home a couple nights a year (my wife gets chilly)
and i use the air conditioner just as little (live in hb where the marine layer keeps even the summer scorchers moderate): our state’s climate turns everyone into a bunch of spolied softies that whine when it hovers near 60 degrees or approaches 85 degrees— as it is, wimps like us have no chance of fighting the progressive suffocation
ironically, our country’s horrible energy policies get their life from california— the very place where it is not really felt
(the same lefties that flee the east because it is too cold or too hot and settle here)
but the biggest problem with california is its apathy
i would guess at least 60-70% of the population is not involved and the ones that are seem ripe for the statist propoganda machine as our public schools are designed to create the dunderheads that have little resistance to the lefty siren songs
Yup, the areas she represents are highly hispanic and they vote blindly for her because she is hispanic. She as much said so in the last election, saying her vietnamese competitor was trying to steal he hispanic seat.
Yes, he sole reason for staying in Cali is the weather.
I sit in amazement at how far illegals have reached the rest of the country. in 80′s, no one really noticed since it was a Cal problem. Now, almost every state has pro-illegal groups championing their rights in ____ (enter state).
Here’s an article about Costa Mesa which will “consider” outlawing garage apartments. http://www.ocregister.com/news/apartment-295821-garages-garage.html
Instead of enforcing the code, they are going to ban garages all together! I think you and I and VDH can guess why they don’t enforce the codes in place.
Hey Victor, come down and check out Huntington Park, Southgate, Bell, Bell Gardens, Maywood, Cudahy, Walnut Park & the east side of South L.A.
What a load of angst in the comments! I can’t believe that anyone would wish for 35 million human beings to slide into the ocean or for fellow citizens to endure “cleansing” anarchy and gang violence. I guess there is a lot of mental illness out there.
Californians have been complaining about unfettered immigration since the mid 1980s, way before the rest of the country noticed. Now that the rest of you finally figured out the US was being invaded, we have reached critical mass here.
Unless you come from one of the ten wealthiest states, don’t complain about our budget. California taxpayers have been subsidizing dirt poor red states for decades. Send us back the billions you took, and then complain.
California is the seventh or eighth largest economy in the world, and is just too big to fail. Despite a creaky state constitution, look for a balanced – sort of – budget this summer.
What’s this “send back the billions you took” crap? If those of us who live in “dirt-poor red states” have taken anything from California then we have paid for it in cold hard cash. And let’s not forget that several of those “dirt-poor red states” provide the water that keeps most of Southern California from being a wasteland. And let’s also not forget the billions that have recently been going in to California from the rest of us due to the well-placed trough-feeders representing the state in the Senate and House of Representaitves.
As to your contention that the state is “too big to fail” then I have news for you. ANYTHING can fail these days and the Golden state is no exception. You guys will probably actually get a “balanced budget” for 2011 and it will contain every smoke-and-mirrors trick in the book except real fiscal reform. Come January 1, 2012 you are going to be right back in the same hole again. Eventually all of the tricks are going to be played out. My worry is that when California finally does have to declare bankruptcy it’s going to take a lot of the rest of us down too. Good luck to you!
You are the third poster I am replying to without changing my message, as follows:
“The more the Feds returned to California, the more would get spent. The only difference – the “needy’, the illegals, the unions, the greens, the politicians would all be richer, and you would still be $25 billion in debt. How would this happen? Easy….the voters are idiots, would demand more and would continue electing the same politicians who got them in this mess.”
Do you actually need to have the treachery of ‘too big to fail’ spelled out for you!? Did you notice that unchecked financial corporations that took this approach almost caused the world’s financial system to collapse!?
That the state is too big to fail is an invalid argument with which to form policy, depend on solutions, or handle serious state problems in any manner.
Do you get the implications of ‘to big to fail’!?
Your comment is shocking.
and is just too big to fail
You were making some sense until you tossed that boneheaded remark in.
Too late for you to take it back.
Tom, I hope you’re right. Though Moonbeam and the 3 powerful(ly stupid) geriatric women who ATTEMPT to pass themselves off as 40-something ‘sex panthers’.. best of luck my friend.
“Mental Illness”? Y’all have elevated that personality disorder to celebrity status; How else would Brown, or anyone like him get elected? And then there’s Hollywood…………!
Without even doing a data search, I’m betting ‘Mexifornia’ has more psychiatrists and psychologists, per capita, than any other state.
Wow, I never realized California has carried the whole United States. It’s a wonder the rest of the country can help it go from 7th or 8th largest economy clear up the first in the world. Maybe we did good with all those billions you gave to the rest of us. :-)
Is Japan smaller than Ca. in land and resources? They are the #3 economy, aren’t they? How about we give Mexico California and talk Japan into taking your place?
I realize most of the liberal squeaks will most likely be scurrying up north but that is another analogy for another day.
Tom, the problem with your argument about “subsidization” is that those “red” states have large areas under the control of the US federal government- federal lands, military bases and the like. It is unfair to a state to declare something like a firing range as some sort of “subsidy”, but if you would like to have a nuclear testing facility in your county, it could and should be done. That would alleviate the unfairness, and every round expended would count towards federal funding support of your state. How about a RADAR range? You wouldn’t need your microwave, you could just put your food up on the roof for quick cooking. Maybe HAARP? It’d add a festive appearance to the night sky all aglow.
No one outside of California is “complaining” about your budget, they are either alarmed that their money will be thrown down a hole and set afire in your state, or they are speaking in exasperation but with genuine concern for your well-being.
PS- there is no such thing as “too big to fail”.
“No one outside of California is “complaining” about your budget, they are either alarmed that their money will be thrown down a hole and set afire in your state, or they are speaking in exasperation but with genuine concern for your well-being”
Cheers Mate…my thoughts said better through you
Thanks for all the well-considered comments on my comment.
Too big to fail? Maybe not, but there is an incredible amount of wealth here.
I still think those who want California to fall into the ocean are mentally defective. California has thousands of living WWII and Korea vets, and uncounted active duty. Not to mention lots of ordinary people JUST LIKE the rest of the country.
Maybe if the Japanese home islands become uninhabitable, we can invite them to settle in California. That would turn things around pretty fast.
“Too big to fail” should read “Too big”.
Emergency rooms are indeed a trip down the proverbial rabbit hole. The state of humanity in the waiting rooms makes you want build a cabin in the woods and never come out.
See the redwoods while you can.When California becomes Mexifornia all those standing potential riches are going the way of the Dodo.
Dr. Hanson,
I just got back from Shanghai, China last night. Two thoughts crossed my mind while reading your article.
1) In 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake hit the Bay Area, damaging the eastern span of the Bay Bridge. As a result, the state decided to replace that half of the bridge. Construction is scheduled to completed at the end of 2013. This equals 1/4 of a century to build 1/2 of a bridge, on a site that was already approved for a bridge.
As of the early 1990′s, the only way to cross the Huangpu river from the Puxi to Pudong sides of Shanghai (San Francisco’s sister city) was by ferry. Since then, they have built about a half dozen bridges and a half dozen tunnels, as well as countless skyscrapers of up to 100 floors.
In less time then it takes us to build half of a bridge, they have built a city that makes New York look provincial. It is simply amazing to see. This city in “communist” China makes us look like a joke.
By the way, I was chatting with a guy at an expat bar the other night. Turns out that he and a bunch of other employees of Caltrans are doing the work on Shanghai’s bridges. They have to leave our country for their skills to actually be utilized.
2) On the downside, like much of the world, corruption in China is rampent. Hopefully that will eventually subside, but 5000 years of a culture has a tendency to resist rapid change. Some people may disregard this as racist, but most traditionally caucasian countries are included in my broad brush. The people who level that charge need to get out of the protective bubble of their cruise ship tour groups.
California is different. We do not have 5000 years of ingrained culture. For all of our faults, Americans are generally very honest people. I think that many of us take this for granted. I personally love the opportunities presented by cultural diversity. However, it does bring some potential risks. This is particularly dangerous in a state that is so heavily dependent on secure intellectual property.
When immigration is at a volume that can be assimilated, corruption and bad business ethics can be controled. Unregulated immigration risks overwhelming our ability to filter out bad practices.
I blame California’s enormous liberal beaurocracy for both points above. Labor regulations, CARB, unions, litigation, environmental impact, zoning requirements, ACLU, etc., have at the same time both gummed up our economic engine and opened the floodgates to unimpeded immigration, with it’s potential long-term pitfalls.
One wonders whether the East Bay Bridge will be ever be finished before the next “Big One” hits.
Greece will bail Cali out.
… or Portugal
Always love this mans writing
I disagree with your optimistic final conclusion. I believe Moonbeam and his supermajority of liberal lawmakers will do whatever they damn well please to the chorus of hip-hip-hooray of the voters who overwhelmingly hate what businesses still remain in the state and aren’t unionized up the wazoo.
Great piece, Dr. Hanson.
‘The Razor’s Edge’ is my favorite W. Somerset Maugham book.
And what drove these changes Victor? They didn’t happen by accident. Here’s a hint, all these changes occurred just about the time all you Boomers started setting policy.
I appreciate your essays, sad as they are, because they brilliantly expose the epic failure of socialism. The similarity between California today and the failing countries in Europe are striking. The answer is logically simple, but politically impossible: eliminate welfare and minimize government employment. The laws of economics always doom Utopias where everyone gets everything; there are never enough resources for such a system to work in the long run. When the money finally runs out, and it will, the freeloaders will either become productive citizens or leave. California is leading the nation, but not by much, as anyone who reads the U.S. Treasury reports of income and expenditure knows.
Texas is under direct assault by the leftist media because there is very little welfare due to low taxation. However, under Obamacare, over 50% of Texans will be eligible for Medicaid, which will destroy Texas fiscally. Every time our governor recommends ways to save money, he is instantly demonized by the press, and many people aren’t smart enough to look up the facts (a click away on the internet). When he suggested we might have to drop out of Medicaid, the screams of ‘murderer of old people and poor children’ could be heard from El Paso to Texarkana. When he recommended a replacement for the circa-1950′s I35 (main Mexican NAFTA route for trucks) that would use private money, not taxes, due to a tollway for an extended period of years, the media cried ‘abuse of imminent domain’, but of course they are okay with using tax money for the same purpose. As a result, I35 is jam-packed 24/7 from Oklahoma to San Antonio.
Now that the Marxists and New Democrats [one in the same] have ruined California they are now trying the same thing on the whole of the United States. All of the elected Democrats from California voted against water reclamation for farming, no new dams, not one voted for the farming in the Central Valley that just a decade ago was the largest employer and biggest taxpayer in the State. Now you have ObamaVilles just like HooverVilles in the depression days of the 1930′s but thats the plan, make former workers dependent on the State and garner the vote. As much as the Marxist say’s that isn’t the plan you know that it’s Obama and Piven who is putting it into play for political takeover. Its so bad in what was once the most verdant agricultural land in the world that even the illegals can’t find work, they are living like they did in Mexico, in cars and tents, under over passes and hovels. California is the land of the home grown Marxist and they will do the same for your State if giving a chance; don’t give them a chance, you’ll be sorry if you do.
The sad thing is, once Facebook goes IPO, at a $100B valuation, that alone will generate enough tax revenue for CA to survive another 3-5 years, until the next big IPO.
Google saved CA the same way in 2004.
So partly by accident, CA does indeed survive as long as Silicon Valley produces one megasuccess every few years. The 1000 or so employees/investors/bankers/lawyers who hit the jackpot from the big IPO pay enough taxes to keep the whole state on life support..
Sad but true. Rarely have so many been propped up by so few….
Here is the solution that would work :
When CA defaults, the Federal Government gives CA a bailout under the following strict conditions :
1) The other 49 states get to rewrite the CA constitution with CA residents getting no say. The Tea Party can thus make CA a laboratory of free-market small government society.
2) CA’s debt is restructured.
3) CA is barred from voting in national elections for 4 years.
a) This moves the rest of the country to the right as well, as CA’s leftist voters are not part of the equation.
b) This prevents them from voting themselves more concessions from DC.
4) After this 4-year restructuring, CA is admitted back to full voting rights.
The Homocrats will fight this to the death, of course. But I think the voters of the other 49 states should require these strict conditions if CA wants a bailout. Without CA voters, the rest of the 49 states would form a solidly right-wing electorate.
Homocrats! classic.. If you don’t mind, I think I’ll borrow that. So fitting.
One problem: Do you really want Vermont, Massachusetts, Illinois, and other liberal bastions anywhere near a budget-writing mechanism?
End all legal immigration and kick out the illegals. Tell your representatives you won’t vote for them without that at the top of the list.
I was thinking today with CA leading the country in everything wrong with the USA, plus the CFR controlled government arming terrorists who wish Israel dead, there could be another major earthquake, and tsunami that takes most of the land mass that is CA.
It’s not like America has not earned it. We see the worst drought in West Texas, and Oklahoma right now since the depression, plus unusual storms for so early in the season for the mid west. This pattern appears to be getting worse to me these past few years.
Maybe, I am wrong.
Seems a tad cynical. Every generation pines for the days of yore as they grow older, the young don’t have that baggage so they get on with it. The population has exploded all over the planet not just in California. The symptoms here are similar in many other states. Where will you go? We berate the illegals but fortunately they are more in tune with the Pope than Jihad. I don’t get the same sense of despair north of Scaramento. Chico and Redding have little in common with Fresno and Bakersfield. Sure I’d like to live in the cooler climes by the ocean but the trade off is unrelenting traffic and crowds thanks to the likes of David Packard, Steve Jobs and Zuckerberg. (ask washingtonians what they think of Bill Gates). It feels good to blame it on them:) But yes indeed, we are spoiled rotten by our lavish wasteful lifestyles and I too fear it’s all going to come crashing down on our heads at some point. So if I end up picking sh@t with the chickens, I’d rather it be in California than?
I just cannot see the feds being able to bail out California.
Why should the republicans agree to this? They will lose California in 2012 anyway.
By 2012 summer there should be massive demonstrations in cities in CA as they find out about all the cutbacks. Unions and every leftist group ever invented will be in the streets. If we had almost riots in quiet little Madison WI, what kind of chaos will occur in CA, the capital of civil unrest?
It will be good for the nation to see. Sad, but good.
You talk about CA as if it’s a foreign country. There are still a lot of conservative Californians doing their best to fight the good fight.
Ah, California… you voted for ‘progressive socialism’ and environmental fetishism, and now you got it.
I look forward to watching as roving gangs fight to the death for the last few gallons of gasoline. Welcome to Thunderdome!
What Jerry Brown can, and almost certainly will, do, with the help of the Democrat-controlled Legislature, is eliminate Proposition 13, and raise property taxes by two or three times. That will be the final nail in the coffin for this once-great state.
And to all of you people who have posted here wishing ill on even the good conservative Calfornians (the ones who have fought the good battle and who have done the Lord’s work of constantly rebuilding the best they can the ramparts of conservativism on the West Coast) I must remind all of you that it was Californians who invented almost all of the technology that you are using at this moment to read and to make these rotten postings; the very technology that is just about the ONLY worthwhile thing that the Unikted Staes of America produces and exports that the rest of the world wants. Rest assured the pox that you scorn will come your way soon because you are complacent.
As a Bostonian that appreciates Western Civilization, Mike, I hear you. I LOVE California and wish you all the best
I live in the Central Valley, frequently drive the length of SR-99, and can attest to everything Professor Hanson says. The Valley has become some kind of Mexican-American Appalachia. The poverty and the ironic juxtaposition of lack of or uneven regulation in one of the most heavily regulated places in the world is ironic. Perhaps I have a very slightly different take than that of VDH: I think California’s liberal leadership is completely focused on the coastal regions (i.e. the Bay Area or the LA Basin) and could give a care about the interior netherland — either the Central Valley or the Inland Empire. Conveniently, those places don’t generally vote for the progressives so we wither on the vine out here.
Personally, I think the first action taken by a Republican Congress and Republican President in Jan 2013 should be to divide California up into three states, putting all of the liberals possible into just one of the three.
I get sick of writing off 15% of the electoral votes in every election.
Then let’s see how the liberals perform relative to the Conservatives/Independents.
Oh, and I don’t think Ryan’s Budget has a line item in it for bailing out California. That ship has sailed. The only question is whether 15% of the U.S. population sinks or just 5%, as would be the case if we divided the state.
There was a vote sometime in the 1850′s (or early 60′s) to divide the state – it passed. Governor Douglas (I believe that was his name) refused to sign it because of the Civil War – he was a Unionist (although a democrat) and believed the nation should remain whole. It was under his watch that the California 100 and 500 were sent to Massachusetts to fill their billets for the Union Army.
better yet, I propose that all of the Republicans left in the state move to Washington and Oregon, flipping those states red. Then, after California implodes from its crapitude, they move back to pick up the pieces.
Yeah,
But what do I do with my $800K home that will be worth about $200K after it all collapses?
We’ll living in San Diego for 4 years was a culture shock for this Southern raised Girl, It surely did not look anything like what I grew up in. I had the pleasure of traveling up to Burney California (namesake of Great Great Grandfather) and one thing I noticed right away was the two different California’s. The population were reversed in race and culture, along with liberal/Conservative bends. It seemed to me the differnece was so great how could this be the same State. I believe California should be split into two States, Also the illegal immigrant’s should be sent home immediatly to re-apply legally. We have So many dinamics going on in this State I do not see how it survives much longer, The Whites who have not left have moved as far north as they can, and they pay exordient taxes to barely help with the social services to those who are not here legally, What happens when they leave? What happens when Hispanic make the majority of the entire State and vote to make California a Hispanic speaking State due to the refusal to integrate, They will not want to become part of Mexico, That’s for sure. They will want to continue to recieve the liberal giveaways the USA Governemnt offers at this time, problem is we are now having to pay the piper and trim the fat, It will be interesteing to see how California changes over the next ten years, At one time Anglo’s outnumberd other races in California 8-1 in the early 1900′s. It has slowley changed it’s identity and Mayor’s of Anglo heritage like that of San Fransico chase the Mexican Vote by being for illegal immigration and handouts, this is all coming to an end So I will be watching to see how it play’s out.
When the Mexican takeover becomes complete it will be interesting to see how things shake out. Will the new California be more like Mexico, corrupt and highly divided between those who are rich and those who are poor. Or will Nuevo California actually practice some of that culturally conservative Mexican upbringing we keep hearing about and enforce border control on the southern border much like Mexico does on it’s own and reject the white man’s liberal dogma. Or will Nuevo California continue the liberal tax and spend into oblivion policies.
My guess is with so many uneducated people it will be a cross between the 1st and the latter with all the blame going to people who actually made California great. But in a hundred years who knows, things can change and improvements can be made, be an optimist. Of course Mexico has been independant since 1821, but it still doesn’t look a day over 1822 in many places.
Like a plague of locusts, they will strip the wealth from the land. They will consume all the vegetation. Food will become scarce and money will cease to circulate.
After a time, the locusts will leave the land, as locusts do after they have finished feeding. However, in the time they rested there, the locusts will have replenished themselves with new larvae.
I could write a 1000 words about all of this. However, the short of it is that after living in California for 50 years and raising a family here, I’m pulling up stakes and leaving as soon as I can manage the logistics. The final straw was when 60% of voting Californian’s re-elected Jerry Brown to a third term as Governor. With the facts known and the consequences known, the majority of Californian’s voted for more of the same 35 years.
California may struggle along far longer than most expect due to it’s natural wealth, diverse population, and sheer energy that so many people can bring to one state. However, when the majority of Californians voted for less energy and other resource development, fewer jobs as the river of companies exiting the state becomes a torrent, more regulation, more illegal alien immigration, higher confiscatory taxes – i.e. more of the liberal religion across the board, all hope for California is lost. Whether the state withers and dies slowly or crashes, the end progressive-modernism in California is as certain as the effect of gravity.
I was looking for out of state opportunities one day after the last November election, and I was gone by Thanksgiving. I’m just trying to liquidate my California property while it still has some value, and building a new home in the Southeast. It’s a heck of a different world – a much saner world, outside of California.
I’ll retrench, and fight the good fight from behind other skirmish lines where state leaders are sane and patriotic, where they represent the people’s interests and not the elites, and value democratic freedom over the “safety” of a state-managed life.
Oh, and by the way, I got a hoot out of Professor Hanson’s discussion regarding traffic-ticket-oppression. After 35 years without a ticket, I got two tickets in Oceanside, California about three weeks apart. One was from a known speed trap (where I should have known better), and another was at a stop sign in my residential neighborhood at 10:00 pm at night. I was traveling slower than the officer cited me for in the first case and I was not “rolling the stop sign” as I was cited for in the second. My daughter and I looked up San Diego County records and found over a 1,000 tickets issued in less than 12 months for similar offenses on local residential streets (i.e. envision a police car camped in front of your home) within the square mile around my home. The OPD are like sharks in the water citing everyone in sight. A casual survey of my neighborhood showed that other neighbors had had the same misfortune as I did, i.e. a slew of recent tickets after none for decades.
Bottom line: Oceanside has a new, muscular Police, Fire, and EMT union which owns the Mayor and city council (i.e. $500k in outside union cash for one candidate in the last election). At least one-third of Oceanside Police offers make over $100,000 per year, and all have Cadillac pension plans that are both unfunded and unaffordable. They need money and want yours now. I came back this weekend to find Oceanside installing red light cameras on seemingly every major intersection in the city. I guess they just need more ticket revenue that the union led thugs can generate with a paper and pencil.
This is the future of the liberal but broke state of California. Fewer services, higher costs, more government control and oppression, unlimited junk-rated debt, much poorer medical care and education for all, and all done in behalf of “the people”.
I’m out of California by the end of summer. I just need to con a public union employee into buying my house (i.e. the people with jobs, the ones who can afford a couple of houses, a boat, 30 days a year vacations plus comp time, and retirement by age 45 or 50).
Well heck. I don’t know Old Salt, we hear you but what do you expect to find in the Southeast? You might be in for a whole bunch of shocks. I can’t count the number of people who made similar statements only to come crawling back to an even more unaffordable California. No disrespect. I wish you the best of luck. I hope you find what you seek.
Otherwise as far as I know illegals are everywhere in this country thanks to federal policy not California’s. You are not going to run away from cheap labor. How can you begrudge those who come here working very hard at the low paying jobs your kids won’t take? Why aren’t those kids studying their hearts out in the UC’s and CSU’s to get a global edge in Math and Science? That’s the bill of goods we were sold.
I hear you Brother! Ex-pat Californian living on the Mid Atlantic coast. Love it here! Common sense and sanity are sooooo nice and soothing to be around!
California the Golden state, Obama & the Democrats model for American future, is fast becoming the poster child for an bankrupt third world State!
An unholy alliance of Socialist Democrat politicians, Unions, and Illegal Aliens supporters are feasting at the trough of tax payers paid benefits while taxing & regulating business and the tax paying public into poverty.
The pandering of Left Wing Democrat Politicians to their constituency of Welfare leeches, Illegal Aliens Parasites, Public Unions and Left Wing American hater,s are driving business and citizens to other states & countries, while leaving the parasites & welfare leeches in an increasing bankrupt, crime ridden, dysfunctional state!
For years California has ignored economics 101 by rewarding Public employee with wages and benefits that far exceed any in the private sector or tax payers ability to pay, to buy their votes, while importing poverty Criminals and uneducated parasites from Mexico, which increased Medical, Welfare, Crime, Prison, etc. & adding a estimated 22 billion per year to Calif. State expense to provide for the invading horde of Illegal Aliens while exporting business and educated working tax payers.
Like all Socialist & Marxist States the results have been a astronomical increase in social welfare, schooling, prison cost etc. and a lowing of Living standards, Education standards, Tax receipts & finally a looming Bankruptcy.
The policies of Obama and Wash. DC Democrats are intent on following Calif. policies and are rewarding the Unions, Lazy, Corrupt, Criminal, Greedy and Stupid while punishing the tax paying, Law abiding citizens that pulling the cart and carrying the load.
Amnesty & Citizenship as a reward for their invasion of the USA, will result in the rest of the USA turned into a Spanish speaking third world slum, modeled on Mexico and follow California into a polluted, over populated, Spanish speaking third world Nation of Crime, Corruption, Poverty, Cruelly & Misery!
This will result in a population depending on Welfare and the Democrat party, thus assuring the lock on power for the Socialist Democrat party of the United States of Mexico!
California is a textbook example of how a once thriving economy can be slowly laid waste be decades of boneheaded “feel good” liberal policies. Sadly, it is the fate that awaits our entire nation eventually if we are stupid enough to keep sending liberals back to Washington year in and year out.
For my part, I moved away from California and back to Texas in 2009, a state where common sense still prevails.
The only chance for CA is a good case of the plague or a good sized meteor strike right in the middle of SF. But I hope it happens when Congress isn’t in session so it gets Pelosi, Boxer, Fienstien, Waters and the rest.
You hit the nail on the head. I was born and raised in Ca. and painfully left almost 2 years ago after the crippling taxes and chocking regulations became to much. Now I am in a state where things are more relaxed and dare I say more free, where I can actually afford my house and my car registration went from $500 /yr to $28! I still very much miss CA but not of what it has become!
The best thing I ever did was get out.
1 Nov 2010
Folks,
Obama’s GAME (Great American Marxist Experiment) is over, a failure. Marxism goes against the basic human instincts that freedom is a natural, God-given right, that what you make (or earn) is yours to keep, that family, not government, is the basic social unit. Democrats have historically been the party to raise taxes and increase the size of government, but Obama, Reid, and Pelosi have taken these mistaken policies to the extreme. Republicans, Independents, and Tea Party members will now be forever vigilant of the Left and we will vote.
Tom Johnson, Largo, Florida
PS 19 Jan 2011
Obamacare is illegal. The original, very short, Commerce Clause is too loosely interpreted. Obamacare will NOT reduce total US health care costs by bringing an additional 30-50,000,000 people into the health care system, especially without tort reform. Democrats do NOT believe in the US Constitution as the supreme law of the land.
1. Federal health care is not one of the enumerated powers in the US Constitution, therefore, Obamacare is illegal. This only matters if you believe that the USA is a nation of laws and that the US Constitution is the supreme law of the land. It is clear that Democrats do NOT believe in the US Constitution. Obama supposedly taught US Constitutional law for 12 years, so he must understand the US Constitution. Since health care, as he signed it into law, is illegal, the only conclusion left is that Obama, and the Democrats who voted for health care, do not believe in the US Constitution.
2. The commerce clause was never intended to have such broad scope. These powers have been made up by the Democrats out of thin air.
PS 29 Jan 2011
Obama’s soaring rhetoric has resulted in soaring deficits, soaring gov’t spending, soaring regulations, and soaring unemployment.
PS 08 April 2011
US Federal GDP for 2010: $14,500,000,000,000 (approximately – order of magnitude)
US Federal Debt (forever): $14,266,000,000,000 (approximately – order of magnitude)
PS 11 April 2011
Gold price per ounce 12 April 2011: $1450
Gold price per ounce 01 Oct 2009: $1000
In only 18 months, Obama administration caused increase of $450 = 45% future inflation.
Ex-Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke said, “Inflation will take 12 quarters to enter economy.”
I recently visited friends who are long-time residents of Santa Barbara. They LIKE what California has become! The super-wealthy flatten the hilltops overlooking the ocean to build palacial compounds while the mere commoners sit in their 1920′s and 1930′s housing stock hoping for a miracle. Yet, they snear at the white farmers in the Central Valley and snear at the rubes living in ‘flyover country’ who do not benefit from the elitist culture of California. They are the voters. They are getting what they have voted for.
Dr. Hanson, I generally love your writing and agree with most of what you have said on the topic of California’s decline. But the tone and message of this article reminds me most of my 90 year-old grandmother yelling about how “they let the coloreds go wherever they want now!” back in the 90s. I live in Laredo, and believe my I know from culture clashes and world views blended by the force of changing numbers. But complaining about “they get to throw their trash with impunity while I don’t get the ‘gentlemen’s five miles over’ allowance from the cops anymore” sounds like sour grapes. I agree with you that in the last election CA put 5 rounds in the chamber before starting a game of Russian Roulette and they are pulling the trigger as fast as they can. And I do believe that somehow, somewhere, I will be bailing out what is left of CA. Having family in the Bay Area, I can see the tragedy unfolding and how it will affect everyone. Just please be careful in your righteous takedowns of filthy politicians in cahoots with powerful union masters and environmentalists, you don’t come off like a crotchety old man who doesn’t like the changing skin tones and kitchen smells of his new neighbors.
McKeats, as a VDH reader, I am neither an old man nor am I crotchety, but like VDH, I also don’t get “get to throw (my) trash with impunity while I don’t get the ‘gentlemen’s five miles over’ allowance from the cops anymore.” My car was creamed by an illegal alien last year; I was almost killed.
She fled the scene of the accident. An hour later, as the attending cop and I were about to leave, the cause of the accident showed back up and spoke to the cop. She had no license, no registration, no insurance, and out-of-state expired plates. After explaining the above situation to me, the white male cop added: “Mister, the lady told me she is an illegal; if you pursue this, she could get deported and it could break up her family?” He let her go without citing her, and I was left with higher insurance rates and a new-car payment that has destroyed my monthly budget.
Perhaps McKeats, if this had happpened to you, you’d appear crotchety too. As a white man, I would have instantly been cited, perhaps arrested for leaving the scene of an acccident. Her skin color clearly meant something to the officer; not me. That is racism. That is what VDH means. I might add that the officer is no doubt a union member with a generous salary and generous retirement package. The cop was just practicing good public relations by protecting this situation by helping out a fellow Democrat constituent.
You should have called 911 and demanded another cop be sent to the scene. That’s effin insane.
Mceats, I can assure you that, outside of moonbeam land, there is a substantial plurality that do not like the changing skin tones and kitchen smells of their new neighbors at all. Neither do they like the midnight mariachi music, the wrecks in the yards, the 3-families per home, the drunken driving and the youth gangs. They don’t like the destroyed schools, the bankrupted hospitals, the rampant abuse of welfare. The crime and the grime.
And why should they? Why the hell should they? To spare your exquisite sensibilities?
These are INVADERS with no claims whatsoever.
I can attest that the invaders have also taken over Phoenix, where I lived for awhile. There are some neighborhoods there in which the billboards advertise the Mexican soccer team drinking beer (in Spanish, of course). Don’t expect to hear English on the street there. We have already lost our country. The only question is whether our grandchildren will speak Spanish, Arabic, or Mandarin.
Well at least Arizona (and Texas) has a chance. A gritty posse of white men with guns can still save your states, once you get rid of the traitors in charge (shoot or hang) and seccede. At least there are a few white men with balls in Arizona. When the economy crashes……
I have no hope for the moonbat state.
California’s problems are nothing a good earthquake couldn’t solve. Drop the sliver of blue coastal zone into the Pacific Trench and the rest of the state will do just fine.
Calif isnt the only state with rural trash, many non english speakers, or poor infrastructure as issues. The prob with Ca is that 1/10 of all americans ( legal or not) call it home. In q state with 30% of its area designated a desert – its simply too many people.
CA needs to find a way to pursue succession – and to come up with innovative means to deal with it’s population density. Immigration curbs, relocation allowances, taxation increases/decreases for building in certian areas, even relaxing enviromental regs for business develpoment in selected areas. And the list goes on. Dream world perhaps, but 1/10 is a big hurdle to try and overcome.
1/10? Try one-eighth (37 million out of 311 million U.S. residents).
The county used to charge a nominal fee for a pickup load of trash at the dump and it didn’t matter much what you dumped. Now they charge big bucks for a load of miscellaneous trash and $5 each to dump tires. And there are similar big fees for appliances. The idiots have created an incentive to dump illegally. Who’s going to pay a wad of cash to get rid of trash when they can dump it in a nearby ravine for free? Here’s the price in Placer County.
Description Pricing
General Refuse $68.00/ton
$12.00/yard
Greenwaste* $35.00/ton
$6.00/yard
Wood Waste** $25.00/ton
$6.00/yard
Inert Materials*** $15.00/ton
Construction and Demolition Waste $46.00/ton
Appliances
Refrigerated Appliances (Includes air conditioners, water coolers, refrigerators, & freezers) $27.00/each
Other Appliances (Includes microwaves, water heaters $4.00 ea)
Just as the CA central valley has been swamped, my area to the east is under attack.
People think deserts and mountains are useless wastelands, but we have minerals, agriculture, space, and WATER. Los Angeles took the Owens Valley water years ago, but now they are after any creek or basin that the Sierra flows into. The cities want our space and sun for solar panels and wind farms. Don’t ask me where they think crops are going to come from, with the space and water gone…
California does have conservatives. But we are being swarmed under. When my elderly mother passes on, I’m out of here.
The Invasion of this Nation continues. The Colonization of Calif. is nearly complete! They are on their last legs and grasping for breath as the Plague of Third World Parasites enter the final stages of turning them into another Third World Slum.
A number of other States are reaching critical mess and with Amnesty, a prolific breeding rate, and Chain immigration the Colonization of this Nation will be complete as the USA will becomes a Mexico North Slum and just another great Nation on the scrape heap of history!
The only way to avoid this fate is to abide by our Constitution against Invasion & enforce our immigration Laws!
That means this Nation must be governed by what is in the best interest of American Citizens and the future of this Nation. Playing Godfather to the world and as a welfare state and dumping ground for other Nations Uneducated parasites & criminals will destroy this Nation, as we are slowly but surely transformed into the same type corrupt society the invading horde has created, built, and sustained for hundreds of years in their own Nations!
It is so simple even Obama and the left wing loony ones should understand it! You cannot have a first world Welfare Nation share a long Border with a third World Slum without the borders being totally secure! Otherwise the Criminals and all of the Uneducated poor people from those Nations will overrun the First World Nation for the Welfare!
First World Nation goes deeper and deeper in debt borrowing money to fund government until borrowing cost becomes un-sustainable. Than First world Nation prints Money results in high inflation and money becomes worthless.
First World Nation becomes Third World Slum just like country the Invaders flee! The progress is well on the way in Calif. and other States it will take approximately 10 more years to complete the process and turn the USA into a third world Slum modeled on Mexico!
Judging by his story, VDH lives in the Central Valley, where I was raised. I left almost 20 years ago and happily reside in the Midwest now. I would never move back. I still have immediate family there so I visit frequently and am pretty well in touch with how things are. Even though articles like this one are commonplace and it’s become something of sport to mock California, what VDH says is totally correct. California is so absolutely dysfunctional, it will never recover. Never. Put a fork in it.
The unfortunate reason why is the voters themselves. For all the carping about the unions and the liberal press holding the state hostage, the truth is that the voters have had their chances, but don’t seem smart enough to know which way to vote. I hear my family members complain constantly about it all, yet they still vote for the same idiots who’ve been running the state for years and got it to this point. Most recently, one complained about how a handful of Republicans in the legislature were digging in their heels and preventing any progress. I told her she should write them a thank-you letter. She looked at me like I was insane, then continued to complain.
The rest of the country loves to mock the Golden State. When I first moved out to the Midwest, I got really sick of hearing “California?! Isn’t that the land of fruits and nuts?!” Yuckity yuck. But it was clear that they really did think California was full of idiots, and it surprised me (at first) that they had that reaction. Now it get it.
Enjoy it, Californians. You get the government you deserve. The same one you keep voting for.
One should now call California the “Granola State” — the land of fruits, nuts and flakes.
My biggest fear is that those Californians now scurrying out of state like rats leaving a sinking ship drag along their big government, nanny state ideals to the voting booth of their new home state and begin the process of destruction all over again.
I suspect, as Dr. Hanson has indicated, that California’s problems are the rest of the nation’s, only larger and more spectacular.
Ever noticed that nothing much, especially large scale, seems to work right anymore or anywhere? Public schools, mass transit, health care “reform,” welfare – you name it, the results appear to be the opposite of what’s expected. And BP, Enron, the corporate idiots who accepted investment instruments(so I understand)dreamed up by mathematicians or chemists – well, we don’t even have captains of industry like we used to.
About the only large scale entity I can think of, right off hand, that really works is our military, and that’s IF they get enough resources, manpower, and a rational, achieveable mission.
We all – not just California – seem to be trapped in a complex, hideously tangled web – a true Gordian knot – with no way to untangle it, because everything seems to be out of kilter at once, and is so closely connected to everything else. Not to mention the fact that a lot of our problems, public and individual, seem not only be tangled together, but self-perpetuating…
And there’s no fictional Heracles/Hercules (if that’s the right hero)in sight to cut it for us…which would be a delusion, in any case.
I just don’t know anymore…I don’t want to give up hope, and will do what I can (if it’s just trying to vote intelligently), but there seem to be no promising signs…
Liz, are you capable of rational thought? (most people are not). There are answers to your questions, and solutions to every problem.
Look up the jewel wasp, and think of the mass media of news and entertainment.
Watch “the matrix” and remember the jewel wasp. Then watch the movie “They live” (ignore the poor acting) and integrate that.
Finally, an episode of the outer limits called “The Deprogrammers”, which will explain why I can’t just flat out tell you.
If’n yer bothered.
The real shame is that we will all pay for this. The Nation cannot afford to see California go completely under. At some critical moment, Californians will demand a federal bailout. They have the largest congressoinal delegation, and are allied with other large delegations (i.e., NY, Illinois). The pressure to bail them out will be irresistable, and we will all pay for it.
Yeah great, and then the conga line to Fed bailout begins
Could not agree more.
With all due respect, Mr. Hansen, don’t let the door hit you on the butt on the way out. There is a reason California leads the nation and the world in innovation and wealth creation, and it ain’t the legacy of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. On the converse, show me a state that has implemented the everyone-fend-for-themselves approach you seem to favor, and compare it to the world-changing businesses and ideas have come from our great state. I’ll take California’s Intel and Google over Texas’s Enron any day of the week.
Notably omitted from this post: the political’s rights role in the budget-crippling, inefficient, and irrational Prop 13; our world-high incarceration rates; and systemic political gridlock in Sacramento.
Newsflash: even with Prop 13, Californians pay above-average property taxes. And in all other areas of taxation, Californians pay through the nose. Your state’s problem isn’t a lack of revenue. It’s that you are completely addicted to government spending.
That is simply not correct. California’s property tax rate is lower than all but 5 states. And the Prop 13 system, in addition to leaving billions of dollars in revenue off the table, imposes inefficiencies and irrationality in the real estate market.
http://www.mikemcmahon.info/CATaxesOct2007.pdf
Well, I did check out the site where your source pulled ITS data – taxfoundation.org. While your source’s pretty little paper was politically oriented to tell the tale you want to tell, I found something that tells the whole story more effectively. You want to concentrate on SOME of the details that make you feel better about your sorry state of affairs, but when the entire picture of all forms of taxation that California’s regulatory environment places on the individual, a very different picture emerges.
1. State and Local Tax Burdens: All States, One Year, 1977 – 2009 (http://www.taxfoundation.org/taxdata/show/336.html)
This shows the burden of all state and local taxation. Guess what? In 2009 (latest year documented), California is near the top of the heap at #6. Who else joins them in the vaunted Top Ten? New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Wisconsin, Rhode Island, Minnesota, Vermont, Maine, and Pennsylvania. Not exactly engines of growth this list.
2. State Business Tax Climate Index Rankings, 2006 – 2011 (http://www.taxfoundation.org/taxdata/show/22661.html) Well, now that we have looked at what it costs to breathe the air in California for more than a month, why don’t we look at how you treat the employers you need to sustain that tax burden. For 2010, California comes in at…are you ready for this?…#49!! Outstanding job.
All this gives us a clearer picture of what is happening in the sum of all the moving parts, once we step away from the navel gazing that passes for progressive thought and analysis. I was born in Texas, moved overseas at 3 years of age, lived outside the States for 13 years, graduated from college here in Texas, served as a Naval Aviator for 7 years from Florida to Washington state; having seen all that, I made Texas my home to work upon becoming a civilian again. The great innovation that you claim comes from California is a fraction of what it once was – California companies have moved operations and thought leadership outside of CA for years- and you guys gave us the Z3 and Z4 (not so good)! No doubt your history was great, but that is what it is: history. What really matters at this time for you guys is JOBS. Nowhere is this growth more dynamically visible than here in TX. Depending on the source (WSJ, Economist, etc.), Texas has created well north of half of all new jobs in the US since 2005 BY ITSELF!! And these are not public sector jobs, but private sector jobs – you know, the kind where wealth is actually created, not redistributed. So, sneer about Enron (at least we made it go bankrupt, instead of continuing the kleptomania that masquerades as your state government), but we have Dell, we have ExxonMobil, ConocoPhilips, and more wind generation capacity than any other state (why we invest in that is beyond me). I am good with the fact that we lead the nation in Fortune 100 headquarters and we are energy self-sufficient with new finds in natural gas and oil. We grow our own food and make kickass attack aircraft in Fort Worth. We have the second busiest port (Houston) and the third busiest airport (DFW). Every day, I see new out of state tags signalling a desire to work. My hope is that they can vote with their minds having seen the destruction wrought by fools such as yourself. But, that will be a work in progress. That is why we only allow our state politicians to work for a couple of months every two years. Keeps the meddling to a manageable minimum.
Best of luck to you in your delusional state.
The property tax RATE might be very low, but the taxes themselves in gross amounts are very high – in fact, amongst the highest nationwide.
A bit of a paradox, when you think about it. I imagine the idea behind the property tax structure was to protect californians from having the same tax exposure on land that you see in places like New Jersey and New York. However, the resulting growth in RE prices in California more than overwhelmed the original intent, resulting in Californians on average paying lots more tax for property ownership than most other states.
Idiots will buy the argument about ONE of the taxes imposed on Californians being the cause of all our ills (property taxes and prop 13). Those who use their brains can figure that all taxes taken together are the appropriate measure of the burden of government on citizens. The PRK ranks 6th overall in the US in state and local tax burden accounting for approximately 11% of our gross state product. That is more than enough to pay for the legitimate functions of government. We have a spending problem folks, not a revenue problem. For comparison the highest tax rate as a percent of a state economy is in NJ at 12%. The lowest is Alaska at 6%.
http://www.taxfoundation.org/taxdata/show/336.html
Actually……..
California DOESN’T lead the nation and the world in innovation anymore. Sacramento has done a SPLENDID job driving high tech out of the state.
Example:
Intel has much larger facilities in Oregon and Arizona; the California campus is a mere rump at this point.
Example:
Google is focusing its expansion OUT OF STATE.
If you want to establish a new high tech company, you do it in Austin – not Silicon Valley.
If you want to grow your high tech company, you do it in Portland, Austin, Boston, Dallas, or Colorado Springs – NOT in California.
That’s what happens when the Democratic Socialist Progressive party takes the reins for the better part of two decades – they kill the goose that lays the golden egg.
we tried realllly hard in November..im not sure what the heck happened..maybe its the way the redistricting is done here?
Dr. Hansen wrote: “We now see highway patrolmen and city police, in the manner of South American law enforcement, out in force. Everywhere they are monitoring, watching, ticketing — no warnings, no margins of error — desperate to earn traffic fines that might feed the state that feeds them.”
So true. My 18-year-old son was ticketed going 90 outside of Barstow. The fine just arrived in the mail–$370!!! I’m not making excuses for my son, he should have been watching his speed, but this amount for a speeding ticket is outrageous. My kid will pay the fine, but what also burns me is how many out there won’t or haven’t. I don’t think he’ll be visiting California again any time soon.
I think if you are driving at 90 mph anywhere, including an interstate hwy, you should be ticketed, if caught, whether it is in California or anywhere.
anarcho-tyranny arrives
Why does it take endless paragraphs of whiny neoconservatism to expose an obvious truth? The solution for you malcontents is simple.
Like California? Great!
Don’t like California? Move somewhere else.
And good riddance.
you seem to have missed the main point. VDH was living in California when it was great. before you and your rainbow crowd started to mess it up and ask him to pay for it.
…but that is typical of parasitic types.
will someone once and for all define neocon/ neoconservatism please?
seriously…
how many people are there in the world? 4 or 5 billion 10 billion?
there will be as many definitions of neocon as there are people
Comments like this reveal a depressing lack of insight concerning the realities of government. Nobody in the U.S. has to actually live in California to be affected by what happens there. Two examples –
Several people posting here speak of all the wealth that California has given the “rest of us” in federal taxes. Ignored in this is the fact that California is a national leader in receiving grants, loans and other forms of income back from the federal government. California was #1 when it came to receiving “stimuls” funds from the Obama administration courtesy of the Ms. Peolosi and your two U.S. Senators, Charybdis and Scylla. The Golden State gets plenty back from the “rest of us.”
Also, if California goes down the bowl then this will have a tsunami like effect on the nations bond market. How much as the rest of the U.S. invested in California state bonds or has them in invested in private or institutional portfolios? Every fresh act of fiscal incompetence from the California government puts these investments at risk and also increases the risk attached to these bonds.
No – Everyone in the U.S. is invested one way or another in what happens in California and it would be nice, really nice, if the children who run the state would realize that.
Two Words Barbara Boxer
Pretty accurate assessment of the socialistic state of California.
I have lived in Calfornia all my life and I can tell you one thing, I miss white people period. Illegals have controlled California and I hate it. Oh where oh where have the white people gone?
Sorry, it took so long to reply. Tom Paine-I’m not in Kabul but within a couple hundred miles, close enough. Trying to force other people to not have children (either legally, or chemically as you suggest) is unworthy of a freedom lover such as yourself. They have a one child policy in china-but I don’t think they’d let you publish your pamphlets there!
CAtransplant-you’re historically correct, but missing the point. There’s nothing wrong about a good old fashioned war. But it’s not like going shopping-all sales are not final. Texas and later, the US won the wars but are losing (have lost?) the peace due to a reversal of the demographic pressures that led to the initial victories in the first place.
Lolly-I think that many Mexicans consider it to be their land. It’s really beside the point. No one actually owns land. You have to be able to defend it either legally or by force of arms. The aging Americans living in California have lost control of their local government and dying off anyway. They won’t be able to defend American claims to the land in the long run absent a new baby boom. Eventually land “belongs” to the people who are around. No descendants, no ownership. That simple.
Morgan Trinkhaus-my understanding is that most Mexicans and Central Americans descend from Native Americans to a larger extent than any other ethnic group. While Kevin Costner was dancing with the wolves, the Native Americans were setting up taquerias across the street. Several years ago, while I was on 30 days leave, I was moonlighting at a clinic in Northern California; I pointed that out to a Native American friend lamenting the “demise” of his people. “Different Indians” was all he said. It’s an odd world. I speak Spanish and love Mexican food by the way-beats the corn beef and cabbage I grew up with, though I’m partial to Celtic music and dance.
maybe the “big one” wouldn’t be so bad. At least the destruction would be fast instead of this slow painful death.
and all the dolts that think the government will rescue them will disappear
I was born and raised in Southern Calif. My family left there in 1979 as we could see what was going to happen to our beautiful home state. I haven’t been back since 1985 and I doubt I will ever return.
What a disgrace it is to leave this once-wonderful place to a bunch of savages.
Not a pretty picture, I left the state back in 2002 and moved overseas, and in the interim things have gotten really bad, I wonder what exactly the state, county and city leadership are doing, other than making the quality of life worse, people are taxed and fined into poorness, and only the well heeled seem to have the financial means to have a decent quality of life, most of my friends back home are doing well because they work in IT or a related industry, but even they have to cut back on some things because of rising costs, a few years back I though of maybe returning home with the family, this was of course before the financial crisis hit, but after looking at all the costs vs what our income would be, not to mention the poor quality of public education, forget it, we’re staying put, won’t risk my kids’ future, so one can only hope that sooner or later some new leadership will come in and maybe, just maybe things will turn around, but from 6000 miles away it doesn’t look good, sad but true.
It is so simple even Obama and the left wing loony ones should understand it!
You cannot have a first world Welfare Nation share a long Border with a third World Slum Nation without the borders being totally secure!
Otherwise the Criminals and all of the Uneducated parasites from Slum Nations will overrun the First World Nation for the Plunder and Welfare!
First World Nation cannot be welfare State for millions of Prolific breeding parasites and goes deeper and deeper in debt borrowing money to fund government until borrowing cost becomes un-sustainable.
Than First world Nation prints Money results in high inflation and money becomes worthless.
First World Nation becomes Third World Slum just like country the Invaders fled!
The process is almost completed in Calif. and processing well i9n other States it will take approximately 10 to 15 more years to complete and turn the USA into a Third World Mexico North Slum!
Mexico poses a greater threat to our national security than does Libya.
I was born, currently live and work for the state of California. I am chomping at the bit to get out of here before it reaches that tipping point.
It is a damn shame this state is headed for the abyss but that is what you get for 40 years of progressive policies.
Those who have seen it go from the golden state to a crime ridden, illegal aliens overunning it, infrastructure collaspsing, cost of living nightmare haven’t seen the worst.
I hope to see the last of this state in my rearview mirror as I head to my new location (not mentioned) so I will be far enough away when the final implosion happens.
Good bye California…forever!
111. Frank7888
Mexico poses a greater threat to our national security than does Libya.
Absolutely. It might be past time to turn American guns (military) on Mexico.
As a Californian I’ve watched our state deteriorate from the envy of the nation to a place teetering on the edge of insolvency. You have to remember, no matter how liberal/progressive California is, there is still a large 40% minority of us who aren’t insane.
The two things driving the state’s plunge into the abyss are term limits and the initiative process. With term limits legislators are out after two terms and aren’t held accountable for the mess they leave behind. Prior to term limits the legislature had its experts on education, insurance, health care, tax policy etc. Now no one stays long enough to become an expert. They only serve to enrich themselves and their contributors.
With the initiative you have a majority who don’t own property and don’t pay taxes voting for new programs and new spending. An effort was made years ago to block non-property owners from voting for initiatives that involved higher taxes but it was shouted down.
So don’t condemn the whole population of California. There are still a lot of us left here who loathe the way things are. I had some hope we’d at least start shifting back to the right in the last election but instead we lurched even further to the left. Sadly I think it’s going to take the state going into default before it changes. Even then I’m not hopeful.
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