Who Killed California?

[Snipe]

I have been meaning to start an ongoing thread about California on the forum, where I can post news and tidbits that I come across from time to time. I actually intend on pulling some of my other posts about California on this forum into this thread as well.

I think that California will go bankrupt. I think they may be in a race with Illinois. People have questioned if the Federal Government would bail out California. In the first two years of the Obama administration my likely answer would have been yes. Since the historic election of 2010 however, the worm has turned:

From Victor Davis Hanson at the National Review:

Obama Doesn’t Get It (http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/252447/obama-doesn-t-get-it-victor-davis-hanson)


In California, there is some irony: The philosophy that led the state to the highest tax rates in the country, along with the near-worst schools, largest deficits, and most crumbling infrastructure, was reaffirmed. Now California’s state government will have to deal with the reality that if the highest-tax state in the union raises taxes still higher, it will lose even more high earners than the current 3,000 who leave each week. A Republican Congress is not likely to bail out a bankrupt California. More likely, we will see even more of the present ad hoc government-by-euphemism. More “furloughs” instead of pay cuts for unionized public employees, “temporary” larger class sizes in the schools, more “user fees” imposed by executive order in lieu of getting new taxes passed.

The state will continue to descend into a pyramidal society. On top there is the wealthy, leftist coastal elite from Napa to Hollywood, which is seemingly immune from the effects of high taxes and regulation (and wants more green laws, gay marriage, abortion, and therapeutic bromides). The top of the pyramid is in league with a growing underclass in part dependent upon a huge entitlement industry; this coalition thus favors more taxes, entitlements, unionized public employees, open borders, etc. Meanwhile, a squeezed middle-class private sector is slowly being strangled, shutting down, and leaving.

What are we left with? Public money in California running out is, in fact, a solution of sorts.

The pyramidal society is a nice description. Lots of rich lefties at the top, lots of poor immigrants on the dole at the bottom. Increasingly less room for everything in-between. People are leaving and they aren't coming back. 3,000 "high earners" are leaving each week according to Mr. Hanson. If the Republican House bails them out when it hits the fan I will openly campaign to throw all the bums out of office. California is not too big to fail, and fail they will. I think our election this week has sealed their fate, and California is going to die.

If California is going to die, I would like to treat the death of California like a murder scene investigation in this thread. Let the corpse lay there while we chalk around the body. Put up some police tape. Who did this? Who murdered California? That is the quest of my knowledge.

I have predicted on this forum that California is going to be an important issue in American politics in the coming years. I repeat that prediction tonight.

Growing up California was always some special place. "California Dreamin" and all that. It was the trendsetter of the nation. Some eminent scholars predict that California is still a trendsetter for the nation, though not in ways that some may like. If California's future is also our future, now might be a good time to take a close look at California.

Like I said, I am going to pull some of the posts I have already made on other threads into this one. I would like to have all my "research" and contributions on the subject put to one place. I don't think that California as a national issue will go away. It can only get bigger in my estimation. I also admit that I could be wrong, so feel free to disagree with me. I apologize if anyone has already read the posts that I will be adding, I am just compiling them into one place. Then I will have one thread that I can add to as time goes on.

I plan on documenting both the ongoing death and the "who dun it" of California on this thread. If anyone else comes across evidence that might provide useful in my investigation I encourage them to post it.

Cheers!

[GuyFawkes38]

IMHO, it's the state government and geography.

Via Wikipedia, California has a state GDP of 1.85 trillion. With a population of 36 million, California has a per capita GDP of $50,000.

That's higher than US per capita GDP.

A good chunk of those people are squeezed between the coastal mountains and the Pacific, which creates high cost of living.

And the state government absolutely sucks.

[GuyFawkes38]

Just want to add, NYC is super expensive to live and the tax rates are absurdly high. But they have close to monopolies in some economic sectors (news, advertising, finance).

Likewise, California has close to a monopoly in some sectors (entertainment, technology, some engineering fields).

If your a doctor you can instantly improve your standard of living by moving from LA or NYC to Colorado. But you can't do that if your in technology.

I wonder if that accounts for some of the recklessness by state and local governments in NYC, LA, and San Francisco.

[madness31]

There is a lot wrong with CA including high tax rates. The one thing you are forgetting however is that the housing bubble and subsequent bust is an enormous contributer to their problems. Had home prices not escalated to unrealistic levels due to easy money greenspan and the greedy banking industry then politicians wouldn't have been able to think up as many stupid projects/policies. Now that the easy property tax revenue is declining from home price declines and vacant houses plus decreases in other taxes related to job losses, etc they are having a hard time paying their bills.

I say let them fail. Let the chips fall where they may. The entire country needs a lesson on responsibility.

I agree that a Republican congress will not go for the bailout because they can blame the Democrats but they definitely would have bailed out CA under Bush and probably will again if they regain the white house. The fallout from a bankrupt CA will be severe and I just don't see them allowing another economic catastrophy occur on their watch when they are able to stop it. Bush bailed out the banks so it is difficult to imagine he would have let CA go down.

[DC Muskie]

This country and particularly California has lost some of its values.

[waggy]

Just because you're in debt or broke, doesn't mean you're dead. And if you don't want to be a part of paying off the debt, well you just leave like so many are doing. Who's going to make California pay? And really, who is California? It's not like you can go over and knock on Californias door and demand your money. Craziness. Bottom line, people voted two days ago, and those people are apparently happy.

So, what happen to Miami Florida? Or what happened to OTR or Norwood?

[MADXSTER]

We were having a conversation at work about Cal and bankruptcy.

If the government bails them out, will this trigger the snowball effect of socialism? Will the federal government be in charge of California? If so, does Cal lose if voting priveleges? Do they have representatives like guam, Puerto Rico but do not get to cast votes in congress?

If they do bail them out, then nothing changes.

IMHO, California is already a lost cause.

At this point, if a governor in any state that has lost alot of jobs, why not approach some of these corporations, promise great tax incentives and get them out of California. If they stay they're just going to end up being taxed to death. Hell, Silcon valley could move to Arizona or some other place with the right incentives. Build the buildings for them.

I don't know what's going to happen to these companies but I'm pretty sure they don't either.

[waggy]

The companies will be fine. At least the healthy ones. Most of them are (very) big boys. Hell, with the way the overall economy is right now, you can lease space out here for about nothing. Find a good deal on a place to live too.

But a state government going bankrupt should never ever happen. That's just stupid.

[nuts4xu]

They shoulda legalized it!!!

[Snipe]

One of the suspects that I would like to question in California's demise is the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_Nationality_Act_of_1965). It is impossible to ponder the issues facing California without considering the incredible demographic change that opening up our borders did in the 1960s.


The study of demographics is interesting and sometimes very revealing.

California 1960 Census Totals

White Population: 14,455,280 (92.0%)
Black Population: 883,861 (5.6%)
Other Races: 378,133 (2.4%)

California Today (http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06000.html):

White Population: 15,634,784 (42.3%)
Black Population 2,476,431 (6.7%)
Other Races: 18,850,449 (51%)
Latino/Hispanic: 13,527,969 (36.6%)
Asian: 4,620,208 (12.5%)

And let’s take a look at these projections for 2050 (http://www.laalmanac.com/population/po40.htm):

Total Population: 59,507,876

White Population: 15,712,119 (26.4%)
Black Population: 2,682,828 (4.5%)
Other Races: 41,119,942 (69.1%)
Latino/Hispanic: 31,028,375 (52.1%)
Asian: 7,889,183 (13.3%)

Look at the city of Los Angeles, circa 1960 (http://www.laalmanac.com/population/po20.htm):

Total Population 6,039,834
White 5,453,866 (90.3%)
Black 461,546 (7.6%)
Chinese 19,286 (0.3%)
Indian 8,109 (0.1%)
Japanese 77,314 (1.3%)
Filipino 12,122 (0.2%)
Other 6,528 (0.1%)

Los Angeles Today (http://www.laalmanac.com/population/po39.htm):

Total Population 10,514,663
White 2,913,695 (27.7%)
Hispanic 5,079,973 (48.3%)
Asian 1,397,967 (13.3%)
Pacific Islander 29,522 (0.3%)
Black 877,423 (8.3%)
American Indian 31,089 (0.3%)
Multi-Racial 184,994 (1.8%)

Los Angeles in 2050 (http://www.laalmanac.com/population/po39.htm):

Total Population 13,061,787
White 1,587,993 (12.2%)
Hispanic 8,405,036 (64.3%)
Asian 2,109,318 (16.1%)
Pacific Islander 49,101 (0.4%)
Black 583,499 (4.5%)
American Indian 37,316 (0.3%)
Multi-Racial 289,524 (2.2%)

I was born in the 1960s. Just during my lifetime California (and this nation) has gone through an astounding demographic change. More of that is in store for our future.

Minorities will be New American Majority by 2050 (http://hispanic.cc/minorities_will_be_the_new_american_majority_by_20 50.htm)


"More of the country is going to be like California," said William Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution. Minorities make up 57% of the population in California....

"In California, minorities make up 72% of those under age 15."


Just during my lifetime California has gone from being a state with a 92% white population to one which 72% of the kids under 15 are minorities. Just that stat right there tells you something about the future demographic makeup of the Golden State.

It is impossible for me to look at the changes that have taken place in California without looking at the possible demographic influences.

The State of California used to be conservative. It used to go Republican in elections. From the 1950s to 1988, (http://www.270towin.com/states/California) California voted for every Republican Presidential candidate except one, Barry Goldwater. Since the 1992 elections, California has been a reliable Democratic vote in Presidential elections. This isn't supposed to change anytime soon. It very well could, but the projections are that it will not. This mirrors some other trends in national voting. No Democratic Presidential candidate has won a majority of the white vote nationally since the 1940's, save Lyndon Baines Johnson who defeated Barry Goldwater in a landslide in 1964. Barrack Obama won a comfortable victory, but he didn't win the white vote.

This news is good for Democrats in the sense that if all Democrats care about is winning elections California and the rest of the country will be heading toward a demographic future that favors Democrats. Because of this fact, Democrats generally support immigration. I am speaking in general terms. I don't want to put words in anyone's mouth.

I think Demographics are a major reason that California has gone from Conservative to Progressive.

Outside of politics, what about the schools?

A State Transformed: Immigration and the New California (http://www.cis.org/california-education)

I Have Seen the Future and It Doesn’t Work (http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/231700/i-have-seen-future-and-it-doesnt-work-mark-krikorian)


California has the least-educated work force in the nation:



In 1970, California had the 7th most educated work force of the 50 states in terms of the share of its workers who had completed high school. By 2008 it ranked 50th, making it the least educated state.

Nor will California be able to catch up with Mississippi and Arkansas any time soon: "There is no indication that California will soon close the educational gap. California ranks 35th in terms of the share of its 19-year-olds who have completed high school."

Speaking of Mississippi: "California's income distribution in 2008 was more unequal than was Mississippi's in 1970."

And this too: "In 2008 California ranked 11th highest in terms of the share of its households accessing at least one major welfare program and 8th highest in terms of the share of the state’s population without health insurance."


What about the economy?

The Golden State’s War on Itself (http://www.newgeography.com/content/001712-the-golden-state%E2%80%99s-war-itself)


Last year, California personal income fell 2.5 percent, the first such fall since the Great Depression and well below the 1.7 percent drop for the rest of the country. Unemployment may be starting to ebb nationwide, but not in California, where it approaches 13 percent, among the highest rates in the nation. Between 2008 and 2009, not one of California’s biggest cities outperformed such traditional laggards as New York, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia in employment growth, and four cities—Los Angeles, Oakland, Santa Ana, and San Bernardino–Riverside—sit very close to the bottom among the nation’s largest metro areas, just slightly ahead of basket cases like Detroit. Long a global exemplar, California is in danger of becoming, as historian Kevin Starr has warned, a “failed state.”


The result is two separate California realities: a lucrative one for the wealthy and for government workers, who are largely insulated from economic decline; and a grim one for the private-sector middle and working classes, who are fleeing the state.


But by the mid-1960s, as I noted in an essay in The American two years ago, Brown’s traditional progressivism was being destabilized by forces that would eventually transform liberal politics around the nation: public-sector workers, liberal lobbying organizations, and minorities, which demanded more and more social spending.


Silicon Valley, for instance—despite the celebrated success of Google and Apple—has 130,000 fewer jobs now than it had a decade ago, with office vacancy above 20 percent. In Los Angeles, garment factories and aerospace companies alike are shutting down. Toyota has abandoned its Fremont plant. California lost nearly 400,000 manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2007, according to a report by the Milken Institute—even as industrial employment grew in Texas and Arizona. A sign of the times: transferring factory equipment from the Bay Area to other locales has become a thriving business, notes Tom Abate of the San Francisco Chronicle.


Several cities in the State of California are on the verge of bankruptcy. The State itself is deep in debt and is looking for a federal bailout. They already have begun the practice of paying people with IOUs. If the feds don't bail them out the whole state could default on its debt and declare bankruptcy.

It is hard for me to look at the political, educational and economic spheres in California without thinking about the demographics. “More of the country is going to be like California” says a respected scholar at the Brookings Institution. If that is true, maybe we should think long and hard about what that means.

[Snipe]

The Congealing Pot--Today's Immigrants Are Different from Waves Past (http://www.aei.org/article/100860)


They're not just like the Irish--or the Italians or the Poles, for that matter. The large influx of Hispanic immigrants after 1965 represents a unique assimilation challenge for the United States. Many optimistic observers have assumed--incorrectly, it turns out--that Hispanic immigrants will follow the same economic trajectory European immigrants did in the early part of the last century. Many of those Europeans came to America with no money and few skills, but their status steadily improved. Their children outperformed them, and their children's children were often indistinguishable from the "founding stock." The speed of economic assimilation varied somewhat by ethnic group, but three generations were typically enough to turn "ethnics" into plain old Americans.

This would be the preferred outcome for the tens of millions of Hispanic Americans, who are significantly poorer and less educated on average than native whites. When immigration skeptics question the wisdom of importing so many unskilled people into our nation at one time, the most common response cites the remarkable progress of Europeans a century ago. "People used to say the Irish or the Poles would always be poor, but look at them today!" For Hispanics, we are led to believe, the same thing will happen.

But that claim isn't true. Though about three-quarters of Hispanics living in the U.S. today are either immigrants or the children of immigrants, a significant number have roots here going back many generations. We have several ways to measure their intergenerational progress, and the results leave little room for optimism about their prospects for assimilation.

Repeating the diversity mantra over and over does not affect actual results. Just saying that different people, from a different culture that speak a different language will become just like us doesn't make it reality.


The Census Bureau projects that, if there is no change in immigration policy, 30 percent of the nation will be Hispanic by 2050. To avoid developing a large economic underclass, we need to confront the question of whether they will assimilate

The children of Hispanic immigrants (the second generation) actually stay in school much longer and earn a considerably higher wage than their parents. In fact, the Hispanic rate of assimilation from the first to the second generation is only slightly lower than the assimilation rate of more successful groups of immigrants. Most second-generation Hispanics make up nearly as much ground as the children of European immigrants would if they grew up in the same disadvantaged situation.

But the good news ends there, and two problems arise. First, the second generation still does not come close to matching the socioeconomic status of white natives. Even if Hispanics were to keep climbing the ladder each generation, their assimilation would be markedly slower than that of other groups. But even that view is overly optimistic, because of the second, larger problem with Hispanic assimilation: It appears to stall after the second generation. We see little further ladder-climbing from the grandchildren of Hispanic immigrants. They do not rise out of the lower class.

I mentioned it earlier that as the rest of America becomes more like California, it is time to take a close look at California...


The educational picture does not look much better. The children of Hispanic immigrants are much better educated than their parents. However, American-born Hispanics still have high dropout and low college-completion rates compared with white natives, and there is little improvement from the second to the 3+ generations. Again, progress stalls.

These results do not depend on the time period considered. Economists Jeffrey Grogger and Stephen Trejo reached the same conclusions when they used CPS data from the mid-1990s for a similar analysis of Mexican Americans. And other datasets tell the same story. One study reported results from the Latino National Political Survey, conducted in 1989 and 1990. Among its striking findings was that the percentage of Mexican-American households with incomes higher than $50,000 rose from 7 percent in the first generation to 11 percent in the second. But the same statistic in the third and fourth generations stayed at 11 percent, at a time when the national rate was 24 percent. Another study, the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, began tracking a representative sample of young Americans in 1979. By 1993, the Hispanic 3+ generations in that sample had, if anything, slightly worse outcomes than the second generation in terms of wages, educational attainment, and cognitive test scores.

They also have a higher amount of births out of wedlock.

It is depressing to see the difference between the diversity hype and the reality of Latino assimilation. It is going to pose a real problem as they make up more and more of this nation.


So why do Hispanics, on average, not assimilate? Theories abound. Popular explanations from the left include the legacy of white racism, labor-market discrimination, housing segregation, and poor educational opportunities. Those on the right tend to cite enforced multiculturalism, ethnic enclaves, and a self-perpetuating culture of poverty. One would need a whole book to sort out these competing explanations, but we can safely say that none of them, even if true, suggests easy solutions. Social scientists have not devised any set of programs that effectively spurs assimilation.

That assimilation has stalled even among third-generation Hispanics growing up today is especially sobering. In the early 20th century, the quality of schools varied greatly, high-school graduation was unusual, travel was relatively difficult, and universities and employers were free to discriminate based on ethnicity. Today all but the worst inner-city schools are well funded, high-school graduation is expected, traveling around the country to look for work is much easier, and affirmative-action programs give preferences to Hispanics. Despite these advantages over earlier immigrants, today's Hispanics have not closed the socioeconomic gap with white natives.

You have to wonder why would give affirmative-action hand outs to immigrants to this country. You can argue that we have a legacy of racism and discrimination in this country, but new immigrants didn't bear the brunt of that. A Mexican that snuck across the border and was granted amnesty in the 80s can qualify for special hiring practices that poor working class white people can't get. Why do we hate white people? What did poor white people do to you?


Though continuing research on the barriers to Hispanic assimilation will be valuable, the reality is that no intervention in the foreseeable future will change the very slow and perhaps nonexistent assimilation process into a fast and effective one.

The consequences of a large ethno-cultural group's lagging behind the majority in education and income are significant. In strictly economic terms, perpetually poor immigrants and their descendants will be a major strain on social spending and infrastructure. Health care, public education, welfare payments, the criminal justice system, and programs for affordable housing will all require more tax dollars. When pro-immigration conservatives declare that these government programs should be scaled back or eliminated entirely, I am sympathetic. But a large public sector is a reality that cannot be wished away--we will not be abolishing Medicaid or public schools anytime soon. Immigration policy needs to take that reality into account.

Even if economics were not a concern, the lack of Hispanic assimilation is likely to create ethnic tensions that threaten our cultural core. Human beings are a tribal species, and this makes ethnicity a natural fault line in any society. Intra-European ethnic divisions have been largely overcome through economic assimilation--Irish and Italian immigrants may have looked a bit different from natives, but by the third generation their socioeconomic profiles were similar. Hispanic Americans do not have that benefit.

Read the whole thing, though I already probably quoted too much of it. It paints quite a dreary picture of the future prospects of immigration assimilation and the impacts it will have on America.


Is it possible that the people who are most hurt by massive immigration of Mexicans are Mexican Americans themselves? Is that one explanation why their wages have fallen or are stagnant after many generations?

I didn't discuss that the first time I wrote this post but it makes sense. Importing large waves of unskilled labor into the country drives down wages and drives up unemployment. If Mexican-Americans lag in school they would probably be competing with the same immigrants in most of the same geographical areas.

Caesar Chavez organized the farm workers, and he was adamantly AGAINST illegal immigration just for that reason. You can't go on strike and gain concessions from management if they can turn around and get busloads of cheap labor right over the border.

[Kahns Krazy]

Yay. It's like a "best of Snipe".

[Snipe]

I found the above article while reading a post (http://www.nationalreview.com/agenda/243196/brief-post-immigration-reihan-salam) by Reihan Salam

Brief Post on Immigration (http://www.nationalreview.com/agenda/243196/brief-post-immigration-reihan-salam)

He concludes:


My guess is that the United States could successfully manage this transition. We are a wealthy country with a vibrant culture. If our immigration policy is motivated by humanitarian concerns, we obviously wouldn’t focus on Mexico as opposed to the world’s poorest countries. And if our immigration policy is not motivated by humanitarian concerns, we’d presumably want to place a greater emphasis on drawing skilled migrants rather than less-skilled migrants, as Richwine and many others recommend. In either case, we’d need a very different immigration system. The main case for the status quo, or for a comprehensive immigration reform that entrenches existing patterns, seems to rest on interest group politics.

Reihan Salam soundly concludes that the only reason that we have our current immigration system is because of group politics. Latinos are immigrating and breeding their way to become the largest component in our country, and neither the Democrats nor the Republicans want to run the risk of alienating them by confronting the problem. It just does not make sense to take wave after wave of dirt poor uneducated Mexicans, but nobody is going to stop it. Hell, most people don't even want to talk about it in polite company. If you are a middle class white person you could be branded a racist for broaching the subject. So the beat goes on.

What I found odd when rereading this in context of the 1965 act: The 1965 act was done in part to show that we are not a bigoted country and that we will accept everyone. People thought that interest group politics shouldn't play a part in the system. It looks like we replaced one interest group with another. Immigration debate is dominated and influenced by the immerging Hispanic minority instead of the declining white minority. Politics still dominates the debate; it is just another group’s politics. Is this country better off when Latino politics are a dominant factor in who we let in instead of White European politics? Seems like two sides of the same coin and where you come down on depends upon your perspective. But it isn't rational immigration policy; it is political interest group policy. That is what we were supposed to getting away from in 1965, and in that sense the Act was a total failure.

[Snipe]

Yay. It's like a "best of Snipe".

I know, my ego knows no bounds. I did warn people. I wanted to get it all on one thread.

I will have other stuff too. I am sure you are excited.

[Snipe]

I know, my ego knows no bounds. I did warn people. I wanted to get it all on one thread.

I will have other stuff too. I am sure you are excited.
I have to add that while I think demographic change is a major factor of what is going on in California it is by all means not the end of the argument.

Consider the State of Texas. Texas has had huge demographic changes as well yet they are not going bankrupt.

People have talked about the government of California being bad. They weren't lying.

The Essence and Future of Texas vs. California (http://www.newgeography.com/content/001211-the-essence-and-future-texas-vs-california)


I know there have been a lot of articles and references to Texas vs. California recently in this blog, but, well, there's a new one with some genuinely new contributions to the argument ("America's Future: California vs. Texas", Trends magazine, hat tip to Jeff). And it says some nice things about Houston too, so how can I pass on it? The beginning of the article is here (http://www.trends-magazine.com/trend.php/Trend/2047/Category/55)- including an overview of both states' situations - but here are some key additional excerpts:



...Both the Brookings Institution and Forbes Magazine studied America’s cities and rated them for how well they create new jobs. All of America’s top five job-creating cities were in Texas. It's more than purely economics and regulation can explain, though. Texas – and Houston in particular – has a broad mix of Hispanics, whites, Asians, and blacks with virtually no racial problems. Texas welcomes new people and exemplifies genuine tolerance. When Hurricane Katrina hit, Houston took in 100,000 people. Not surprisingly, Houston has more foreign consulates than any American city other than New York and Los Angeles.
...
But, how did this happen? What’s wrong with California, and what’s right with Texas? It really comes down to four fundamental differences in the value systems embodied in these states:

First, Texans on average believe in laissez-faire markets with an emphasis on individual responsibility. Since the '80s, California’s policy-makers have favored central planning solutions and a reliance on a government social safety net. This unrelenting commitment to big government has led to a huge tax burden and triggered a mass exodus of jobs. The Trends Editors examined the resulting migration in “Voting with Our Feet,” in the April 2008 issue of Trends.

Second, Californians have largely treated environmentalism as a “religious sacrament” rather than as one component among many in maximizing people's quality of life. As we explained in “The Road Ahead for Housing,” in the June 2009 issue of Trends, environmentally-based land-use restriction centered in California played a huge role in inflating the recent housing bubble. Similarly, an unwillingness to manage ecology proactively for man’s benefit has been behind the recent epidemic of wildfires.

Third, California has placed “ethnic diversity” above “assimilation,” while Texas has done the opposite. “Identity politics” has created psychological ghettos that have prevented many of California’s diverse ethnic groups and subcultures from integrating fully into the mainstream. Texas, on the other hand, has proactively encouraged all the state’s residents to join the mainstream.

Fourth, beyond taxes, diversity, and the environment, Texas has focused on streamlining the regulatory and litigation burden on its residents. Meanwhile, California’s government has attempted to use regulation and litigation to transfer wealth from its creators to various special-interest constituencies.

I think it is interesting that Houston didn't have a housing bubble and California did. People really don't draw much connection to the environmental movement to housing prices, but maybe they should. Housing prices are always steeper when you have land use restrictions. Houston has one of the most lax regulatory environments in the nation. Move your business to Houston and they will work with you so you can hit the ground running in no time. Move it to California and you could be tangled in paperwork for over a year. And if your business is building a power plant you can forget about that in California. Texas isn't that way.

Texas exploits their oil and gas. California bans drilling off of it's oil rich coast. Texas gets the money, California doesn't. Texas gets the oil and gas jobs, which are probably pretty accomidating to Mexican immigrants with a work ethic. Where are California's green jobs? And where do Mexicans fit in with developing "green jobs" or working in the Silicone Valley? Texas seems to use it's land and people to its advantage, while California seems to use it's land and resources against it's people. Seems obvious to me who has a better system, and that is an important consideration for all of our future. Do we want to be more like California or Texas?

[Kahns Krazy]

This thread is the message board equivalent of a leper colony.

[Snipe]

It is only going to go down from here too. This won't end well...

[Snipe]

I read this article yesterday and thought I would apply it to California:

Why center-left parties are collapsing
Democrats sacrificed the working class to woo bankers and professionals -- and now they're paying a steep price (http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2010/11/02/center_left_parties_lind)


The immigration issue is particularly damaging to the center-left, because it illustrates the growing divide between the populist working class and the professional-class elites who control the machinery of center-left parties. The conflicts associated with Muslim immigration in Europe are different from those associated with Latino immigration in the U.S., but on both sides of the Atlantic parties of the center-left have treated any concern about the effects of high immigration on wages, the welfare state, or national cultural community as deplorable racism. While the mainstream conservative parties of Europe officially denounce far-right nativist parties like the Sweden Democrats, the Dutch Freedom Party and the French National Front, they have moved to the right to co-opt the issue. In France, Nicolas Sarkozy was catapulted to the presidency after he called Muslim rioters "scum" and supervised a crackdown in his previous post as interior minister. Angela Merkel, the conservative chancellor of Germany, recently declared that multiculturalism in Germany had "utterly failed," and Horst Seehofer, leader of a conservative Bavarian party allied with the ruling Christian Democrats, declared: "Multikulti is dead."

During the recent British electoral campaign, David Cameron’s Tories criticized non-EU immigration, a code word for Muslim immigration. Meanwhile, New Labour prime minister Gordon Brown harmed his chances for reelection in what the tabloids called "bigotgate." Gordon Brown’s demise was accelerated by a similar gaffe during the recent British election campaign. After a 65-year-old widow named Gillian Duffy asked him about "all those eastern Europeans coming in," an open microphone caught Brown telling an aide that "she was just a sort of bigoted woman who said she used to be Labour." Brown’s dismissive attitude was strikingly similar to that of then-candidate Barack Obama in 2008. In the infamous leaked speech to a group of rich donors in San Francisco, Obama attributed the preference of white working-class voters for Hillary Clinton in terms of their alleged pathology: "It’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustration." It is hardly surprising that working-class voters in Europe and America should reject center-left politicians who treat them as annoying yokels whom they must humor on the way to their coronations.

In general the parallels between the U.S. and Europe are striking. In the U.S., as in Europe, the right is divided between a pro-business right promoting policies of austerity and a populist, nativist right energized by opposition to immigration and multiculturalism, particularly where Muslims are involved. In the U.S., as in Europe, the upper-middle-class activists and intellectuals of the center-left devote far less energy to traditional social democratic issues like social insurance and the minimum wage than to non-economic causes like renewable energy, mass transit, the new urbanism, gay marriage, identity politics and promotion of amnesty for illegal immigrants. On both continents, conservatism is becoming more downscale while progressives are increasingly upmarket.

I am a libertarian conservative. Conservatives just won a huge landslide Congressional election. It would be nice at times like this to think the whole country is shifting towards conservatism. This author says that isn't the case. He is saying that the center-left majority still exists in much of the US and Europe, but the other parts of the left have co-opted the party and kicked them out. The reaction is an increase in voting for conservative parties.

Consider the scenario of a working class social liberal in California. Put yourself in their shoes. You consider yourself a liberal, not rabid or fringe, but simply liberal (committed to equality, tolerance, public schools). What happens when elites co-opt the party?

The environmental left is a problem for the center left of the working class. In California the land use restrictions drive up the price of housing and having a family. Those committed to Gaia, the Goddess of the Environment make all of your energy costs skyrocket. Elite liberals have been driving up the cost of electricity and gas in California for quite some time.


In the U.S., as in Europe, the upper-middle-class activists and intellectuals of the center-left devote far less energy to traditional social democratic issues like social insurance and the minimum wage than to non-economic causes like renewable energy, mass transit, the new urbanism, gay marriage, identity politics and promotion of amnesty for illegal immigrants

When you struggle to pay your bills the elitist left doesn't seek to help you, they spend money on fancy mass transit projects, or money losing "renewable energy". They endlessly debate about gay marriage or the rights of transgender peoples, while not paying any attention to you. They promote amnesty and have "sanctuary cities", as well as the "identity politics" that plague California. When the mass immigration comes, the schools are ruined. You can't afford to educate your children. At some point high housing costs, high energy costs, high taxes and terrible schools take effect, and you simply leave.

Now you never left the "political left", the political left just left you. You didn't suddenly become a free-market enthusiast or a libertarian, you were basically kicked out of your own party. Consider that moderates on the Center-Left were once the majority of the base of the party. They were the heart and soul. Now they feel forced out. The elites don't care about the same things they do. In California politics you have a huge Latino vote and immigration is a huge issue. At the top of the party you the elite liberals that have their green fetishes and whatnot. They don't need the workingman of the center left and that workingman has gotten the message.

I thought it was an interesting analysis of the last election cycle and I think it bears some truth too.

[Snipe]

IMHO, it's the state government and geography.

...

A good chunk of those people are squeezed between the coastal mountains and the Pacific, which creates high cost of living.

And the state government absolutely sucks.

I think the state government absolutely sucks too. I can agree with that. On geography I am not so sure. Those coastal mountains were there ever since California became a state. Those mountains have been pretty successful. Now that things have taken a turn for the worse, it seems a little unfair to blame the mountains. Japan has lots of mountains. Chile has lots of mountains. Those countries seem to be doing well. Maybe it isn't the mountains, but the mountains of government debt and obligations that come with the expansive welfare state.



There is a lot wrong with CA including high tax rates. The one thing you are forgetting however is that the housing bubble and subsequent bust is an enormous contributor to their problems. Had home prices not escalated to unrealistic levels due to easy money greenspan and the greedy banking industry then politicians wouldn't have been able to think up as many stupid projects/policies. Now that the easy property tax revenue is declining from home price declines and vacant houses plus decreases in other taxes related to job losses, etc they are having a hard time paying their bills.

I say let them fail. Let the chips fall where they may. The entire country needs a lesson on responsibility.

I agree that a Republican congress will not go for the bailout because they can blame the Democrats but they definitely would have bailed out CA under Bush and probably will again if they regain the white house. The fallout from a bankrupt CA will be severe and I just don't see them allowing another economic catastrophy occur on their watch when they are able to stop it. Bush bailed out the banks so it is difficult to imagine he would have let CA go down.

I am not sure you can blame California's problems with respect to other states as caused by Alan Greenspan and the "greedy bankers". Ohio didn't have the same bubble that California had. Texas didn't have it either. What about progressive policies of land-use restriction? That drives up the prices in your bubble. That didn't happen everywhere. And just the fact that 3,000 "high earners" are leaving every week affects your housing prices. Those people are selling their homes and "high earners" aren't coming into California to buy them. Texas on the other hand has people moving to it. That tends to help your housing market.

As for Bush bailing out California I am sure he would have. He was always a big government liberal at heart. He never saw a problem he couldn’t throw money at or vetoed a bill because it spent too much money. I am still confused as to why more liberals didn’t like him. He certainly spent the money. Education, AIDs, foreign aid, he set records in education and AIDs spending. How much money did they throw at Katrina? He cut taxes for the poor, giving the largest percentage of the population in modern history that doesn’t pay federal income tax. With Medicare reform he gave us the biggest expansion of entitlement spending since LBJ. I mean really, what did he have to do to get a little liberal love? The man was big government liberal through and through.

[Snipe]

Just because you're in debt or broke, doesn't mean you're dead. And if you don't want to be a part of paying off the debt, well you just leave like so many are doing. Who's going to make California pay? And really, who is California? It's not like you can go over and knock on Californias door and demand your money. Craziness. Bottom line, people voted two days ago, and those people are apparently happy.

So, what happen to Miami Florida? Or what happened to OTR or Norwood?

Nobody can really make California pay. If you own California bonds you might not get paid. California will at some point default in my opinion, and your bonds would lose value or become worthless. That isn't the problem for California. The problem is the next time they try to raise money with bonds, or when they get close to default and nobody wants to carry that risk. If people stop lending to California this process could really speed itself up.

If you can't issue bonds it is hard to do large projects, like build highways, bridges or schools. California's infrastructure is crumbling. How will it get updated? It really will have an effect on them and I don't think it will be pretty.

[Snipe]

We were having a conversation at work about Cal and bankruptcy.

If the government bails them out, will this trigger the snowball effect of socialism? Will the federal government be in charge of California? If so, does Cal lose if voting priveleges? Do they have representatives like guam, Puerto Rico but do not get to cast votes in congress?

If they do bail them out, then nothing changes.

IMHO, California is already a lost cause.

At this point, if a governor in any state that has lost alot of jobs, why not approach some of these corporations, promise great tax incentives and get them out of California. If they stay they're just going to end up being taxed to death. Hell, Silcon valley could move to Arizona or some other place with the right incentives. Build the buildings for them.

I don't know what's going to happen to these companies but I'm pretty sure they don't either.

I can't see us taking away their voting rights, as desirable as that might sound to some.

I think California is a lost cause too. I think bankruptcy and chaos is in their future. And I do think states are actively going after California businesses. Texas does a good job at attracting business. Many states sell themselves to California and businesses are listening.

[Snowboarder]

The biggest Texas cities usually have mayors who are Democrats. Houston has had a Democratic mayor since 1982, San Antonio since 1981, Austin since the 80's, and Dallas usually rotates from Democrat to Republican. The most conservative parts of the state are West Texas and the Panhandle which happen to be the poorest parts of the state. Your arguments as usual hold no water Snipe. You should move to Midland or Amarillo with your fellow right wing brethren and see how bad off economically they are.

[Smails]

The biggest Texas cities usually have mayors who are Democrats. Houston has had a Democratic mayor since 1982, San Antonio since 1981, Austin since the 80's, and Dallas usually rotates from Democrat to Republican. The most conservative parts of the state are West Texas and the Panhandle which happen to be the poorest parts of the state. Your arguments as usual hold no water Snipe. You should move to Midland or Amarillo with your fellow right wing brethren and see how bad off economically they are.

Ummm...ok. So California is going broke and the righties are raping West Texas? I guess i fail to see just what on God's green earth you are talking about.

[sweet16]

The biggest Texas cities usually have mayors who are Democrats. Houston has had a Democratic mayor since 1982, San Antonio since 1981, Austin since the 80's, and Dallas usually rotates from Democrat to Republican. The most conservative parts of the state are West Texas and the Panhandle which happen to be the poorest parts of the state. Your arguments as usual hold no water Snipe. You should move to Midland or Amarillo with your fellow right wing brethren and see how bad off economically they are.

Uh, you don't think that maybe there are other variables (other than politics) that come into play that explain the plight in West Texas and the Panhandle?

[Snowboarder]

Ummm...ok. So California is going broke and the righties are raping West Texas? I guess i fail to see just what on God's green earth you are talking about.

California is not the only state going broke or in the hole. Since the recession started I would guess that every state is almost broke or facing huge defecits. I was just stating that that the state of Texas is not monolithic. I know this since my father is from West Texas and I have quite a bit of family in Texas. Texas went through the same thing that California is going through now. I guess you never heard about the oil bust during the late 70's and early 80's that almost broke Texas. The bigger cities in the Eastern half of Texas learned a lesson from this and they diversified their economies, where as West Texas did not. Plus the collapse of Enron did lots of damage to Houston and that city still has not fully recovered, but I guess you still have no idea what I am talking about.

[Snipe]

The biggest Texas cities usually have mayors who are Democrats. Houston has had a Democratic mayor since 1982, San Antonio since 1981, Austin since the 80's, and Dallas usually rotates from Democrat to Republican. The most conservative parts of the state are West Texas and the Panhandle which happen to be the poorest parts of the state. Your arguments as usual hold no water Snipe. You should move to Midland or Amarillo with your fellow right wing brethren and see how bad off economically they are.

I did talk about the alienated Center-Left that was for a longtime the cornerstone of the Democratic Party and you could argue a Center-Left America. I would probably be willing to bet that most Texas Democrats are about as conservative as California Republicans. Cincinnati Democrats seem to be the same way. Old man Luken wasn't a liberal. He son wasn't either.

I spar often with DC Muskie and PMThor. I bait them and call them liberals. They would probably feel pretty conservative out in California.

I vote for Center Left politicians at times and I like them. I voted for David Pepper. He is a conservative Democrat. I wanted Evan Byah to run for President and I predicted if they elected a conservative Democrat who could cut government spending that the Democrats would run the Republicans off into the political abyss. And I would have been completely fine with that too. I like Heath Shuler and Jim Webb, very fine Democrats that I could vote for over an Ohio pol like ex Republican Senator George Voinovich or ex Gov Robert Taft.

It isn't just that Democrats are running California; it is a radical faction of progressives that has lost touch with their center-left democratic base. It is useless to argue with you if you don't accept the premise that Texas is conservative in nature and that California is progressive. To me those are facts of life.

In assimilating the Hispanic influx it appears the Texas way works much better. Most of the radical Mexican flag waving rallies are in California. If Texas has a better system with this I think we should pay attention. If California is going down the tubes we also need to understand why.

I don’t even know what a California collapse would look like. Would it be orderly? Would there be violence? What happens when they go bankrupt? Do they lay off police or border patrol? Fireman for forest fires? Will there be lawlessness and pockets of anarchy? I don’t know. Could the images I conjure up be exaggerated? Sure. Things are bad in California. I don’t know how they get solved. The State has no money. Cities are on the verge of bankruptcy. Pension costs are through the roof. And you haven’t seen anger until you see a retired pensioner who doesn’t get his check.

The whole thing is going to blow.

[GuyFawkes38]

I think the state government absolutely sucks too. I can agree with that. On geography I am not so sure. Those coastal mountains were there ever since California became a state. Those mountains have been pretty successful. Now that things have taken a turn for the worse, it seems a little unfair to blame the mountains. Japan has lots of mountains. Chile has lots of mountains. Those countries seem to be doing well. Maybe it isn't the mountains, but the mountains of government debt and obligations that come with the expansive welfare state.

But there was a time when land was plentiful and cheap in California. The San Fernando Valley was farmland.

From the 1980's on, home prices have risen to staggering levels. It's the most expensive state to live in the country.

http://www.oftwominds.com/photos07/CA-homes.gif

Japan is really expensive too and experienced a real estate bubble in the 1990's just like California did in 2008.

The past 5 years has been a struggle for the California economy. But from 1980-2005 the state witnessed incredible economic growth. There was a lot of cash chasing a fixed amount of space and real estate.

Of course, all of that has nothing to do with the state going into massive debt. But it definitely is a reason why the state is so expensive and middle class residents are moving out.

[GuyFawkes38]

This from the NYtimes:


Attracting Valuable Coaches to the Priciest College Town

PALO ALTO, Calif., Nov. 5 — When Scott Shafer came to Stanford to interview for the defensive coordinator’s job last winter, he became more excited as the day went on. He enjoyed Coach Jim Harbaugh’s energy, meeting his potential co-workers and seeing the vision for the program.

That excitement quickly dwindled when he saw the look on the face of his wife, Missy, who had spent the morning looking at local real estate.

“I came back in tears,” Missy Shafer said. “I was literally crying.”

Missy’s tears came from the sticker shock. She realized that buying a four-bedroom home similar to the $240,000 one they had just built in Kalamazoo, Mich., where Scott served as the defensive coordinator at Western Michigan, would cost about $1.5 million more.

Look at a map of the region in google satellite view. The area that experienced the tech boom is surrounded by mountains and water. There's a lot of cash chasing relatively few houses.

Edit: Here's a good image. We don't have this problem in Ohio:

http://0.tqn.com/f/wiki/e/en/thumb/5/5c/BayareaUSGS.jpg/300px-BayareaUSGS.jpg

[Masterofreality]

Plus the collapse of Enron did lots of damage to Houston and that city still has not fully recovered, but I guess you still have no idea what I am talking about.

Houston population grew 14.4% from 2000-2009 - U.S. Census Bureau

Houston's population was 2,257,926 in 2009, according to the bureau’s latest round of estimates. That’s up from 1,972,727 in 2000, when the previous decennial census was conducted. Houston was then also the fourth-largest city in the country.

Hmmmmm. Houston-Lots of damage and it hasn't recovered. I guess I have no idea what the hell you're talking about.

Cleveland sure would like to have that kind of "damage".

[Strange Brew]

Californians...

[madness31]

The big difference between CA and TX is that TX has a ton of energy money. They also have favorable tax policies which brings businesses to the state. CA has been badly mismanaged, including tax policy. Claiming this mismanagement is purely political is too simple. There are plenty of well run states and cities with Democratic leaders. There are plenty of poorly run states and cities lead by Republicans. Anti business policies are destructive whether done by Democrats or Republicans.

Not sure who is running Harrisburg or Pitsburgh PA but they are both having serious budget problems. One is already missing bond payments and the other is at risk of having its pensions taken over by the state due to severe underfunding.

[Snipe]

Guy ~

From Cato:

Blame Urban Planning (http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/blame-urban-planning/)


So it all started with the bubble. But what caused the bubble? The answer is clear: excessive land-use regulation. Yet while many talk about re-regulating banks and other financial firms, hardly anyone is talking about deregulating land.

The housing bubble was not universal. It almost exclusively struck states and regions that were heavily regulating land and housing. In fast-growing places with no such regulation, such as Dallas, Houston, and Raleigh, housing prices did not bubble and they are not declining today.

The key to making a housing bubble is to give cities control over development of rural areas — a step that is often called “growth-management planning.” If they have such control, they will restrict such development in the name of stopping “urban sprawl” — an imaginary problem — while their real goal is to keep development and its associated tax revenues within their borders. Once they have limited rural development, they will impose all sorts of conditions and fees on developers, often prolonging the permitting process by several years. This makes it impossible for developers to respond to increased housing demand by stepping up production.

You might want to look into the statistics of how concentrated this bubble was...


Before 1960, virtually all housing in the United States was “affordable,” meaning that the median home prices in communities across the country were all about two times median-family incomes. But in the early 1960s, Hawaii and California passed laws allowing cities to regulate rural development. Oregon and Vermont followed in the 1970s. These states all experienced housing bubbles in the 1970s, with median prices reaching four times median-family incomes. Because they represented a small share of total U.S. housing, these bubbles did not cause a worldwide financial meltdown.

California likes to limit "sprawl".


Though everyone knows that the deflation of the housing bubble is what caused the financial meltdown, few have associated the bubble itself with land-use regulation. Back in 2005, Paul Krugman observed that the bubble was caused by excessive land-use regulation.

When Paul Krugman and the CATO institute agree on something it is either dead on or a sign of the apocalypse. Here is what Krugman had to say (http://www.pkarchive.org/column/080805.html):


Then there are the numbers. Many bubble deniers point to average prices for the country as a whole, which look worrisome but not totally crazy. When it comes to housing, however, the United States is really two countries, Flatland and the Zoned Zone.

In Flatland, which occupies the middle of the country, it's easy to build houses. When the demand for houses rises, Flatland metropolitan areas, which don't really have traditional downtowns, just sprawl some more. As a result, housing prices are basically determined by the cost of construction. In Flatland, a housing bubble can't even get started.

But in the Zoned Zone, which lies along the coasts, a combination of high population density and land-use restrictions - hence "zoned" - makes it hard to build new houses. So when people become willing to spend more on houses, say because of a fall in mortgage rates, some houses get built, but the prices of existing houses also go up. And if people think that prices will continue to rise, they become willing to spend even more, driving prices still higher, and so on. In other words, the Zoned Zone is prone to housing bubbles.

And Zoned Zone housing prices, which have risen much faster than the national average, clearly point to a bubble.

In the nation as a whole, housing prices rose about 50 percent between the first quarter of 2000 and the first quarter of 2005. But that average blends results from Flatland metropolitan areas like Houston and Atlanta, where prices rose 26 and 29 percent respectively, with results from Zoned Zone areas like New York, Miami and San Diego, where prices rose 77, 96 and 118 percent.

Krugman had it right back in 2005.

Thomas Sowell also blames land use zoning regulations.

Here is the way Randal O'Toole at CATO finishes:


Even worse, the Environmental Protection Agency has proposed to “integrate climate and land use” — effectively using global warming fears to impose nationwide growth management. Supposedly — though there is no evidence for it — people in denser communities emit fewer greenhouse gases, and growth management can be used to impose densities on Americans who would rather live on quarter-acre lots. The California legislature recently passed a law requiring cities to impose even tighter growth restrictions in order to reduce greenhouse gases — and its implementation will be judged on the restrictions, not on whether those restrictions actually reduce emissions.

Instead of such laws, states that have regulated their land and housing should deregulate them. Congress should treat land-use regulations as restrictions on interstate mobility, and deny federal housing and transportation funds to states that impose such rules. Otherwise, hard as it may be to imagine, the consequences of the next housing bubble will be even worse than this one.

California alone is to blame for California’s housing bubble. It is basically written in the law.

[Snipe]

What about the unintended consequences of "Affordable Housing" mandates? Check this out:

Housing Supply and Affordability
Do Affordable Housing Mandates Work? (http://reason.org/news/show/housing-supply-and-affordabili)


The number of cities with affordable housing mandates has grown rapidly, to about 10 percent of cities over 100,000 population as of the mid-90s, and many advocacy groups predict the trend will accelerate in the next five years. California was an early leader in the adoption of inclusionary zoning, and its use there has grown rapidly. Between 1990 and 2003, the number of California communities with inclusionary zoning more than tripled—from 29 to 107 communities—meaning about 20 percent of California communities now have inclusionary zoning.

Then this:


In this paper we use data from communities in the San Francisco Bay Area region to evaluate the effects of inclusionary zoning and examine whether it is an effective public policy response to high housing prices. We chose the Bay Area because inclusionary zoning is particularly prevalent there; today more than 50 jurisdictions in the region have inclusionary zoning. These communities have various sizes and densities with different income levels and demographics, so they provide a good sample to tell us how inclusionary zoning is probably working nationwide.

These are our findings:

Inclusionary Zoning Produces Few Units

...After passing an ordinance, the average city produces fewer than 15 affordable units per year...

Inclusionary Zoning Has High Costs

...

Inclusionary Zoning Restricts the Supply of New Homes

Inclusionary zoning drives away builders, makes landowners supply less land for residential use, and leads to less housing for homebuyers—the very problem it was instituted to address.

In the 45 cities where data is available, we find that new housing production drastically decreases the year after cities adopt inclusionary zoning. The average city produced 214 units the year before inclusionary zoning but only 147 units the year after. Thus, new construction decreases by 31 percent the year following the adoption of inclusionary zoning.

In the 33 cities with data for seven years prior and seven years following inclusionary zoning, 10,662 fewer homes were produced during the seven years after the adoption of inclusionary zoning. By artificially lowering the value of homes in those 33 cities, $6.5 billion worth of housing was essentially destroyed.

Considering that over 30 years inclusionary zoning has only yielded 6,836 affordable units, one must question whether those units are worth the cost in terms of fewer and higher-priced homes.

Inclusionary Zoning Costs Government Revenue

...The total present value of lost government revenue due to Bay Area inclusionary zoning ordinances is upwards of $553 million.

Price Controls Do Not Address the Cause of the Affordability Problem

Price controls fail to get to the root of the affordable housing problem. Indeed by causing fewer homes to be built they actually make things worse. The real problem is government restrictions on supply. ...

...Supply has not kept up with demand due to artificial restrictions. One recent study found that 90 percent of the difference between physical construction costs and the market price of new homes can be attributed to land use regulation.

The solution is to allow more construction. When the supply of homes increases, existing homeowners often upgrade to the newly constructed homes. This frees up their prior homes for other families with lower income. Inclusionary zoning restricts this upgrade process by slowing or eliminating new construction. With fewer new homes available, middle- and upper-income families bid up the price of the existing stock of homes, thus making housing less affordable for everyone.

Conclusion
Inclusionary zoning has failed to produce a significant number of affordable homes due to the incentives created by the price controls. Even the few inclusionary zoning units produced have cost builders, homeowners, and governments greatly. By restricting the supply of new homes and driving up the price of both newly constructed market-rate homes and the existing stock of homes, inclusionary zoning makes housing less affordable.

Inclusionary ordinances will continue to make housing less affordable by restricting the supply of new homes. If more affordable housing is the goal, governments should pursue policies that encourage the production of new housing. Ending the price controls of inclusionary zoning would be a good start.

It isn't the mountains Guy, it is the zoning. There is more where this came from too if you want it. Our housing bubble and present financial collapse of the mortgage industry was cooked up in places like California. That bailout wasn't for Ohio mortgages. We are already paying for their sins, and it isn't the freaking mountains.

California is a testament to progressive politics. Those politics will be on trial in the murder of California.

Further reading (http://www.demographia.com/db-dhi-econ.pdf)

[Snipe]

More Than 8.3 Million U.S. Mortgages Are Under Water (Update3) (http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aOpE4o.BuHfM)


California Leads
U.S. foreclosure filings exceeded 250,000 for the 10th straight month in January, RealtyTrac Inc. reported, and payrolls plunged by 598,000, pushing the unemployment rate to the highest since 1992, according to the Labor Department.

An average of 230,000 borrowers a month slid to negative equity in the fourth quarter of 2008, First American said. California led with 43,000.

California has always been a leader...


California had the most underwater borrowers in the fourth quarter with 1.9 million.

Always a trend setter...

Housing Downturn Moves Into Phase II (http://www.newgeography.com/content/00602-housing-downturn-moves-into-phase-ii)


By September of 2008, house prices in the “ground zero” markets of California, Florida Las Vegas, Phoenix and Washington, DC had dropped from 25 percent to 45 percent from their peaks. These markets represented 75 percent of the overall lost value among the major metropolitan areas (those with more than 1,000,000 population).

We were not bailing out ourselves, we are bailing out a lot of people in California. And the default rate in California was highest among Mexican immigrants. That makes me a racist.


The Varieties of House Price Escalation Experience: In Phase I, the house price escalation and subsequent losses were far less severe in other major metropolitan areas. This depended in large part to the degree of land use controls – such as land rationing (urban growth boundaries and urban service limits), building moratoria, large lot zoning and other restrictions on building routinely – that helped drive prices up to unsustainable levels.

Did you read that Guy? Might not be the mountains after all. It might be the land rationing and zoning.


On the other hand, in the “responsive” land use regulation areas, the market (people’s preferences) was allowed to determine where and what kind of housing could be built. In these areas housing prices rose far less during the housing bubble and fell far less during Phase I of the housing downturn.

Wow Guy, it all seems to be coming together. Maybe those mountains had nothing to do with it. I do appreciate your google pic though.


Leading to the International Financial Crisis:

These radically differing house price trends set up world financial markets for ”Meltdown Monday.” The easy money led to a strong increase in foreclosure rates, an inevitable consequence of households having sought or been enticed into mortgage loans that they simply could not afford. Yet it was not foreclosure rates that doomed the market. It was rather the unprecedented intensity of those losses in particular markets.

Wait, are they telling me that politics of zoning in California and other similar venues actually lead to the international crisis? That is what they just said. It might be true. Guess who gets to pay?


Foreclosures were not the problem:

Foreclosures happened all over. Foreclosure rates rose drastically in California and the prescriptive markets, but had relatively less impact in the responsive markets of the South and Midwest, where house prices changed little relative to incomes.

Intensity of the losses was the problem. The problem lay largely in the scale of house value losses in some markets, particularly the most prescriptive ones. Lenders faced foreclosure and short sales losses on houses that had lost an average of $170,000 in value in the ground zero markets. In the responsive markets, on the other hand, average house value losses were less than one-tenth that, at $12,000 per house

Guy, I don't think he is buying your "Mountains" ideology. He seems to be saying that people that have prescriptive land use regulations inflate their property values, and then a bubble grows until it bursts. This isn't an Ohio bubble. I am still paying my mortgage. I am also paying for the Californians. If California gets a bailout this time around it won't be the first. We have been living through one right now. This bailout and the economic calamity that we have endured can be pinned on California more than any other state.

To be honest, I don't want to pay for them. I know their elites look at us as "fly over country" and they wouldn't be bailing us out. They couldn't give two shits about me or you for that matter. I think they despise us, at least their liberal elite. And we get to pay off their mortgages though our taxes.

[Strange Brew]

Snipe.....Atlas shuffled........elsewhere. THAT is the story of Cali.

San Fran just banned the free toy in the Happy Meal citing health issues in relation to the caloric/fat content of the Happy Meal.

If I'm McD's I fight and offer 4.99 for the toy that just so happens to come with a free Happy Meal.

Lazy parents make fat kids, not McD's.

[Smails]

California is not the only state going broke or in the hole. Since the recession started I would guess that every state is almost broke or facing huge defecits. I was just stating that that the state of Texas is not monolithic. I know this since my father is from West Texas and I have quite a bit of family in Texas. Texas went through the same thing that California is going through now. I guess you never heard about the oil bust during the late 70's and early 80's that almost broke Texas. The bigger cities in the Eastern half of Texas learned a lesson from this and they diversified their economies, where as West Texas did not. Plus the collapse of Enron did lots of damage to Houston and that city still has not fully recovered, but I guess you still have no idea what I am talking about.

Yes I understand that Texas had major energy issues in the late 70's. My comment was more geared to the point that this thread is about California and you decided to use it to take a half witted jab at the right by citing the problems of West Texas....which made little to no sense in the context of this thread.

[GuyFawkes38]

Wow Guy, it all seems to be coming together. Maybe those mountains had nothing to do with it. I do appreciate your google pic though.

Really???!!!! You just wrote two long posts which claimed that land usage played a big role.

In Cincinnati, would anyone care if the city sold part of Mount Airy Forest for development? I doubt it.

The San Francisco Bay area is different. They actually do have beautiful mountains with thousand year old redwoods. I'm far from an environmentalist. But I understand where they are coming from protecting such a wildly beautiful landscape.

It's absurd to compare the environment around Dallas and Houston (basically a hellish wasteland), to the pristine paradise of the Bay area.

Of course, your right that it isn't a great environment to attract low wage immigrants. The welfare safety net is too expensive in such a state. And there's too much of a temptation to promote affordable housing policies which leads to bad stuff.

But that's not a failure of land use regulations. It's a failure of national policies which sought affordable housing in a super expensive state (without relatively poor immigrants California would still be super expensive) and a state government that's not controlling its spending.

[Snipe]

Really???!!!! You just wrote two long posts which claimed that land usage played a big role.

In Cincinnati, would anyone care if the city sold part of Mount Airy Forest for development? I doubt it.

I think if the city of Cincinnati tired to sell Mt. Airy Forest people would go crazy.

From the national park service:


Established in 1911, the Mount Airy Forest covers an impressive 1,471 acres and includes natural areas, planned landscapes, buildings, structures, and landscape features. The numerous hiking trails, bridle paths, walls, gardens, pedestrian bridges, and various other improvements within Mount Airy Forest reflect the ambitious park planning and development that took place in Cincinnati in the early to mid-20th century. Conceived as the nation’s first urban reforestation project, the park has developed over the years—especially during the Depression and post-World War II period- into a park with a variety of areas, spaces and structures designed to accommodate recreational, social, and educational activities. Today it continues to offer a large expanse of protected land within the city limits where the public can enjoy the richness and diversity of nature.[3]

I have read that Mount Airy Forest is larger than any municipal park in the nation. If you can come to the facts of that and dispute it I would be eager to read your facts. I hike in Mt. Airy with my kids. I love our people and I love our land. I love our part of the country. I love the rolling hills of Kentucky. I love it all. If we tried to sell Mt. Airy I would be up in arms.



The San Francisco Bay area is different. They actually do have beautiful mountains with thousand year old redwoods. I'm far from an environmentalist. But I understand where they are coming from protecting such a wildly beautiful landscape.

It's absurd to compare the environment around Dallas and Houston (basically a hellish wasteland), to the pristine paradise of the Bay area.

San Francisco has a lot of rich white people and some beautiful surroundings. Now if I was a rich San Franciscan, I would think that I would much rather have beautiful surroundings that a patchwork of Latino sub dwellings. Property values and all! San Francisco is a white city just like Manhattan New York is white because other peoples can't afford to live there. The crazy thing is that the liberals and progressives there like to speak on behalf of the black and brown peoples and their rights, and they claim the city of San Francisco to be a sanctuary city.

Sanctuary indeed, when you can afford a 700k house.



Of course, your right that it isn't a great environment to attract low wage immigrants. The welfare safety net is too expensive in such a state. And there's too much of a temptation to promote affordable housing policies which leads to bad stuff.

But that's not a failure of land use regulations. It's a failure of national policies which sought affordable housing in a super expensive state (without relatively poor immigrants California would still be super expensive) and a state government that's not controlling its spending.

What environment is great to low wage and low skilled immigrants? And what does that do to our own native low wage and low skilled immigrants?

You argue that these are "national policies" but the effect of the bubble was felt in California and a few isolated other places. California also had extensive land use restrictions. What happened in California didn't happen everywhere. Maybe we should look at what California did. Maybe what they did had an effect. I think it did. Cheer on the old historic redwoods, but at some point if you confiscate land from property owners through "green renewable ideas" then at some point you have restricted land access and you create a land/housing bubble. It isn't that hard to follow this through when looking at the statistics. Don't tell me they are special in the Bay Area. They adopted "affordable housing" codes that actually restricted housing! Read my posts again if you don't believe that. Restricting housing causes housing costs to rise. Who would have thought?!

This isn't controversial stuff. This is basic supply and demand issues writ large through progressive restriction in the name of environmentalism. And we are all paying for it now.

[Snipe]

[
Snipe.....Atlas shuffled........elsewhere. THAT is the story of Cali.

San Fran just banned the free toy in the Happy Meal citing health issues in relation to the caloric/fat content of the Happy Meal.

If I'm McD's I fight and offer 4.99 for the toy that just so happens to come with a free Happy Meal.

Lazy parents make fat kids, not McD's.


The Happy Meal thing is a good example of why center-left democrats leave the democratic party for Republicans. What good working class democrat really cares about what San Fran has to say about Happy Meals? These are all fetishes of the left, and San Fran hits one or the other out of the park all the time.

The center left Democrat of the working class probably cares most about his children's public schools. He knows that Happy Meals aren't good for his kids every day, and he couldn't afford to feed them that way either way on a daily basis. It is a treat, and now the progressive Dems are taking away the Happy Meal. Next week they will talk more about green energy and transgender awareness. The whole of the progressive left is a joke. People that stood for the base of the Democratic Party are leaving because they are excluded. We need to find a way to welcome them and acclimate them into some version of fiscal conservatism. We can't agree on everything, but a balanced budget is one thing that we should all agree upon. Those people have the same values as far as that is concerned, and we need to capture the moment.

[GuyFawkes38]

I have read that Mount Airy Forest is larger than any municipal park in the nation. If you can come to the facts of that and dispute it I would be eager to read your facts. I hike in Mt. Airy with my kids. I love our people and I love our land. I love our part of the country. I love the rolling hills of Kentucky. I love it all. If we tried to sell Mt. Airy I would be up in arms.

But I think there's a difference. How many famous environmentalist came from Ohio and Texas compared to California? How many environmentalist organizations are there in each state?

California played a key role in the very beginning of the environmentalist movement.

People in California, Oregon, and Washington simply care more about the environment.

They have to live with the consequences of that (really expensive to live in and expensive to provide welfare to poorer residents).


What environment is great to low wage and low skilled immigrants? And what does that do to our own native low wage and low skilled immigrants?

Texas!!! Tons of land, cheap affordable housing.


You argue that these are "national policies" but the effect of the bubble was felt in California and a few isolated other places. California also had extensive land use restrictions. What happened in California didn't happen everywhere. Maybe we should look at what California did. Maybe what they did had an effect. I think it did. Cheer on the old historic redwoods, but at some point if you confiscate land from property owners through "green renewable ideas" then at some point you have restricted land access and you create a land/housing bubble. It isn't that hard to follow this through when looking at the statistics. Don't tell me they are special in the Bay Area. They adopted "affordable housing" codes that actually restricted housing! Read my posts again if you don't believe that. Restricting housing causes housing costs to rise. Who would have thought?!

You seem to be arguing that California should be a lot more like Texas and embrace less environmental regulations and land policies so they accommodate more poor people and poor immigrants.

I don't really mean to defend the people of California as much as I am. You can't have your cake and eat it too. California can't embrace environmental and land policies which make the state really expensive to live in and open the door to many, many poor immigrants without paying for costs associated for that. And that's what many in California apparently want to do.

But yeah, ultimately, I think the mountains are key.

[Strange Brew]

[


The Happy Meal thing is a good example of why center-left democrats leave the democratic party for Republicans. What good working class democrat really cares about what San Fran has to say about Happy Meals? These are all fetishes of the left, and San Fran hits one or the other out of the park all the time.
b
The center left Democrat of the working class probably cares most about his children's public schools. He knows that Happy Meals aren't good for his kids every day, and he couldn't afford to feed them that way either way on a daily basis. It is a treat, and now the progressive Dems are taking away the Happy Meal. Next week they will talk more about green energy and transgender awareness. The whole of the progressive left is a joke. People that stood for the base of the Democratic Party are leaving because they are excluded. We need to find a way to welcome them and acclimate them into some version of fiscal conservatism. We can't agree on everything, but a balanced budget is one thing that we should all agree upon. Those people have the same values as far as that is concerned, and we need to capture the moment.

Haha, you're right. Let me offer a couple of ideals to sway them a little more to the center.

1. Gov't defined Green energy is a joke. Just Nuke It!
1A. SCHOOL VOUCHERS!
2. End state sponsored marriage. As a Catholic I believe Marriage to be a Sacrament. The State has NO authority in regulating it. Civil contracts are Civil contracts.
3. Taxes: The Progressive tax system is rediculous and violoates the 14th Amendment (equal protection).
so, if I make 10K and pay 10%, I pay 1,000 and if I make 100K and pay 10%, I pay 10,000. So, by making 10x's as much I pay 10x's as much the to Fed. But for some reason a Progressive believes that is an injustice and thinks that those who are considered rich should pay even more. That's just silly, and yes I know that the % is not in accordance with the current tax rates but why should the achievers have to pay more in %?
4. NEA...Gone
5. EPA...Worthless
6. Military..........Cut it by 40%
7. DHS...Gone
Anyway, I could go on, and on, and on but I think that those of us who belive in the individual can attract those the lean center left.

[Snipe]

The big difference between CA and TX is that TX has a ton of energy money. They also have favorable tax policies which brings businesses to the state. CA has been badly mismanaged, including tax policy. Claiming this mismanagement is purely political is too simple.

California has oil wealth right off their own shores if they want it. Don't blame Texas for exploiting their natural resources. As for tax policies that are favorable to business, why is that not considered political? Who do you think is making the policies?

If the politicians of California should not be held accountable, who in the hell should we be holding accountable. Who killed California?

[Snipe]

From Today's Wall Street Journal

California: The Lindsay Lohan of States Sacramento is headed for trouble again, and it shouldn't expect a bailout.. (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703506904575592612400443370.html)


You've racked up nearly $70 billion in general obligation debt, and that doesn't include your $500 billion unfunded pension liability. Your own analysts predict you'll face a hole of at least $80 billion over the next four years.

Your government's run by a brothel of environmentalists, lawyers, public-sector unions and legislative bums. When they're not taxing or spending, they're creating regulations and commissions like the Board of Barbering and Cosmetology and the California Blueberry Commission. Many businesses would leave if it weren't for your sunny climate.

Which may explain why you're so obsessed with climate change. If your climate changes, no one, including your Hollywood friends, would tolerate you anymore. So you've created a law to tax carbon emissions—no matter that it will kill jobs.

That is quite a hole.

Brian Doherty at the City of Angles Blog:

Another State Fiscal Crisis: Unemployment (http://www.kcet.org/socal/voices/city-of-angles/another-state-fiscal-crisis-unemployment.html)


As control of state government switches hands, some old problems continue to haunt: for one, a likely $16 billion in debt to the federal government by 2012, from whom California is borrowing to make unemployment benefit payouts.

The L.A. Times runs the grim numbers (http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-jobless-fund-broke-20101107,0,6477830,full.story):


the state is borrowing billions of dollars from the federal government to pay benefits at the rate of $40 million a day.

The debt, now at $8.6 billion, is expected to reach $10.3 billion for the year, two-thirds greater than last year. Worse, the deficit is projected to hit $13.4 billion by the end of next year and $16 billion in 2012....

Interest on that debt will soon start piling up, forcing the state to come up with a $362-million payment to Washington by the end of next September.

That's money that otherwise would go into the state's general fund, where it could be spent to hire new teachers, provide healthcare to children and beef up law enforcement.
Continued borrowing, meanwhile, means that employers face an automatic hike in their federal unemployment insurance taxes, pushing up annual payroll costs $21 a year for each worker. Those costs are expected to more than double over the next five years if California continues to borrow from the federal government.
The LA Times article quoted above concluded:

"I'd rather have something planned to deal with the issue," he said, "than not do anything and have things come down that are unintended and could be worse."

Aint that the truth. At least if you take the pain now you have some control. Wait to long though and other people are going to make those painful decisions for you. That is true of California and it is true of our entire nation.

[Kahns Krazy]

San Francisco has a lot of rich white people and some beautiful surroundings. .

San Francisco is less than half white.

http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06/0667000.html

[Snipe]

San Francisco is less than half white.

http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06/0667000.html

I stand corrected.

San Francisco:

White persons, percent, 2000 49.7%
Black persons, percent, 2000 7.8%
American Indian and Alaska Native persons, percent, 2000 0.5%
Asian persons, percent, 2000 30.8%
Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander, percent, 2000 0.5%
Persons reporting two or more races, percent, 2000 4.3%
Persons of Hispanic or Latino origin, percent, 2000 14.1%
Foreign born persons, percent, 2000 36.8%
Language other than English spoken at home, pct age 5+, 2000 45.7%
High school graduates, percent of persons age 25+, 2000 81.2%
Bachelor's degree or higher, pct of persons age 25+, 2000 45.0%

49.7% non-Hispanic white. 30.8% model-minority Asian = 80.5% of the city population. And it shows in the education statistics with 45% getting a bachelor's degree or higher. White people are significantly more than anyone else, and everyone is in the same party anyway in San Francisco. Hispanics and Blacks even in a grand coalition would only represent 22% of the vote which is far less than either the non-Hispanic whites or the Asians. I do think the progressive white left still rules San Francisco, though you are right that they are not a majority.

Compare those census numbers to Los Angeles, and Hispanics make up 46.5% and Blacks make up 11.2%, and the education goes for high school graduates 66.6% and college bachelors or higher 25.5%.

No doubt the Silicone Valley has a lot to do with educational attainment, wages and the people who can afford those high housing prices. It is land use restrictions however that really makes those housing prices bubble and pop. I generally think that San Franciscans like their wealth and educated status and they would rather have land use regulation and beautiful nature than the bunch of poor Mexicans that would show up if they eased up on the land use restrictions.

Los Angeles:

White persons, percent, 2000 46.9%
Black persons, percent, 2000 11.2%
American Indian and Alaska Native persons, percent, 2000 0.8%
Asian persons, percent, 2000 10.0%
Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander, percent, 2000 0.2%
Persons reporting two or more races, percent, 2000 5.2%
Persons of Hispanic or Latino origin, percent, 2000 46.5%
Foreign born persons, percent, 2000 40.9%
Language other than English spoken at home, pct age 5+, 2000 57.8%
High school graduates, percent of persons age 25+, 2000 66.6%
Bachelor's degree or higher, pct of persons age 25+, 2000 25.5%

I also have to note that I have used statistics for LA in this thread, and those are markedly different than the census statistics. Those came from LA Almanac (http://www.laalmanac.com/population/po39.htm). Their source was the California dept of Finance and the white population of LA County was 31.8% in 2000 and 27.71% in 2010. Both those numbers are a huge difference from the Census numbers. There may be a difference between Los Angeles (city) and Los Angeles County. I don't know but since I have put both number in the thread I just wanted to explain my sources if I can't explain the difference. I don't know which would be a better source.

And interesting tidbit on education in California:

http://www.cis.org/articles/2010/california-education-t1b.jpg

Dead last out of 50 states. This obviously doesn't affect San Francisco either. San Francisco is one of the most educated cities in the nation. The Brookings Institution ranked the top cities in educational attainment, San Francisco is 4th. San Jose is also highly ranked, and has similar demographics to San Francisco.

If you look at the bottom of the list you have this:

94 Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, CA, 19 percent
95 Fresno, CA, 18.9 percent
96 Lakeland, FL, 18.7 percent
97 Stockton, CA, 15.6 percent
98 McAllen, TX, 15.1 percent
99 Modesto, CA, 15.1 percent
100 Bakersfield, CA, 14.7 percent

5 of the 7 most uneducated cities are in California. They also differ from San Francisco in their racial demographic composition.

So relatively, San Francisco is whiter and more Asian than the rest of these cities, it is wealthier and more educated. They do zone their land and create rules that drive up prices to make it a sort of liberal enclave, at least in my opinion. And they are a center of the radical progressive fringe, dominated by rich white progressives represented by Nancy Pelosi herself.

They are all Democrats too. If you are a center left working class native Californian imagine how the people in your own party would seem to be working against you. What with the elite progressives and the immigrant lobby they can pretty much do what they want and to hell with you. Your state is going bankrupt by they continue to push “green initiatives” and devote billions to stem cell research. Your energy prices go up and they limit the number of power plants. Your gas prices go up and they continue to put regulations on special types of gas that apply only to California. Let alone they won’t drill off the coast and offer you one of those 80-90k oil rig jobs that come with oil development. Then when your kids go to school the schools are horrible because most of the kids can’t speak English. 58% of the kids in LA don’t speak English in their homes. That is quite something. And over 70% of the children 15 and under in California are minorities. Good luck getting into a good school for your children if you are working class. To the center-left man of the California working class of yesteryear, they didn’t leave the left, the left has left them. And what good are their green jobs, stem cells, transgender rights and no toy in your happy mean to you then? The elite left has deserted the very bread and butter of their party core, and that is why they just got devastated in the last election.

They still rule California though with an iron fist, and California is going to fail. The collapse will be spectacular.

[Snipe]

So far I have immigration and rabid progressive politics as my possible suspects in the murder of California. I will also add public sector unions and their bloated pensions later, and most likely put them in a sub-heading under the progressive political banner.

Here are some more brass tacks on immigration:

A State Transformed: Immigration and the New California (http://www.cis.org/california-education)


Between 1970 and 2008 the share of California’s population comprised of immigrants (legal and illegal) tripled, growing from 9 percent to 27 percent.1 This Memorandum examines some of the ways California has changed over the last four decades. Historically, California has not been a state with a disproportionately large unskilled population, like Appalachia or parts of the South. As a result of immigration, however, by 2008 California had the least-educated labor force in the nation in terms of the share its workers without a high school education. This change has important implications for the state.

That is quite an influx of illegal and legal immigrants. One has to make a distinction however between certain immigrant groups. It is not likely that the large influx of Asian Americans in the Silicon Valley and other places in California has hurt the state fiscally or sent them towards bankruptcy As a group the Asians are usually better educated that whites and have fewer children out of wedlock than any other group. They don't go on welfare. They strive to get educated, work and be productive members of society. The statistics bear that out at an amazing pace. They are model immigrants. That is why Canada likes bringing them in relative to other immigrant groups.

More from the report:



Among the changes in California:

In 1970, California had the 7th most educated work force of the 50 states in terms of the share of its workers who had completed high school. By 2008 it ranked 50th, making it the least educated state. (Table 1a)


Education in California has declined relative to other states. The percentage of Californians who have completed high school has increased since 1970; however, all other states made much more progress in improving their education levels; as a result, California has fallen behind the rest of the country. (Table 1b)


The large relative decline in education in California is a direct result of immigration. Without immigrants, the share of California’s labor force that has completed high school would be above the national average.

There is no indication that California will soon close the educational gap. California ranks 35th in terms of the share of its 19-year-olds who have completed high school. Moreover, one-third (91,000) of the adult immigrants who arrived in the state in 2007 and 2008 had not completed high school.2


In 1970 California was right at the national average in terms of income inequality, ranking 25th in the nation. By 2008, it was the 6th most unequal state in the country based on the commonly used Gini coefficient, which measures how evenly income is distributed. (Tables 2a and 2b)


California’s income distribution in 2008 was more unequal than was Mississippi’s in 1970. (Tables 2a and 2b)


While historical data are not available, we can say that in 2008 California ranked 11th highest in terms of the share of its households accessing at least one major welfare program and 8th highest in terms of the share of the state’s population without health insurance. (Tables 3 and 4)


The large share of California adults who have very little education is likely to strain social services and make it challenging for the state to generate sufficient tax revenue to cover the demands for services made by its large unskilled population.

For all that progressives seem to moan about income inequality, they sure do have a lot of it in the progressive paradise of California. A widening gap between rich and poor is usually thrown at Republicans, but yet you see it expanding in California. Progressives bitch and moan about the uninsured, yet in the progressive paradise the number of people uncovered is terrible. You give these people a chance to run things and everything turns to junk. And who do they blame for income gaps or the uninsured? You got it, Republicans. Hypocritical arrogance, thy name is California.

Hey, but at least they give themselves a pat on the back for their “Sanctuary Cities”. The gall of it all. No wonder normal working class Americans have been leaving. California is a good example of what not to do in Government. Ronald Reagan used to be Governor there. Back then they had a budget surplus too. Even Democratic Socialists in Europe have been giving up on the Big Government model. We need to learn the lessons of California before it is too late. I think it is already too late for them, but save yourself!

[GuyFawkes38]

A quick search on my google reader account shows that leftists are also frustrated with California:

http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2010/07/the-tragedy-of-california/

[West is Best]

I'm not sure how a bankruptcy means that California's doomed. Orange County went through bankruptcy 1994, it bounced back OK... tons of private companies have filed and returned to profitability.
If the unemployement rate improves CA will bounce back faster than most other states. If not, bondholders will pay the price more than anyone else.

[Snipe]

West is Best, I think California is doomed.

In the first post on this thread I quoted Victor Davis Hanson:


In California, there is some irony: The philosophy that led the state to the highest tax rates in the country, along with the near-worst schools, largest deficits, and most crumbling infrastructure, was reaffirmed. Now California’s state government will have to deal with the reality that if the highest-tax state in the union raises taxes still higher, it will lose even more high earners than the current 3,000 who leave each week. A Republican Congress is not likely to bail out a bankrupt California.

Who do you think those "high earners" are? A hint, they aren't the Mexicans.

Who are the Mexicans?

Honesty from the Left on Hispanic Immigration
A provocative new book doesn’t flinch from delivering the bad news.
Heather Mac Donald (http://www.city-journal.org/2008/eon1008hm.html)

This is a review of book entitled The Latino Education Crisis: The Consequences of Failed Social Policies, by Patricia Gandara and Frances Contreras.



Gandara and Contreras, education professors at UCLA and the University of Washington, respectively, are more honest than many conservative open-borders advocates in acknowledging the bad news about Hispanic assimilation.

Hispanics are underachieving academically at an alarming rate, the authors report. Though second- and third-generation Hispanics make some progress over their first-generation parents, that progress starts from an extremely low base and stalls out at high school completion. High school drop-out rates—around 50 percent—remain steady across generations. Latinos’ grades and test scores are at the bottom of the bell curve. The very low share of college degrees earned by Latinos has not changed for more than two decades. Currently only one in ten Latinos has a college degree.

That is not good. More:


When you couple U.S. demographics with the Hispanic education crisis, things look worrisome indeed. By 2025, one in four students nationally will be Latino; in many Southwest cities, Latinos are already about 70 percent of the school population. For the first time in history, the authors observe, the ethnic group with the lowest academic achievement will become the majority in significant parts of the country.

Sounds like a recipe for Golden State success!


California provides a glimpse of what such changes might mean for America’s economic future. The Center for Public Policy and Higher Education predicts that unless the rate of college matriculation among “underrepresented” minorities (that is, Hispanics) immediately rises, the state will face an 11 percent drop in per capita income by 2020.

Federal, state, and local governments have already spent billions trying to overcome the Latino education gap, with little success.

Are you beginning to see how it might be difficult for California to "bounce back"? They don't have the human capital. That Division 1 human capital is leaving. The human capital of their new recruits is D-III World Poverty level.

California isn't just some beaches, parks, big trees and mountains. The secret to California was its people. Those people have been changing, and now most homes in Los Angeles don't speak English in their home. These new recruits are not going to be on the cutting edge of technology on the next high tech boom.

It is not like the Silicone Valley has rules like Champagne does in France. It doesn't have to grow just in the right region. Companies and industries can leave altogether.


The Latino Education Crisis pulls no punches in its conclusions: “With no evidence of an imminent turnaround in the rate at which Latino students are either graduating from high school or obtaining college degrees, it appears that both a regional and national catastrophe are at hand.” The United States is well on its way to creating a “permanent underclass,” the authors write. They even have the nerve to discuss the calamity of Latinos’ rapidly rising illegitimacy rate—which now stands at 50 percent. Gandara and Contreras had better get used to being called racists from open-borders supporters, as anyone who dares to point out Hispanic family breakdown can attest.

Two prominent liberal academic Latinos took a look at the system and they see "both a regional and national catastrophe are at hand" and that we are well on our way to creating a “permanent underclass”. Now that sounds refreshing. This isn't David Duke speaking either. These are Latino academics saying the whole system is heading for disaster. I didn't make any of this up.


The evidence it presents for the “grave . . . economic and social consequences” of Hispanic educational failure is overwhelming.

You predict that California will "bounce back faster than most other states". I predict that this will not end well. We may indeed see some bounce at a point, but the trend line looks downward.

When Victor Davis Hanson talks about the "high earners" leaving he is talking about human capital. He is also largely talking about "white people". He is using this code because you are not allowed to say that "White people are leaving California, and they aren't coming back". It isn't just "high earners" either but middle-class white people as well.

Why would they come back? As Hanson put it, California has a "philosophy that led the state to the highest tax rates in the country, along with the near-worst schools, largest deficits, and most crumbling infrastructure". What would you come back for the most, the high taxes or the bad schools? I don't know which one I prefer the most myself. Maybe I would come back for the ethnic tension. So many choices!

Will businesses that are moving out move back? Not if their isn't any decent human capital to exploit. If I was building a company and I wanted to employ a bunch of ignorant third world labor, why would I go to California and pay California taxes and California wages? Why wouldn't I just go to Honduras and pay people $0.48 a hour (http://www.units.muohio.edu/ath175/student/mcclell1/index.html)! (And they are worth every penny of it.) In California you would have to pay $8.00 just for the minimum wage, and many may prefer the luxurious welfare money instead of that. You would also have to pay for translators, lawyers, OSHA, and California State taxes. Who is going to do that?

Orange County did file for bankruptcy in the 1990s. It was the largest municipal bankruptcy case in the history of the United States. They did weather the storm and California bounced back. But this isn't just one county, we are talking about the State of California.

And yet we aren't even talking just about the State of California either, because former LA Mayor Richard Riordan (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704608104575218392603082622.html) says that "Los Angeles is facing a terminal fiscal crisis: Between now and 2014 the city will likely declare bankruptcy."

And yet we aren't even talking about California and Los Angeles either, because the Bay Area city of Vallejo is already in bankruptcy court, and the San Francisco Chronicle reported this just last Sunday (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/11/06/INUQ1G5C45.DTL):


Small-town living has long been part of the American dream, but amid California's fiscal crisis, it is becoming a nightmare. Cities like Vallejo have declared bankruptcy as municipal deficits deepen. Others, like Maywood in Southern California, have fired their city employees and outsourced everything from police and fire protection to pothole filling.

Cities all over the state are contemplating similar measures, but the Bay Area is particularly at risk of further municipal bankruptcies.

Cities all over the state are contemplating similar measures. Many could go bankrupt. Los Angeles could go bankrupt. Counties could go bankrupt. And yes, the whole state is teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. It is a national disaster of epic proportions, and they should have seen it coming.

They just reelected Jerry Brown and Barbara Boxer and a whole slate of progressive Democrats. They should have seen it coming. The continue to spend billions on Green Initiatives and Stem Cell Research. They should have seen it coming. They call themselves "sanctuary cities" and encourage open borders while eschewing assimilation for progressive "identity politics". They should have seen it coming. The debate transgender issues and teach transgender awareness to grade-schoolers (no joke!). They debate taking the toys out of happy meals. Nero fiddled while Rome burned, and they should have seen it coming.

When the shit hits the fan they are gonna ask for one big bail out because they are "too big to fail". But now that fiscal conservatives are back in Congress, they should have seen that coming too.

California is dying, and it is all over but the crying. California will never be the same. This will not end well. The collapse will be spectacular.

[Snipe]

And if I can add one thing, if California defaults on government bonds the first thing the United States should do is buy appoint an accountant to sell the rights to their offshore oil deposits to "Big Oil" to pay the bondholders back. That ought to piss them off. They should have seen that coming too.

A once proud conservative state. The state of Ronald Reagan. A state with a budget surplus and real infrastructure projects when Conservatives built it. When Japan made a surge in the late 80's one of my Econ Profs noted that just the state of California alone was similar in size and had far higher production that Japan. He laughed at Japan overtaking us, because Japan couldn't even compete with California. California was the strongest state in the Union, and worldwide with the entertainment industry it stood for America.

[Snipe]

Some articles:

The Daily Caller:

What Happens When a State Goes Bankrupt?
By Richard Epstein - Ricochet | Published: 1:56 PM 11/08/2010 (http://dailycaller.com/2010/11/08/what-happens-when-a-state-goes-bankrupt/)


there is no obvious mechanism for state bankruptcies, even if there are some procedures, I believe, for municipal bankruptcies. This is a ticklish issue because states are sovereigns and it is a frightening prospect to think that when mired in bankruptcy, they could not discharge their essential functions because they could not pay their pension obligations, among others. So the battle over the form of bankruptcy will be acute, and I have no idea how this would play out–except badly.

And this...


I don’t think that full-fledged bankruptcy is a realistic prospect as of now. I think that the much more sensible approach is to side-step the bankruptcy proceedings and find ways to attack the union pension obligations directly, given their enormous size. It is odd that these days the only sacred contracts are those which the state enters into with unions for the benefit of their members.

The key question is whether it will be possible to persuade the courts that these pension agreements were the result of political self-dealing, which means that they should be set aside unless it could be shown that the state received fair value for the services rendered when it made those deals. I think that case is bold but winnable, yet only when the situation becomes truly desperate. Funding that litigation will take some bankrolling, but the corporate law analogies on self-dealing make it pretty clear that the state legislatures violated all their duties of loyalty to the public at large when they entered into deals from which union pension funds got all the upside and everyone else got the downside. Not nice. Undoing it is the work of the next generation.

Talk about a legal battle if I understand the ramifications of legal precedents and "self-dealing". One case could set a precedent for a lot of other cases, so government unions would have to fight incredibly hard against any legal challenge anywhere. California will be the first battleground on over bloated government pensions, and they have a notoriously progressive/liberal judiciary.

Another article I read today pointed out just where things get really messy and down and dirty.

Chapter 9 Is a Very Tough Slog
Municipalities See Too Much Trouble (http://www.bondbuyer.com/issues/119_450/chapter_9_muni_bankruptcy-1018801-1.html)


Perhaps the defining difference between a Chapter 9 bankruptcy for a municipality and a Chapter 11 reorganization for a corporation is that a corporation can be liquidated.

If corporate restructuring proposals aren’t panning out, a Chapter 11 bankruptcy can threaten to convert to a Chapter 7 bankruptcy, in which a company’s assets are sold off and the proceeds used to repay creditors, frequently at a loss.

The threat compels both debtors and creditors to resolve disputes fast. The debtor knows if it does not keep creditors happy, it can be dismantled; creditors know if they demand too much, they could end up taking a bigger loss in a liquidation.

Under a Chapter 9 bankruptcy, the judge has no authority to liquidate a municipality.

All the judge can do is rule on whether a reorganization proposal is fair to all creditors. That places creditors in a game-theory stalemate: without the threat of liquidation, creditors often have nothing to lose by insisting on repayment in full.

“There’s no real meaningful threat from that municipality that they’ll liquidate,” said Scott Hazan, partner at Otterbourg, Steindler, Houston & Rosen. “There are so few checks and balances in Chapter 9. It’s kind of a wild, wild west.”

Wild, Wild West aside, this is where it gets messy:


Throw in the fact that many creditors in municipal bankruptcies are political constituents, and reorganizations can become messy and prolonged.

“Unlike Chapter 11, where people are pretty much focused on economics, in Chapter 9 there is an entirely, and additional, political process,” said Riley Walter, the lawyer representing Sierra Kings Health Care District in its bankruptcy. “There are always constituencies that have to be considered, even if they are not owed any money.”

For example, if a town wanted to sell an asset to raise money to repay creditors, it must go through an “elaborate process of public meetings and even citizen votes,” before the sale might happen, he said.

GM under Obama was a political bankruptcy. They made the bondholders take the bite even though they were first in line and they gave the company over to the Unions. The law was basically thrown out and political considerations came to the forefront. Imagine it being not just GM, but an entire state. What a free for all. Property rights and established order of creditors will be out the window in progressive California. It will be a major political battle of the ages, and who gets paid may be determined by campaign donations and political clout. Without property rights and blind justice this simply isn't America. Scary stuff.

[Snipe]

Calif. School Orders Boy to Remove American Flag From Bike (http://www.theblaze.com/stories/calif-school-orders-boy-to-remove-american-flag-from-bike/)

Education

Calif. School Orders Boy to Remove American Flag From Bike

Cody Alicea, 13, likes to fly a small American flag on his bike in honor of veterans such as his grandfather, Robert. He’s been doing it for two months. But now, the school he attends has ordered him to remove the flag citing “racial tensions.”

“In this country we’re supposed to be free,” said Cody, who attends Denair Middle School near Sacramento, CA. “And I should be able to wave my flag wherever I want to. And they‘re telling me I can’t.”

Free or not, officials say flag flying has become too controversial at the school. Denair Unified School District Superintendent Edward Parraz said that while Cody does have a First Amendment right, “with that comes a responsibility.”


http://nygoe.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/bike-cody-alicea.jpg?w=397&h=223

Little white kid can't fly an American flag on his bike in California. If he does it threatens to be a race war. I wonder who would be so upset about it?


That “responsibility” apparently means being more considerate to other cultures.

“Our Hispanic, you know, kids will, you know, bring their Mexican flags and they’ll display it, and then of course the kids would do the American flag situation, and it does cause kind of a racial tension which we don’t really want,” Parraz said. “We want them to appreciate the cultures.”

He explained that some Hispanic students got out of hand with their own flag flying on Cinco de Mayo.

http://www.commonsensejournal.com/wp-content/images/illegal_immigration/mexiracists.jpg

And from another report (http://www.theblaze.com/stories/school-responds-boy-forced-to-remove-flag-for-his-own-safety/):


Ed Parraz, the Superintendent of the Denair School District told us a school supervisor asked Cody to take down the flag. The supervisor will not be fired or face repercussions. Parraz says the supervisor had information that Cody’s safety was at risk because of the flag. Some students had complained about it and had apparently made threats.

In other related news:

Latino kids now majority in state's public schools (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/11/12/MNIG1GBD0C.DTL#ixzz15g18SVsc)


Latinos now make up a majority of California's public school students, cracking the 50 percent barrier for the first time in the state's history, according to data released Friday by the state Department of Education.

Almost 50.4 percent of the state's students in the 2009-10 school year identified themselves as Hispanic or Latino, up 1.36 percent from the previous year.

In comparison, 27 percent of California's 6.2 million students identified themselves as white, 9 percent as Asian and 7 percent as black. Students calling themselves Filipino, Pacific Islander, Native American or other total almost 7 percent.

While the result was no surprise to educators, experts say the shift underscores the huge impact Latinos already have on California's politics, economy and school system.

When I was born California was around 90% white.

Here is the kicker of the article:

Everybody bilingual?


Nearly 1.5 million students are English language learners, but many more still struggle in the classroom with difficult, subject-specific terms, he said.

"For example, if you are studying social science, understanding words like 'justice' and 'beauty' can be difficult," he said. "In math, it can be even harder."

Fuller, the UC Berkeley professor, suggested state educators look at language education in an entirely new way.

"If the majority of the population is becoming bilingual," he said, referring to the growing Latino population learning English, "why shouldn't the white minority also become bilingual?"

I wonder what the political orientation of the "Berkeley Professor" is?

Not only should white people not fly an American flag for fear of triggering racial violence, now they are telling us white people should have to learn how to speak Spanish.

You have come a long way baby! Those progressives have done so well for California. I don't understand why white people are leaving.

[Snipe]

Multiculturalism verified by Snoopes (http://www.snopes.com/politics/quotes/hispanicleaders.asp)

http://www.commonsensejournal.com/wp-content/images/illegal_immigration/this-is-our-continent.jpg



This an excerpt from a statement by Augustin Cebada of the Brown Berets de Aztlán, a paramilitary offshoot of the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA)....

We're here today to show L.A., show the minority people here, the Anglo-Saxons, that we are here, the majority, we're here to stay. We do the work in this city, we take care of the spoiled brat children, we clean their offices, we pick the food, we do the manufacturing in the factories of L.A., we are the majority here, and we are not going to be pushed around.

We're here in Westwood, this is the fourth time we've been here in the last two months, to show white Anglo-Saxon Protestant L.A., the few of you who remain, that we are the majority, and we claim this land as ours, it's always been ours, and we're still here, and uh, none of this talk about deporting. If anybody's going to be deported it's going to be you.

[SHOUTING] Go back to Simi Valley, you skunks! Go back to Woodland Hills! Go back to Boston! Go back to the Plymouth Rock, Pilgrims! Get out! We are the future. You're old and tired. Go on. We have beaten you; leave like beaten rats.

You old white people, it is your duty to die. Even their own ethicists say that they should die; that they have a duty to die. They're taking up too much space, too much air.

We are the majority in L.A. There's over seven million Mexicans in L.A. County alone. We are the majority. And you're going to see every day more and more of it, as we ... we manifest as our young people grow up, graduate from high school, go on to college and start taking over this society. Our people ... are ... the vast majority of our people are under the age of 15 years old. Right now we're already controlling those elections, whether it's through violence or nonviolence. Through love of having children we are gonna take over.

I am getting the feeling that this "diversity" thing isn't always the lovefest that it has been sold to us. I don't think that guy likes us, and he was giving a speech to a large crowd.

http://www.commonsensejournal.com/wp-content/images/illegal_immigration/spanishracists.jpg

From LA City Councilman Richard Alatorre:


Because our numbers are growing, they're afraid about this great mass of minorities that now live in our community. They're afraid that we're going to take over the governmental institutions and other institutions. They are right, we will take them over, and we are not going to go away — we are here to stay, and we are saying 'ya basta' (enough!)

Are you feeling the love white people?

http://www.commonsensejournal.com/wp-content/images/illegal_immigration/latinoracists.jpg


"The border remains a military zone. We remain a hunted people. Now you think you have a destiny to fulfill in this land that historically has been ours for forty thousand years, and we're a new Mestizo nation. And they want us to discuss civil rights. Civil rights! What law made by white men to oppress all of us of color, female and male! This is our homeland. We cannot, we will not, and we must not be made illegal in our own homeland. We are not im-mi-grants that came from another country to another country; we are migrants, free to travel the length and breadth of the Americas because we belong here. We are millions. We just have to survive. We have an aging white America. They are not making babies. They are dying. It's a matter of time. [laughter] The explosion is in our population.

This is an excerpt from a statement by José Angel Gutiérrez, then an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Texas at Arlington (and a former leader of the La Raza [THE RACE] Unida political party) at a Latino conference

José Angel Gutiérrez is feeling the love, feeling the love of his race taking over. I love the laughter. He doesn't care about Civil Rights. Payback is a bitch.

http://www.mexica-movement.org/images/baldwinpark.jpg


This is a sentence taken from a statement given by Art Torres, a fomer California State Assembly member and State Senator, at the UC Riverside conference referenced above:

It is an honor to be with the new leadership of the Americas, here meeting at UC Riverside. So with 187 on the ballot, what is it going to take for our people to vote, to see us walking into the gas ovens? It is electoral power that is going to make the determination of where we go as a community. And power is not given to you; you have to take it. Remember: 187 is the last gasp of white America in California. Understand that.

The last gasp of white America in California! Latino politicians can say that openly and with glee.


Mario Obledo was a co-founder of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) and the La Raza [THE RACE] Lawyers of California bar association, and he formerly served as California's Secretary of Health and Welfare. We don't know exactly when and where he first made his controversial statement about California's becoming a "Hispanic state," but he has confirmed he said it at least twice: during an appearance on Ray Briem's talk radio show in May or June of 1998, and again on Tom Leykis' talk radio show:

Obledo: "We're going to take over all the political institutions of California. In five years the Hispanics are going to be the majority population of this state."

Caller: "You also made the statement that California is going to become a Hispanic state, and if anyone doesn't like it, they should leave. Did you say that?"

Obledo: "I did. They ought to go back to Europe."

Go back to Europe white oppressors!

I am not quoting fringe people baiting white people. These people are part of the Latino movement and the Lation establishment. Imagine if a white politician said these types of things.

Funny stuff. There appears to be a race war going on, and you didn't even know you were invited. Coming to a theater near you in time. Tuck your kids in tonight. What kind of America will they grow up in? These people don't like you, or your "spoiled brat children".

Who thought this was a good idea? I don't think it ends well.

[pizza delivery]

Snipe, it would be less interesting, but less confusing, if you made the distinction between illegal immigration and legal immigration. The people pitching a bitch are illegals and those fighting in their interest. Their marginalization as illegals cements their oppressed ethos and allows the whole "this is our land" argument to grab hold. People are desperate and will believe anything that leads their cause forward.

As far as multiculturalism is concerned, it's a facet of our society that has allowed a soft stance on illegal immigration, sure. But so is the profit interest. So is apathy. You can't blame multiculturalism for these problems. It's not productive. The facts support the need to curb illegal immigration and perhaps deport people. They don't conclude that US citizens can't live together, or aren't better learning tolorance of other cultures. In fact, you'll end up needing multiculturalists to sympathize with you while fighting the narrow minded latino leader's you've shown above. Ironic.

[Snipe]

We need to curb legal and illegal immigration, but how can we do that? You hear the angry and violent racist rhetoric, but do you realize the size of the rallies? How are you going to start deporting people in this climate?

http://nontroppo.org/blog/images/larally.jpg

http://topia.org/images/LA%20immigration%20demonstration.gif

They already control the political machinery in California. They have sanctuary cities. California passes laws that say they won't enforce the federal law. And they don't enforce it. Illegals can go to City Hall and protest waiving Mexican flags and nobody does anything but back down. They are taking it back. They have taken it back. It is over in California. That bird has flown. I read one piece in the LA Times that was self congratulatory of progressive California tolerance. The reported said something like "Only in America could someone protest at City Hall waving a foreign flag. It just shows you how tolerant we are and what a great country America is". I read that and I am thinking, you might be tolerant, but those guys waiving the flag might give a fuck about you and your "spoiled children".

To listen to these people they have been oppressed by the white man since 1492. And they are sick and tired of racist white people. People say they just come here for work and the promise of America, the American dream. That sounds nice but that obviously isn't the case for everyone. Some of them really don't like you. And you might not want to be one of the few white people living in the barrio when California goes bankrupt and the benefits stop flowing. Minorities have a hard time everywhere, it isn't just a white European in American thing. A kid couldn't ride his bike with an American Flag on it because school officials were concerned for his safety. They received threats. We played Mexico in Soccer in Los Angeles and Mexicans packed the stadium. The booed during the national anthem, they waived Mexican Flags, and they threw stuff at our players. Maybe they don't like our flag. Maybe they don't like our anthem or our country. Maybe they don't like us. Maybe they didn't come here for the American dream. Maybe just as they say they and taking back for Mexico what once belonged to Mexico, and white people should go back to Europe or grow old and die.

When we had small numbers of Latino's they did assimilate. Now we have so many concentrated in California that they don't bother. They are taking power and not giving it back. This is their land now and it is their turn. People are saying in the California papers "why don't the minority white's learn how to speak Spanish?".

California will never start a massive deportation campaign. If the United States government went it California would not assist them, or do so half heartedly and sabotage the effort. The people in power get there with the Mexican vote, and they know the demographics and the future. Racial voting is block voting. Hence Obama urging Latino's to "punish their enemies". People think like that, that is why he appeals to them like that. It isn't a mistake. And while the whole country was going Red California stayed Blue.

If you sent the National Guard or the Army into California to deport masses of Mexicans you would have blood spilled riots in the streets. That is what they are threatening. It is their land, they have taken it back and they aren't giving it up. They know we are too much pussified to actually fight about it, and they are willing to fight. We have lost our will to defend our borders and with that we lose sovereignty.

[Snipe]

We have lost the will to defend our culture. We buy into the fact that we are racist. We have some defect. White people deplore "white privilege". We educate our children that at politically correct universities. You can have Black studies that glorify blacks, and Chicano studies that glorify Hispanics, but ever check out "White Studies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiteness_studies)". From the wiki:


A central tenet of whiteness studies is a reading of history and its effects on the present, inspired by postmodernism and historicism, in which the very concept of race is said to have been socially constructed in order to justify discrimination against non-whites. Since the 19th century, critics of the concept of race have questioned if human races even exist and pointed out that arbitrary categories based on phenotypical characteristics are chosen, and that the idea of race is not about important differences within the human species.[1]

Major areas of research include the nature of white identity and of white privilege

Did you get that? Race doesn't exist. It is just an arbitrary thing that white people made up to hurt and enslave and discriminate against non-white people. No glorification of western culture there, white studies tell you how evil we all are. Maybe those Mexicans deserve everything they take. They seem to agree with the premise of whiteness studies too!

More:


Whiteness emerged as a focus of inquiry within the academy, primarily in the United States and the UK, as early as 1983. The "canon wars" of the late 1980s and 1990s, a political controversy over the centrality of white authors and perspectives, led scholars to ask "how the imaginative construction of 'whiteness' had shaped American literature and American history."[3] The field developed a large body of work during the early 1990s, extending across the disciplines of "literary criticism, history, cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, popular culture, communication studies, music history, art history, dance history, humor studies, philosophy, linguistics, and folklore."[4]

As of 2004, according to The Washington Post, at least 30 institutions in the United States including Princeton University, the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of New Mexico and University of Massachusetts Amherst offer, or have offered, courses in whiteness studies. Teaching and research around whiteness often overlap with research on post-colonial theory and orientalism taking place in the Arts and Humanities, Sociology, Literature, Communications, Cultural and Media and Studies faculties and departments, amongst others (e.g. Kent, Leeds). Also heavily engaged in whiteness studies are practitioners of anti-racist education, such as Betita Martinez and the Challenging White Supremacy workshop.

Black & Chicano studies glorify Black and Chicano authors. White studies ask why we pay so much attention to White Authors. They think we give them too much significance. And this crap is taught at major universities. No wonder we have lost the will to defend our culture. It is Psychoside. We were already defenseless, just waiting for somebody else to show up. The white man is the root of all evil.

The wiki article continues on the importance of white "Race Traitors":


Like currency, the value of this privilege (for the powerful) depends on the reliability of "white skin" (or as physical anthropologists would deem this construct, the phenotype of historical North Atlantic Europeans) as a marker for social consent. With sufficient "counterfeit whites" resisting racism and capitalism, the writers in this tradition argue, the privilege will be withdrawn or will splinter, prompting an era of conflict and social redefinition. Without such a period, they argue, progress towards social justice is impossible, and thus "treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity."

Did you just get that ball of crap? They teach this stuff at major universities. If you are white you need to be a race traitor to be loyal to humanity. What about the crap of resisting "capitalism"? Huh? Capitalism is some white trait or something. I think it is a dead giveaway that these are Marxist lefty types and the real enemy is capitalism. Thus white people are evil and their systems are evil, and the best way to subvert our system is to open our borders and let the third world in. It is no surprise that the radical left has always been for immigration, and they were behind the change in the 1965 immigration law. They best way to defeat capitalism is to crash the system, and you will see that happen in California in the coming years.

Outside of some pockets of white Cubans, our Hispanics are mainly non-white Mexicans. They vote for Mexicans and against what they perceive is the white ruling class. They like to tend toward socialism because they tend to be poor. What a great idea to come to the richest country and share the wealth. They do too, they get on public assistance and breed. You can look at the birthrate as an existential group evolutionary strategy. It worked for the Muslims in Kosovo. Just outbreed your foes in a traditional Serbian enclave and then vote to be an independent Muslim state. That is what frightens the Europeans when they see Muslim's on their welfare rolls highly out-reproducing the white European population.

Nobody has a solution to end it. The political will is not there. The American people want the massive flow of immigration to end, but Washington does nothing. The topic doesn't even come up in Presidential debates. One side knows what they want. They want what we have. The land, the power, the spoils of being the majority. They have set upon a path to get it. They are supported and encouraged by the Mexican government. We largely go on day by day ignoring it. As the noose tightens, I fully expect to see an emerging white identity in this country. It won't just be David Duke and the Klan saying "Save our culture" either. The people leaving progressive California have to be a bit disillusioned.

I can't see this ending well. We haven't come close to solving the Black/White thing yet, and the Hispanic wave is huge and appears unstoppable. People are arriving in this country believing that we are white racists and oppressors. Who should blame them because we teach that to our own white children at places like Princeton. One poster here on this topic responded "Was it fair when Europeans invaded this country with guns?". It is epidemic in our thinking. We have lost a sense of self preservation, and in my children's generation will we be a minority. If California is a bellwether for the change to come, things are only going to get more difficult from here.

[nuts4xu]

I haven't read every word of this thread, but I skimmed a good bit of it.

I think my new favorite quote of all time is:
You old white people, it is your duty to die.

I am not old, but I certainly am not young. I am most definitely white with a captial "W", and I accept the fact it is my duty to die.

I will friggin die one day.... no one can take that away from me. It is one of the few things I can guarantee in this crazy world of ours.

When my time on Earth is gone, and my activities here are past; I want that they should bury me upside down, so my critics can kiss my ass.

Hallelujah! Holy shit! Where's the Tylenol?

[pizza delivery]

We have lost the will to defend our culture. We buy into the fact that we are racist. We have some defect. White people deplore "white privilege". We educate our children that at politically correct universities. You can have Black studies that glorify blacks, and Chicano studies that glorify Hispanics, but ever check out "White Studies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiteness_studies)". From the wiki:



Did you get that? Race doesn't exist. It is just an arbitrary thing that white people made up to hurt and enslave and discriminate against non-white people. No glorification of western culture there, white studies tell you how evil we all are. Maybe those Mexicans deserve everything they take. They seem to agree with the premise of whiteness studies too!

More:



Black & Chicano studies glorify Black and Chicano authors. White studies ask why we pay so much attention to White Authors. They think we give them too much significance. And this crap is taught at major universities. No wonder we have lost the will to defend our culture. It is Psychoside. We were already defenseless, just waiting for somebody else to show up. The white man is the root of all evil.

The wiki article continues on the importance of white "Race Traitors":



Did you just get that ball of crap? They teach this stuff at major universities. If you are white you need to be a race traitor to be loyal to humanity. What about the crap of resisting "capitalism"? Huh? Capitalism is some white trait or something. I think it is a dead giveaway that these are Marxist lefty types and the real enemy is capitalism. Thus white people are evil and their systems are evil, and the best way to subvert our system is to open our borders and let the third world in. It is no surprise that the radical left has always been for immigration, and they were behind the change in the 1965 immigration law. They best way to defeat capitalism is to crash the system, and you will see that happen in California in the coming years.

Outside of some pockets of white Cubans, our Hispanics are mainly non-white Mexicans. They vote for Mexicans and against what they perceive is the white ruling class. They like to tend toward socialism because they tend to be poor. What a great idea to come to the richest country and share the wealth. They do too, they get on public assistance and breed. You can look at the birthrate as an existential group evolutionary strategy. It worked for the Muslims in Kosovo. Just outbreed your foes in a traditional Serbian enclave and then vote to be an independent Muslim state. That is what frightens the Europeans when they see Muslim's on their welfare rolls highly out-reproducing the white European population.

Nobody has a solution to end it. The political will is not there. The American people want the massive flow of immigration to end, but Washington does nothing. The topic doesn't even come up in Presidential debates. One side knows what they want. They want what we have. The land, the power, the spoils of being the majority. They have set upon a path to get it. They are supported and encouraged by the Mexican government. We largely go on day by day ignoring it. As the noose tightens, I fully expect to see an emerging white identity in this country. It won't just be David Duke and the Klan saying "Save our culture" either. The people leaving progressive California have to be a bit disillusioned.

I can't see this ending well. We haven't come close to solving the Black/White thing yet, and the Hispanic wave is huge and appears unstoppable. People are arriving in this country believing that we are white racists and oppressors. Who should blame them because we teach that to our own white children at places like Princeton. One poster here on this topic responded "Was it fair when Europeans invaded this country with guns?". It is epidemic in our thinking. We have lost a sense of self preservation, and in my children's generation will we be a minority. If California is a bellwether for the change to come, things are only going to get more difficult from here.

This is pretty compelling stuff. I don't think these "Americans" will be accepted for their values. I'm not fact checking all the political leaders you've listed, but perhaps they will be mostlly marginalized the way most extremists are in our culture. They can't just "vote" California into their own country and if it ever is in peril, it will be mitigated in this democracy and, if need be, with the 600 billion dollar per year military, LOL.

It is time we start focusing on the details on this issue instead of the ever loving 2012 presidential campaign.

As for the education system, I got the sense at XU that academics were so bored or stuck with all their knowledge that they start coming up with pre-post-post-pre-utilitarian modernism to justify their existance- pushing logic wherever it can go. My ethnography teacher, for example, tried to embarrass me about saying there needs to be one English standard language for general communication, and that things like Ebonics really aren't relevant. I'll always remember that. There is some brow beating that goes on by crusading academics that goes beyond challenging the mind and becomes us vs. them.

[nuts4xu]

California's budget issues would be solved if they were to legalize weed.

[GuyFawkes38]

I completely concur with Snipe's concern for racial supremest and nationalist groups. It's twisted stuff.

But just to put the focus on the economics again, these graphs from the economist are interesting: (http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2010/11/state_growth_rates):

http://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/original-size/caltexgsp.PNG

and

http://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/original-size/caltexinc.PNG


Of course, the difference between the graphs is that the population of Texas has grown much more rapidly than California.

If your looking for a place to move to and your not in the technology, entertainment, and some engineering industries where California dominates and you'd get paid a lot, you'll get a lot more bang for your buck in Texas. People have responded to that incentive and have moved to Texas or moved out of California.

But the numbers also show that California isn't dead. It's still a very productive state, albeit with an awful state government.

Even in real GDP terms, Texas has only very slightly grown faster than California in the past decade.

[GuyFawkes38]

Sure, there are lots of frustrating aspects of California (especially in the department of governance).

But Snipes posts about California's "death" remind me a lot of the chatter about America's economic decline for the past couple decades.

When you put up some national and state GDP numbers you can't get around the fact that the US is still an incredibly productive and wealthy country.

http://www.southsearepublic.org/files/ssr/16/maps_us_states_as_countries.jpg

The interesting thing about the map is that most of the states are much less populous than their GDP equivalent country. Left leaning economists would argue that Europeans and others outside of the US have much more leisure time and have higher productivity rates per hour worked. Regardless, it's still really striking.

California has an economy the size of France with only half the population of France!!!

[Snipe]

Where is Japan in you graph?

Japan had the #2 economy in the world at one point and California was till bigger. Now we compare Califronia to France. Califronia used to be the second biggest economy in the world. It was the promise of all dreams. Now they become nightmares, and instead of #2 we compare them to France. Too bad we don't have French people living there, because I doubt that would cause that much trouble.

[XUglow]

I just got back from visiting the old home land in the SF Bay area. I had a great time as usual. I am not sold on moving back any time soon, but it is one great place to visit.

Things seemed pretty much the same as always with the exception that my old house sold earlier this year for $980,000. I think I sold it for $485,000 ten years ago. It was listed at $1,040,000, so apparently, the buyer got it for a bargain. LOL. I think it was 2750 sq. ft. with a 3-car garage and 1/4 acre corner lot in a fairly typical upper middle-class neighborhood. My impression from back east was that the real estate market had really tanked. The truth is that it took a bit of a hit, but it is far from tanking.

[GuyFawkes38]

Where is Japan in you graph?

Japan had the #2 economy in the world at one point and California was till bigger. Now we compare Califronia to France. Califronia used to be the second biggest economy in the world. It was the promise of all dreams. Now they become nightmares, and instead of #2 we compare them to France. Too bad we don't have French people living there, because I doubt that would cause that much trouble.

yeah, Germany isn't there either. Both are just too awesomely productive and populated. China isn't there either due to their large GDP, but that's not really impressive since their population is well over a billion.

Did California really have the 2nd largest economy in the world?


Things seemed pretty much the same as always with the exception that my old house sold earlier this year for $980,000. I think I sold it for $485,000 ten years ago. It was listed at $1,040,000, so apparently, the buyer got it for a bargain. LOL. I think it was 2750 sq. ft. with a 3-car garage and 1/4 acre corner lot in a fairly typical upper middle-class neighborhood. My impression from back east was that the real estate market had really tanked. The truth is that it took a bit of a hit, but it is far from tanking.

wow. yeah, I can see how it would be tempting to move out and instantly improve your living standard.

[madness31]

Everyone must realize that this is the beginning of the US slide. The economy peaked in some aspects back in the 1970's. Of course GDP and other measures continued growing robustly during the 90's and some other years but most of that was related to economic bubbles and not legit growth.

Since 2000 the peak has become more obvious as the business cycles are shortening and the troubles are increasing in scope. Debt is a serious problem at the government and household levels. Interest rates are as low as they can go and taxes have also likely reached their lows. These factors make it very difficult to deal with slowdowns as all past slowdowns were met with lower rates and lower taxes. These things helped to spur growth and cause business investment.

In addition to having no ability to lower rates and taxes there is also the issue that it takes more and more debt to spur additional GDP growth. This is not in reference to just government debt but also household debt. When an economy depends on debt expansion to grow it is in serious trouble. This can be masked for years and it has but eventually this fact leads to very slow or negative growth for long periods of time.

[GuyFawkes38]

Everyone must realize that this is the beginning of the US slide. The economy peaked in some aspects back in the 1970's. Of course GDP and other measures continued growing robustly during the 90's and some other years but most of that was related to economic bubbles and not legit growth.

yeah, a lot of you posts are like this.

Lets just dismiss the numbers. Screw GDP, inflation rates, productivity rates. Those might show unbelievable growth, but those are all a mirage. Believe me. We haven't experienced real economic growth in the past 40 years.

[madness31]

I would never suggest dismissing numbers. Looking strictly at GDP numbers ignores other numbers such as median wage, trade balance, etc. GDP can easily be manipulated by inflation. The government has all sorts of means to distort inflation and therefore increase "real" GDP. It is much more difficult to distort trade figures and median wages.

Obviously the country has not been if free fall for 30 to 40 years but it hasn't been growing the way a healthy economy grows. There are signs after signs indicating that the US economy has structural issues. You can ignore them if you wish. They also don't mean that the country is going to fall apart tomorrow or even 10 years from now. It is quite possible that we experience another bubble before another big drop or that the economy muddles through for 30 years without a big advance or decline. I am merely suggesting that a big economic expansion is incredibly unlikely.

I wish you and everyone lots of luck dealing with real troubles the country and even the global economy faces. I believe it is incredibly unlikely that the jobs lost will ever be replaced. There will be some job growth but it won't replace anywhere close to the number of jobs lost. Then there will be another recession and more jobs will be lost. This is the pattern of history but also the pattern most likely based on the economic data available. If you or anyone can give reasons why this is unlikely please post them because I would love to be wrong.

[GuyFawkes38]

I would never suggest dismissing numbers. Looking strictly at GDP numbers ignores other numbers such as median wage, trade balance, etc. GDP can easily be manipulated by inflation. The government has all sorts of means to distort inflation and therefore increase "real" GDP. It is much more difficult to distort trade figures and median wages.

ugghhh

Since you believe that there is some sort of massive conspiracy going on for the past 40 years and that GDP and inflation numbers have been messed with, I guess we can't really touch upon that.

But just on an anecdotal level (since of course, we can't trust the numbers), do you really think all of the technological advances of the past 30 years haven't increased productivity and wealth?

[madness31]

Of course there has been productivity increases. Not sure I would call the inflation manipulation a conspiracy but it is well documented that the calculation has changed dramatically over the years. Most, if not all of these changes have caused the inflation calculation to show lower inflation.

Some of the changes are legit and they are all somewhat reasonable in theory. An example is that the government assumes that if the price of beef goes up then people will buy more chicken. This is a valid assumption but it doesn't change the fact that the price of beef increased. Another example is that if a car or computer or any other product has additional features but sells at the same price it is considered a decrease in price. this makes sense if the individual has an option to buy these products without the extra features at the lower price but many times that option is not available so the price paid stays the same while the government records it as a price drop.

There are all sorts of other changes that keep inflation statistics low and therefore boost GDP. There are organizations that calculate inflation using older models and the difference is very material. As I said the theories make some sense but they go a little to far for my tastes.

Wealth has definitely increased but most of the increase has been experienced by those at the top. An example of this is that CEOs use to make 25 times the average employee, now it is around 500 times. There is also the wealth created by property and stocks. While those things have struggled recently they did boom for a good stretch of that 40 year period. Most of those gains went to the wealthy but obviously anyone with a 401K, IRA, etc should have benefited. Technological advances have definitely made life easier for everyone but financial struggles are still a major issue for many working class families.

Unfortunately the middle class is beginning to get squeezed due to jobs permanently leaving the country. People can live off of savings for a while and take lower paying jobs at fast food restaurants, etc but their standard of living will decline. You can ignore reality if you wish but a significant portion of those job losses are here to stay. The question isn't if the US will decline or even if the US is in decline but how fast will it happen? Thus far it has been a very slow process, which is probably why many haven't realized it has started. The pace picked up a bit in the 2000's but the country still expects their leaders to do something about it. There are serious structural issues that can't be solved so simply. The country may follow the Japan path or they may choose to take their pain more abruptly. I'm not suggesting the US is going to collapse and never come back again but that there are some rough times ahead. A country cannot increase debt at the rate the US did and expect to not have serious problems. This is not a partisan complaint as both parties have been incredibly irresponsible as have households and even businesses. Businesses have cleaned up their balance sheets but the other sectors are still a mess with the government getting worse every year.

[GuyFawkes38]

There are 3 sectors of the economy that are now more expensive than 40 years ago.

Education and health care are highly labor dependent. Computers can't teach your kids. We still desire low student/teacher ratios. And highly trained doctors still need to diagnose illnesses and treat them. That gets expensive.

For the past 50 years, the government has invested a lot of cash in home ownership programs which have driven up prices.

But outside of those 3 areas, everything has decreased in price compared to median wages. Productivity is a good thing. There is no better time to be alive.

[madness31]

Productivity is a great thing. It reduces costs and increases profits. That is not the whole story. An economy is more than productivity.

I agree the government has played a role in rising home prices but a much smaller role than aggressive lending by the financial industry. This debt fueled boom has created a misallocation of wealth. When wealth is misallocated it leads to economic problems.

The feds easy money policies were a huge factor in the housing bubble as well as the consumer debt bubble and government debt bubbles. In the beginning the easy money helped to create businesses which increased competition and lead to productivity gains. There was real innovation that took place but that productivity innovation is slowing. Now most productivity gains come from demanding more work from fewer employees without a technological offset. There are of course areas that are still experiencing innovation and there will be new technologies and medical breakthroughs, etc but not because of easy Fed policies. The easy Fed policies have moved past the stage of fostering innovation and to the stage where it creates widespread commodity inflation. It is leading to a weak dollar and that will cause prices to rise. At first it will be gradual but if policies don't change quickly it will become dramatic.

There is only so much magic in central planning and when the tricks run out the good times fade. There are no easy solutions. If the Fed continues with easy money inflation will get out of control and if they don't the economy will stagnate. Interest rates will rise in both cases. A weak economy will cause concern over the government debt load and foreigners will slow, stop or sell treasury purchases. This will drive rates higher. If the fed continues to weaken the US dollar they will take the same action. I don't know the precise timing of this but it is coming. Bernanke has been very creative since taking over for Greenspan so maybe he still has another trick that I'm unaware of. There is no doubt he is more knowledgeable than I but that doesn't change the fact that you cannot change the laws of economics. Eventually the trickery stops fooling people. Eventually debt loads are just too high. Eventually the house of cards is knocked down by a brisk wind.

Can't say I agree that there was never a better time to be alive as it is personal preference but there is no doubt that it is a very interesting time. The US will fade to the background for a period of time if we do the right thing and deal with our issues now. If not the US will eventually cease to be relevant for a very long time. We are flirting with the second option after inflating the housing bubble and bailing out the banks. It definitely made the fix more severe but probably still manageable with only a decade or two of hard times. Time will tell.

[Snipe]

Here is an interesting piece by Victor Davis Hanson. He has traveled the back roads and the roads less traveled in California where he grew up. What has found is a segregated apartheid welfare state. One California exists for the wealthy first world portion, another for the Mexican third world sector.


Two Californias (http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/255320/two-californias-victor-davis-hanson)
Abandoned farms, Third World living conditions, pervasive public assistance -- welcome to the once-thriving Central Valley.
by Victor Davis Hanson

The last three weeks I have traveled about, taking the pulse of the more forgotten areas of central California. I wanted to witness, even if superficially, what is happening to a state that has the highest sales and income taxes, the most lavish entitlements, the near-worst public schools (based on federal test scores), and the largest number of illegal aliens in the nation, along with an overregulated private sector, a stagnant and shrinking manufacturing base, and an elite environmental ethos that restricts commerce and productivity without curbing consumption.

During this unscientific experiment, three times a week I rode a bike on a 20-mile trip over various rural roads in southwestern Fresno County. I also drove my car over to the coast to work, on various routes through towns like San Joaquin, Mendota, and Firebaugh. And near my home I have been driving, shopping, and touring by intent the rather segregated and impoverished areas of Caruthers, Fowler, Laton, Orange Cove, Parlier, and Selma. My own farmhouse is now in an area of abject poverty and almost no ethnic diversity; the closest elementary school (my alma mater, two miles away) is 94 percent Hispanic and 1 percent white, and well below federal testing norms in math and English.

Here are some general observations about what I saw (other than that the rural roads of California are fast turning into rubble, poorly maintained and reverting to what I remember seeing long ago in the rural South). First, remember that these areas are the ground zero, so to speak, of 20 years of illegal immigration. There has been a general depression in farming — to such an extent that the 20- to-100-acre tree and vine farmer, the erstwhile backbone of the old rural California, for all practical purposes has ceased to exist.

Now that is quite a happy way to start an article. Hanson grew up in California and his family has owned a farm there for many generations. He is talking about his neighborhood.

It has to be a bitter experience. He goes on...


Many of the rural trailer-house compounds I saw appear to the naked eye no different from what I have seen in the Third World. There is a Caribbean look to the junked cars, electric wires crisscrossing between various outbuildings, plastic tarps substituting for replacement shingles, lean-tos cobbled together as auxiliary housing, pit bulls unleashed, and geese, goats, and chickens roaming around the yards. The public hears about all sorts of tough California regulations that stymie business — rigid zoning laws, strict building codes, constant inspections — but apparently none of that applies out here.

It is almost as if the more California regulates, the more it does not regulate. Its public employees prefer to go after misdemeanors in the upscale areas to justify our expensive oversight industry, while ignoring the felonies in the downtrodden areas, which are becoming feral and beyond the ability of any inspector to do anything but feel irrelevant. But in the regulators’ defense, where would one get the money to redo an ad hoc trailer park with a spider web of illegal bare wires?

It is as if there is a demarcation point between the civilized world and the abyss, and this has already happened in California. Coming to a theater near you!

Trashing America!


California coastal elites may worry about the oxygen content of water available to a three-inch smelt in the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta, but they seem to have no interest in the epidemic dumping of trash, furniture, and often toxic substances throughout California’s rural hinterland. Yesterday, for example, I rode my bike by a stopped van just as the occupants tossed seven plastic bags of raw refuse onto the side of the road. I rode up near their bumper and said in my broken Spanish not to throw garbage onto the public road. But there were three of them, and one of me. So I was lucky to be sworn at only. I note in passing that I would not drive into Mexico and, as a guest, dare to pull over and throw seven bags of trash into the environment of my host.

For all their progressive environmental foresight, they seem to have not taken good care of California. Why spend so much time on the Delta Smelt when the apocalypse is starting to surround you? But they do.


In fact, trash piles are commonplace out here — composed of everything from half-empty paint cans and children’s plastic toys to diapers and moldy food. I have never seen a rural sheriff cite a litterer, or witnessed state EPA workers cleaning up these unauthorized wastelands. So I would suggest to Bay Area scientists that the environment is taking a much harder beating down here in central California than it is in the Delta. Perhaps before we cut off more irrigation water to the west side of the valley, we might invest some green dollars into cleaning up the unsightly and sometimes dangerous garbage that now litters the outskirts of our rural communities.

Talk about a wasteland. Meanwhile, the exodus continues:


We hear about the tough small-business regulations that have driven residents out of the state, at the rate of 2,000 to 3,000 a week.

I wonder why those fine people would be leaving California? Will the last American to leave California please bring the flag? Anyone? Please?

He moves on to the welfare state:


In two supermarkets 50 miles apart, I was the only one in line who did not pay with a social-service plastic card (gone are the days when “food stamps” were embarrassing bulky coupons). But I did not see any relationship between the use of the card and poverty as we once knew it: The electrical appurtenances owned by the user and the car into which the groceries were loaded were indistinguishable from those of the upper middle class.

By that I mean that most consumers drove late-model Camrys, Accords, or Tauruses, had iPhones, Bluetooths, or BlackBerries, and bought everything in the store with public-assistance credit. This seemed a world apart from the trailers I had just ridden by the day before. I don’t editorialize here on the logic or morality of any of this, but I note only that there are vast numbers of people who apparently are not working, are on public food assistance, and enjoy the technological veneer of the middle class. California has a consumer market surely, but often no apparent source of income. Does the $40 million a day supplement to unemployment benefits from Washington explain some of this?

How long can that hope to last? The system is broken. It is a matter of time.

But you say "Hey Snipe, what about the diversity? Diversity is strength. They told me that in school."

Welcome to the apartheid state of California:


Do diversity concerns, as in lack of diversity, work both ways? Over a hundred-mile stretch, when I stopped in San Joaquin for a bottled water, or drove through Orange Cove, or got gas in Parlier, or went to a corner market in southwestern Selma, my home town, I was the only non-Hispanic — there were no Asians, no blacks, no other whites. We may speak of the richness of “diversity,” but those who cherish that ideal simply have no idea that there are now countless inland communities that have become near-apartheid societies, where Spanish is the first language, the schools are not at all diverse, and the federal and state governments are either the main employers or at least the chief sources of income — whether through emergency rooms, rural health clinics, public schools, or social-service offices. An observer from Mars might conclude that our elites and masses have given up on the ideal of integration and assimilation, perhaps in the wake of the arrival of 11 to 15 million illegal aliens.

I have to ask. Why do we let this happen? Why do we let illegal aliens from Mexico come here and do this? And it isn't just illegal aliens. We don't need any more legal immigration from Mexico either. We have 20% of the Mexican population, and most of them come from the poorest and most uneducated sector of that population. The only country with more Mexicans in the world is Mexico. So we have that going for us.

It is cultural suicide.

To be continued ~

[Snipe]

More from above on VDH:


Again, I do not editorialize, but I note these vast transformations over the last 20 years that are the paradoxical wages of unchecked illegal immigration from Mexico, a vast expansion of California’s entitlements and taxes, the flight of the upper middle class out of state, the deliberate effort not to tap natural resources, the downsizing in manufacturing and agriculture, and the departure of whites, blacks, and Asians from many of these small towns to more racially diverse and upscale areas of California.

Fresno’s California State University campus is embroiled in controversy over the student body president’s announcing that he is an illegal alien, with all the requisite protests in favor of the DREAM Act. I won’t comment on the legislation per se, but again only note the anomaly. I taught at CSUF for 21 years. I think it fair to say that the predominant theme of the Chicano and Latin American Studies program’s sizable curriculum was a fuzzy American culpability. By that I mean that students in those classes heard of the sins of America more often than its attractions. In my home town, Mexican flag decals on car windows are far more common than their American counterparts.

Note that it isn't just whites getting away from the third world Mexicans, it is Asians and Blacks too. Blacks don't do well in Mexico. Mexicans in general don’t care for Blacks. For that matter, they don’t care for Jews either. Much more than our general population. And they don’t really care for White people. It is a trifecta!. We are importing an intolerant, uneducated and ignorant bunch relative to the rest of the population, and they don’t like any of us.

How could any of that go wrong? Multiculturalism has failed.

And here is the big finish:


California does not care whether one broke the law to arrive here or continues to break it by staying. It asks nothing of the illegal immigrant — no proficiency in English, no acquaintance with American history and values, no proof of income, no record of education or skills. It does provide all the public assistance that it can afford (and more that it borrows for), and apparently waives enforcement of most of California’s burdensome regulations and civic statutes that increasingly have plagued productive citizens to the point of driving them out. How odd that we overregulate those who are citizens and have capital to the point of banishing them from the state, but do not regulate those who are aliens and without capital to the point of encouraging millions more to follow in their footsteps. How odd — to paraphrase what Critias once said of ancient Sparta — that California is at once both the nation’s most unfree and most free state, the most repressed and the wildest.

Hundreds of thousands sense all that and vote accordingly with their feet, both into and out of California — and the result is a sort of social, cultural, economic, and political time-bomb, whose ticks are getting louder.

California is a ticking time bomb. The ticks are getting louder. This baby is about to break. When it does it will shake this nation.

Who killed California?

[X-band '01]

Lex Luthor killed California. When it falls into the ocean the new coastal cities of Luthorville, Marina Del Lex and Otisburg will prosper with illegals.

[Snipe]

The band man chimes in with a brilliant point. We might have to consider the "Lex Luther option" after all. If only.

The third world invasion doesn't halt at the borders of California. What has happened in California is already happening in every other state in the Union. We are just lagging behind. It is happening in Ohio. California is the trend setter of the nation, they have been so for decades. I think we need to look at what is happening there now and prepare for the worst.

I can't see how this ends well. California was probably the richest state in the nation. They are going down the tubes. As Hanson said, it is a ticking time bomb. At one point the rest of America will wake up. The collapse of California will be the death of the canary in the coal mine. I wonder if it already will be too late to do anything about it. I suspect it is. That doesn't mean you should just take it, and people won't go easily. They will rage against the dying of the light. That is what is coming. I think it will be a national upheaval.

This will not end well.

[nuts4xu]

Don't know if anyone has mentioned it on this thread or not, but I think California would be much better off if they were to legalize marijuana.

Just sayin...

[Smails]

Don't know if anyone has mentioned it on this thread or not, but I think the world would be much better off if they were to legalize marijuana.

Just sayin...

Fixed that for ya Nuts

[Snipe]

I thought this reaction was amusing.

Victor David Hanson’s “Two Californias” is the most horrifying writing I’ve read not penned by Stephen King (http://hillbuzz.org/2010/12/16/victor-david-hansons-two-californias-is-the-most-horrifying-writing-ive-read-not-penned-by-stephen-king/)


Seriously, this is the most horrifying thing I’ve read in a while that didn’t leap from Stephen King’s cranial cauldron of nightmares.

It’s Victor David Hanson’s “Two Californias” essay, and it’s chilling.

Please read it.

Every word.

In a nutshell, Hanson describes the net effect of importing 15 million third world peasants illegally to this country while the Left and media pretend they don’t exist, and that they are not reconquistas colonizing the US the way Muslims are colonizing Europe. Just as Muslims are trying to turn France, the Netherlands, and Britain into sharia law controlled nightmares similar to the Islamic countries that sent these colonists to do those jobs, Mexico’s pumping its unwanted peasants into California…which these reconquistas are turning into the Thunderdome-grade lawless wasteland that is Mexico itself.

The reconquistas are squatting on farmland in California’s Central Valley — which is made possible by Democrats destroying the agriculture industry in California and the manufacturing base that accompanied it, leaving vast swaths of abandoned property the Mexicans then seize and turn into garbage dumps and illegal trailer parks. Just like back in Mexico where they came from, only now Democrats see to it they get checks from the government to subsist on.

Hanson also touches on the bizarre paradox that is an illegal alien rally — where reconquistas wave the Mexican flag high in the air, shout in Spanish, and nostalgically wax on about how wonderful Mexico is and how morally superior it is to the US…and at the same time protest against being sent back to Mexico, that place they say is so great, but left, and now refuse to go back to.

Which makes no sense.

[madness31]

I have no problem with Mexicans or any other people moving to the US. I do have a problem with supporting them if they are not working. Many Mexicans are very hard workers and slave away at jobs most americans would hate. The problem isn't with imigration as much as it is with the government supporting people that are not working.

An individual making $600K annually stated that he has his common law wife apply for food stamps. Greed and selfishness know no bounds.

Minimum wages make sense to ensure people do not take advantage of other people but other financial assistance should be eliminated.

[X-band '01]

I wonder how illegals are living in the other border states of Arizona, New Mexico and Texas - neither state has anywhere near the extent the issues that California does. Texas may well be the most prosperous state in the union.

I wonder if there's any chance Texas would turn blue if the demographics continue to change.

[Snipe]

I have no problem with Mexicans or any other people moving to the US. I do have a problem with supporting them if they are not working. Many Mexicans are very hard workers and slave away at jobs most americans would hate. The problem isn't with imigration as much as it is with the government supporting people that are not working.

An individual making $600K annually stated that he has his common law wife apply for food stamps. Greed and selfishness know no bounds.

Minimum wages make sense to ensure people do not take advantage of other people but other financial assistance should be eliminated.

You don't have kids. If you did, would you send your child to a California public school that is 94% Hispanic and 1% White where the kids by and large can't speak English? The author of that article comes from a farming family for many generations in that area. Is there any wonder why White people leave? When that author was born the State of California was probably 90% White or more. That valley was one of the most productive farmlands in America. I bet it was a tight-knit Christian community with good schools for sure. I can only imagine. Now it is a third world wasteland. Ah the price of progress and diversity.

Imagine growing up in beautiful California and living his life. Imagine the transformation that he has seen. The whole nation is supposed to look more and more like California. I can't wait.

[Snipe]

I wonder how illegals are living in the other border states of Arizona, New Mexico and Texas - neither state has anywhere near the extent the issues that California does. Texas may well be the most prosperous state in the union.

I wonder if there's any chance Texas would turn blue if the demographics continue to change.

It seems like Texas is much better at coping with the problem of massive third world immigration. I think they expect people to assimilate in Texas, where California progressives put the emphasis on identitity politics. The radicals do seem to be coming from California. That is just one screwed up state in so many ways.

[GuyFawkes38]

I know I already posted these two graphs. But I don't think Snipe responded and I think they are important. And x-band noted the California vs Texas debate.

Someone has to defend California.

IMHO, these two graphs are the best indicators that California might not be quite as doomed as Snipe believes.

http://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/original-size/caltexgsp.PNG

and

http://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/original-size/caltexinc.PNG

The total GDP of Texas has grown at a slightly faster rate than California.

But this past decade, Texas has declined even further in terms of per capita GDP rate versus California.

What does this tell us? Texas is clearly a more accommodating place. The population of Texas has grown faster than California. Land is cheaper than California. Cost of living is cheaper than California. If you have a fixed amount of cash and your not in the technology or entertainment industries, it's a good idea to move to Texas instead of California. That caused Texas to grow at a slightly faster rate than California.

Should California be blamed for that? perhaps a little. As Snipe notes, land regulations are supposedly ridiculous.

But California is also a victim of its own success. It's an incredibly productive state (the economy of France with half of the population). There are lots of people who make a ton of cash and that drives up prices on everything, but especially housing.

I think the big story of "Texas vs California" is that Texas has much more land and less super wealthy people driving up prices on that land.

I'm not knocking Texas. It's awesome that there's still a place in America that provides cheap land. It's the American dream. It'll be sad when Texas grows more heavily populated and prices rise.


Edit: On a more general note, a quick glance at the graphs show that both Texas and California weathered the decades recessions quite well. I have trouble buying the apocalyptic tone of the VDH piece. Or, to put it better, I just think it's a very incomplete picture of the state. Yes, the central valley very well might be a hell hole. But don't extrapolate that to the entire state.

[madness31]

California's GDP is not yet the problem. The problem is with the government budget. They are spending too much and it is putting their economy at risk. As the Federal assistance goes away this will become even more obvious. The CA government will be forced to reduce spending or raise taxes. Either will decrease overall GDP as companies, especially small businesses, leave if taxes are raised and jobs are lost if government cuts spending.

I don't believe TX has the same budget issues.

[GuyFawkes38]

No doubt California has a more dysfunctional state government. But GDP is a much more important figure for the welfare of a state.

[GuyFawkes38]

hmmm, anybody have a site to compare Texas and Califnornia in terms of the population growth of low earning wage immigrants?

[waggy]

Despite huge losses to San Francisco's pension fund, $170 million extra will be paid out (http://www.baycitizen.org/pensions-1/story/bonus-payments-retirees-draw-ire-cash/)

[BandAid]

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, God may kill California:

"Superstorm" Coming (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/21/california-superstorm_n_812215.html)

[GuyFawkes38]

I blasted madness31 earlier in this thread for arguing that the US economy peaked in the 1970's. He's wrong in the literal sense. The economy has continued to grow since the 1970's. But he does have a point. The growth in the 50's, 60's, and 70's was stronger than the 80's, 90's, and 00's.

I just stumbled on this (http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2011/01/growth_1) blog post. It does indicate that growth has slowed in the past 30 years.

Here are average annual growth rates per decade:

* 1930s 1.31%
* 1940s 5.99%
* 1950s 4.17%
* 1960s 4.44%
* 1970s 3.26%
* 1980s 3.05%
* 1990s 3.20%
* 2000s 1.82%

It's sort of depressing.

I think part of the problem is that in the past 30 years we've invested a lot of resources into health care and education. The education and health care industries have a close connection with the government and have received massive funding from tax payers. I don't think we've seen a good return on that investment.

[Snowboarder]

I wonder how illegals are living in the other border states of Arizona, New Mexico and Texas - neither state has anywhere near the extent the issues that California does. Texas may well be the most prosperous state in the union.

I wonder if there's any chance Texas would turn blue if the demographics continue to change.

The state of Texas is $27billion dollars in the hole.

[Juice]

Fart tasting smug bastards killed California
http://www.mgroves.com/images/south_park_smug.jpg

[GuyFawkes38]

I'm far from an environmentalist. But I sort of sympathize with the people of California.

As Snipe notes, land regulations in California dramatically increase home prices. But there's a lot of beauty on the California coast.

This blog post got me thinking about that:
http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2011/01/california-coastal-commission-gentrification-and-climate-change/#comments

Nearly everyone in the comments section, who likely can't afford housing along the California coast, support the regulations.

And I sort of agree. It's not appealing for the California coast to be turned into Miami, lined with ugly high rises.

This is a fun thread. Snipe makes some great points. I completely agree with Snipe that the state government in California sucks.

But geography plays a big role too. California has lots of beautiful mountains and beaches that need to be protected, which limits the housing supply and increases the cost of living.

[bobbiemcgee]

http://skypeassholes.com/node/10163

[Snipe]

http://skypeassholes.com/node/10163

Wow.

[GuyFawkes38]

A while back I purchased a US atlas off a bargain bin for a dollar. I just stumbled on a map like this:

http://www.learnnc.org/lp/media/uploads/2010/03/us_precip.gif

The western part of the US is really, really dry. It's funny when some people argue that the US is empty. A good chunk of the US is either inhabitable or expensive to live in due to the lack of water.

The California economy wasn't the only one to plunge. Arizona, New Mexico, and Nevada also struggled.

It's hard for the government to promote affordable housing in areas where water is so expensive.

[waggy]

Prison guards can retire at the age of 55 and earn 85% of their final year's salary for the rest of their lives. They also continue to receive medical benefits.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704132204576285471510530398.html

[Fred Garvin 2.0]

I hear California had its body washed and was dumped at sea. Mixed reports that California used a woman as a human shield. But no way I believe California reached for a gun as she finds them abhorrent.