Posted by
Bill Crawford on Wednesday, May 06, 2009 8:24:57 PM
Where do I start? Emigration? (Yes, I said emigration). Taxes? Government? Education? The laundry list is so long, it boggles the mind.
There was a great migration westward after World War II that quickly made them pass New York as the most populous State. A decade later, they were a colossus. They prided themselves in the 1960's and '70's on being the leading edge of politics and law.
When the Defense workers left town for other things at the end of the Cold War, they left a political coalition consisting of Simi Valley computer types, urban professionals... and a rapidly growing cordon of immigrants.
I've gone on at length what this has done to Long Island in New York. Just imagine it on a much larger scale. You now have a dual whirlpool of flakeboards- the LA basin and the Sacramento/ San Francisco Bay Area competing to see who can drive the poor state farther into the ground.
Regarding taxation, it is far and away the worst place to be a taxpayer or a business. Nobody else is close. You pay more for gas there because the EPA rules are dedicated for them. You pay more for cars there because they have their own pollution rules.
For many years, the population still grew because of the weather and the burgeoning economy. Now, if they weren't importing more immigrants than anybody else, they would be losing population.
A bit of history: in the early 1930's, New York City was the pre-eminent city in the country. When FDR took office, the New Dealers regarded Fiorello LaGuardia and his city as the laboratory for their government experimentation.
They did so much "experimentation" that the middle class flew out of there into the newly forming suburbs as fast as they could ten years later, leaving the witches brew that comprises NYC now: large pockets of immobile underclass and the smaller pockets of uber rich that support them.
On a larger scale, this is what is happening in California now. There is a middle class stream moving to Nevada, Arizona or north up the coast, to escape the lunacy that comes out of the political class there. That leaves the hordes of Che Guevara rich who seem to like the lunacy.
The top 1% of earners there now pay almost half the income tax. The unemployment rate there is almost 12% now- the fourth highest in the country.
The political class is happy to give driving privileges and college educations to illegal immigrants, in return for whatever votes they can muster from the Hispanics to keep them in office.
These people run a veritable zoo, and then lecture the rest of us about our backward ways. New York and Long Island at least is small enough to wall off, if necessary. Building one around California would be a project.
Now they are reaping the penalties of the housing boom more than any other state, and their answer is to raise whatever "fees" they can muster (because Proposition 13 still places a limitation on "tax" increases).
The only difference between Governor Wilson and Schwarzenegger is that Wilson was happy to lead the State Legislature off a cliff.
If we took Michigan and California out of the national mix, we would be numerically on the road to recovery already. I don't know if I have the patience for political reform there. New York taught me that it may never come, as long as other taxpayers can help fund their mistakes. But what happens when the charity from flyover country dries up?
Trust me, that is coming soon. The internet has killed the old Tip O'Neill axiom about "all politics are local". Not any more. Not when the mistakes are available on the Drudge Report the next day.