Sunday, September 29, 2019

The Decline and Fall of California

It’s an old story. It’s such an old story that one is tempted to ignore it. After all, if the citizens of California continue to render their state uninhabitable, why should any of the rest of us care a whit?

And yet, the story still intrigues. After all, California is the laboratory for all radical leftist economic policies. Such policies have produced a calamity. No one cares. No one wants to change course. They are oblivious to evidence.

Besides, their political leaders are consumed by their hatred of Donald Trump. Rather than help fix their state, Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff have launched an attack on the rule of law, the validity of elections and half of the American people.

You wouldn’t want to think that leftist Democrats are candy-assed weaklings, would you?

This time Michael Snyder of The Economic Collapse blog explains that California is becoming so unaffordable that large numbers of its people want to pick up and leave the state. Snyder quotes a Los Angeles Times story:

Just over half of California’s registered voters have considered leaving the state, with soaring housing costs cited as the most common reason for wanting to move, according to a new poll.

Young voters were especially likely to cite unaffordable housing as a reason for leaving, according to the latest latest UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll conducted for the Los Angeles Times. But a different group, conservatives, also frequently suggested they wanted to leave — and for a very different reason: They feel alienated from the state’s political culture.

A useful qualification, especially if you fear that that California’s dispossessed leftists are about to turn your red state blue.

In fact, it was recently reported that it now takes approximately $350,000 a year to live a middle class lifestyle in the city of San Francisco.  If you have a ton of money, it can partially insulate you from the problems that are increasingly ravaging the state, but unless you never go out in public nothing is going to insulate you completely.  

And, of course, major cities are now rat-infested, crime-ridden open air toilets:

Cities all over the state are degenerating into drug-infested, crime-ridden hellholes that are literally being overrun by millions of rats.  

And, of course, the state has managed to attract illegal immigrants and other destitute rent seekers:

California has some of the worst traffic in the entire world, unchecked illegal immigration is causing a whole host of social problems, and gang activity has become a massive problem.... 

On the other hand, California’s reputation for handing out free goodies has been a magnet for another class of people.  Today, almost half of all homeless people in the entire nation live in the state of California, and this has become such a huge crisis that it literally makes headlines all over the globe.

Snyder concludes:

It is such a shame what has happened to the state.  California should be one of the most beautiful, prosperous and enjoyable places to live in the entire world.  Unfortunately, Californians have been making exceedingly poor choices for decades, and the consequences of those decisions will be extremely bitter indeed.

5 comments:

  1. You are right, Stuart, I don't care, and yes, their ruin is a source of amusement. The trouble is, the idiots who voted for the destruction of California are now coming to Dixie in droves to destroy our well-functioning states. I am thinking of incentivizing local gang members to beat and rob them when they arrive. Thugs win, I win, Dixie wins, and hipster leftists lose. And Apple sells more gear, so the economy wins.

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  2. I watched people from CA change CO from a state with reasonable costs, reasonable taxes and reasonable politics to what they fled from. They had no idea that by bidding up housing prices and electing socialists in the making what the results would be.

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  3. As Prof. Reynolds says at Instapundit, the other states need to form greeting committees to meet California emigrants and get them wise on how things are in their new states and severely disabuse them of their California habits.

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  4. I have to say that I am beginning to think Ubu is right. Much of the jokes about Florida are created by the actions of people running away from the disasters they have created elsewhere and then trying to create the very conditions they ran away. The stupidity heaped on Florida is a direct result of out of staters. Whether one considers school shootings, inability to vote in a legal manner, et al it is due to them.
    Sam, one should not just apply that to Californians. It should apply to any "blue state" areas.

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