How Progressives killed the California dream
California is pretty much a one party state and has been for a while. The legislature is controlled by hard left Democrats, and has been for decades. RHINO Arnold came to office pledging to do something about the out of control spending, and has been a rubber stamp for the Democrats in the legislature since.
Dennis Prager has an interesting article about what’s gone wrong in California.
California’s Democratic legislature has been more or less able to do whatever it wants with California. The Wall Street Journal has described the result:
“The Golden State—which a decade ago was the booming technology capital of the world—has been done in by two decades of chronic overspending, overregulating and a hyperprogressive tax code.…”
One might argue that’s this is a politically biased assessment. So here are some facts, not assessments:
-California’s state expenditures grew from $104 billion in 2003 to $145 billion in 2008.
-California has the worst credit rating in the nation.
-California has the fourth highest unemployment rate in the nation, 9.3 percent—higher even than the car manufacturing state of Michigan.
-California has the second highest home foreclosure rate.
-California’s tax-paying middle class is leaving the state. California’s net loss last year in state-to-state migration exceeded every other state’s. New York, another Left-run state, was second.
-Since 2000, California’s job growth rate—which in the late 1970s was many times higher than the national average—has lagged behind the national average by almost 20 percent.
-California has lost 25 percent of its industrial work force since 2001.
If progressive economic theories had any truth to them, California would be a paradise. Instead, it’s a dying state with many of its most productive citizens leaving.
Prager isn’t the only one to notice this.
Joel Kotkin, one of the leading observers of urban America, the presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University, recently wrote an essay on California, “Sundown for California.” He begins with these words:
“Twenty-five years ago, along with another young journalist, I co-authored a book called “California, Inc.” about our adopted home state. The book described ‘California’s rise to economic, political, and cultural ascendancy’...But today our Golden State appears headed, if not for imminent disaster, then toward an unanticipated, maddening, and largely unnecessary mediocrity.”
That is what left-wing policies have done to California. In Kotkin’s words, “the state legislature decided to spend its money on public employees and impose ever more regulatory burdens on business.”
Many businesses that have long been associated with California have decided that the Golden State isn’t the best place to do business.
Last week, Intel, the world’s largest maker of computer chips, announced that it would invest $7 billion to expand its facilities. Where? In Arizona, Oregon, and New Mexico. But not in California, the state in which Intel is headquartered.
My wife and I are locked into good jobs here in CA, but we both agree. If we were younger and planning to start a family, we would be looking at CA in our rearview mirror.
