by Peter Tucci
California has it all: a great climate, natural beauty, world-class universities, a unique cultural appeal, and a location along the thriving Pacific Rim. People should be flocking to the Golden State, and for a while they were: between 1940 and 1990, 12.4 million Americans immigrated to California (in addition to millions of Asians and Latin Americans).
But then people started leaving. Since 1990, four million more people have moved from California to other states than have moved from other states to California. Companies are leaving, too. In just the first three and a half months of this year, 70 companies left the state.
It’s hard to blame them. California now has the country’s highest cost of living, highest sales tax, third-highest marginal income tax rate, worst business climate, second-worst roads, fifth-highest gas prices, worst air quality, second-highest unemployment rate, highest home prices, and third-highest foreclosure rate. It also boasts a below-average public education system, above-average crime rates, and one of the most poorly managed state governments in America. Environmental regulations designed to protect three-inch-long fish have devastated California’s bread basket, the San Joaquin Valley, where fields lie fallow and the unemployment rate is stuck in the high teens. Two years ago, the unemployment rate in parts of the valley topped 40 percent. Los Angeles is falling apart; San Francisco is considering whether to outlaw circumcision; Silicon Valley, long a symbol of the Golden State’s innovative streak, is facing stiff competition from rising tech hubs like Austin and New York City; and Hollywood is losing business to Canada and other parts of the U.S.
I’m seriously considering moving. This is not the state I grew up in, it’s being transformed into dump. My primary school education was excellent, but today’s classrooms are often taught by teachers with a political agenda. That’s bad enough, but they are teaching at a slower pace than ever, thanks to illegal immigration and non-English speaking students. In the larger cities like Fresno, Sacramento, Stockton, to LA, the grade schools to high schools are grossly affected by gang violence. Everywhere you look we find terrible examples of corruption and waste and that’s why I say California is being transformed into a dump. I blame the highly aggressive and politically motivated liberals with too much free time for doing this to us. They championed every anti-American cause that came down the pike. They promoted incompetence as the lowered the bar with affirmative action. They dumbed down the schools and society as a whole as they helped racist groups infiltrate the government and educational system. At the same time they embarked on this wealth shifting communist based non-sense. The leftist radicals won the demographics race by catering to the welfare bums of society who voted out logic and reason and replaced it with this stupid populist movement. The masses of takers now just vote themselves whatever benefits they want and expect the wealthy to pick up the tab. The evidence of what they have done to us is everywhere. Really sad.
We are too.
What do you do with the property? This hell hole is hard to exit entirely. If you keep your property you may not be able to rent it…maintenance and taxes will continue (and your ties to the state). If you try to sell it you won’t get far without taking a big loss.
If things keep going the same way, however we won’t have a choice. We work for a living and there’s little room or incentive for reward for hard work here. Those who depend on government checks think the businessman is greedy even though you often make less than they do. They are also smug enough to say you don’t “give back” even though you provide jobs and contribute to local charities. But even more than the terrible fiscal and anti-business perspective of government is the attitudes of the people who run it and those who support them. They bite the hand that feeds them! They insult those who have the ability to grow the economy and the tax base, and they have no respect for what it takes to get that done. Who needs it!