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Message
California is drifting into a new kind of feudalism
Posted on 2/13/21 at 8:28 am
Posted on 2/13/21 at 8:28 am
LINK
quote:
If one were to explore the most blessed places on earth, California, my home for a half century, would surely be up there. The state, with its salubrious climate, spectacular scenery, vast natural resources, and entrepreneurial heritage is home to the world’s fifth-largest economy and its still-dominant technological centre. It is also — as some progressives see it — the incubator of “a capitalism we can believe in”.
quote:
The on-the-ground reality — as opposed to that portrayed in the media or popular culture — is more Dickensian than utopian. Rather than the state where dreams are made, in reality California increasingly presents the prototype of a new feudalism fused oddly with a supposedly progressive model in which inequality is growing, not falling.
quote:
California now suffers the highest cost-adjusted poverty rate in the country, and the widest gap between middle and upper-middle income earners. It also has one of the nation’s highest Gini ratios, which measures the inequality of wealth distribution from the richest to poorest residents — and the disparity is growing. Incredibly, California’s level of inequality is greater than that of neighbouring Mexico, and closer to Central American countries like Guatemala and Honduras than developed nations like Canada and Norway.
quote:
It is true that California’s GDP per capita is far higher than these Central American countries, but the state has slowly morphed into a low wage economy. Over the past decade, 80% of the state’s jobs have paid under the median wage — half of which are paid less than $40,000 — and most are in poorly paid personal services or hospitality jobs. Even at some of the state’s most prestigious companies like Google, many lower (and even mid-level) workers live in mobile home parks. Others sleep in their cars.
quote:
But that hasn’t stopped California from portraying itself as a progressive’s paradise, publicly advocating racial and social justice. The state just passed a Racial Justice Act to monitor law enforcement, endorsing reparations (although California was never a slave state) and is working to address “systemic” racism in its classrooms. This “woke” agenda was taken to a new extreme this week when the San Francisco School Board decided to rename 44 schools because they were named after people connected to racism or slavery. The district’s Arts Department, originally known as “VAPA”, also decided to re-brand because “acronyms are a symptom of white supremacy culture”.
Unsurprisingly, changing school names has little effect on the daily lives of minorities. In fact, minorities do better today outside of California, enjoying far higher adjusted incomes and rates of homeownership in places like Atlanta and Dallas than in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Almost one-third of Hispanics, the state’s largest ethnic group, subsist below the poverty line, compared with 21% outside the state. Meanwhile, one fifth of African Americans and over two-thirds of noncitizen Latinos, including the undocumented, are the edge of poverty.
quote:
By 2015, nearly 30% of Silicon Valley’s residents relied on public or private financial assistance. Once a beacon of middle-class aspiration, it has become “fragmented and divided,” note two Leftist researchers, Chris Benner and Manuel Pastor, “with the high-tech community largely isolated from the broader region and particularly those parts of the region that are less fortunate”. Rather than “a capitalism we can believe in”, the Bay Area has become “a region of segregated innovation,” where the upper class waxes, the middle class wanes, and the poor live in poverty that is becoming impossible to break out of. Silicon Valley, as we know it today, has essentially collapsed into “feudalism with better marketing”.
quote:
This is increasingly no longer the case. California’s population is — for the first time in its modern history — falling. Millennials, particularly when they start having families, are heading to other states, a process that has been accelerated by the pandemic. Once the ultimate land of youth, the Golden State is now ageing 50% faster than the rest of the country. In time, the wheelchair could replace the surfboard as the symbol of the state. And as millennials flee the state and other expensive coastal regions, immigrants are no longer coming in large numbers. Instead, as demographer Wendell Cox explains, they are increasingly moving inland to cities like Houston, Nashville, and Orlando.
Californian officials try to cover up these shortcomings by pointing to the huge capital gains tax receipts they receive from large tech companies, and those derived from IPOs. Together these have created an enormous tax windfall estimated at $26 billion that allows the state to enjoy an annual surplus even in hard times. That’s partly why, when Governor Newsom recently defended his economic track record, he predictably pointed to the new round of IPOs to assure us that the state’s growing billionaire class is “doing pretty damn well”.
quote:
And this is all at a time when we are starting to see the unravelling of the precise policies on social justice, climate and taxes that are widely viewed among progressives as role models for the future. These policies have not brought about greater racial harmony, enhanced upward mobility and widely based economic growth. They are not even exemplars in reducing climate change, but, at best, shift the burden of saving Gaia onto the working class while their jobs and resources generate wealth elsewhere.
Clearly California is not the avatar of brighter future, particularly in an age of heightened competition from hungrier, more motivated and less carbon-obsessed places like India and China; indeed, California increasingly cannot compete, even for most high-end jobs, with American upstarts like Texas or Arizona. So before the state — and the President — entertains any notion of sensibly “exporting” its model, California’s leaders need to embrace the biblical notion of “physician cure thyself” and demonstrate that our state is the harbinger of a better future, rather than a feudalistic past.
Posted on 2/13/21 at 8:29 am to tiggerthetooth
You expect people to read all of that?
A summary would help.
A summary would help.
Posted on 2/13/21 at 8:31 am to tiggerthetooth
Cali is proof that trickle-down economic is complete and utterly bullshite.
Posted on 2/13/21 at 8:32 am to tiggerthetooth
Not sure why white leftists in California hate minorities so much, hopefully all of them moving to the south they can learn to get along with people who are different colors than them
Posted on 2/13/21 at 8:32 am to tiggerthetooth
It's all NorCals fault
The recall is happening hopefully Chamath wins and can get his agenda through
The recall is happening hopefully Chamath wins and can get his agenda through
Posted on 2/13/21 at 8:32 am to CaptainBrannigan
quote:
Cali is proof that trickle-down economic is complete and utterly bullshite.
wait
what?
Posted on 2/13/21 at 8:33 am to CaptainBrannigan
quote:
Cali is proof that trickle-down economic is complete and utterly bullshite.
Yeah let's keep raising taxes. Moron.
Heaviest taxed state in the union has the largest amount of inequality and somehow you come to the most braindead conclusion.
Posted on 2/13/21 at 8:34 am to TigerFred
quote:
You expect people to read all of that?
A summary would help.
Read the bolded parts if you must.
Posted on 2/13/21 at 8:35 am to TigerFred
quote:Golden State meet turlet.
A summary would help.
Posted on 2/13/21 at 8:35 am to tiggerthetooth
This is why we have states
The democrats need to stop pushing their ridiculous policies down everyone’s throats. Go to California and run your little socialist experiments and let’s see if it works.
Hint: it doesn’t. And you will see California in ruins not too long from now
The democrats need to stop pushing their ridiculous policies down everyone’s throats. Go to California and run your little socialist experiments and let’s see if it works.
Hint: it doesn’t. And you will see California in ruins not too long from now
Posted on 2/13/21 at 8:35 am to CaptainBrannigan
quote:
Cali is proof that trickle-down economic is complete and utterly bullshite.
Posted on 2/13/21 at 8:36 am to TigerFred
Either your interested in the topic or you aren't fred
Posted on 2/13/21 at 8:36 am to tiggerthetooth
Have a friend that is an electrician. Left NOLA to go to the California Bay Area because he heard how wonderful things were. He had to share an apartment with three other guys. The apartment didn’t have a full kitchen-they had a hot plate to cook on. And he had to commute 2 hours one way into San Francisco.
He is now back in New Orleans.
He is now back in New Orleans.
Posted on 2/13/21 at 8:39 am to tiggerthetooth
Big cities over the decades had its high earning tax base citizens flee to the suburbs, and now California is starting to feel this.
Why a high earner chooses to live in California, instead of just visiting there is beyond me. The taxes and regulations are very high.
Why a high earner chooses to live in California, instead of just visiting there is beyond me. The taxes and regulations are very high.
Posted on 2/13/21 at 8:40 am to TigerFred
quote:
You expect people to read all of that? A summary would help.
I mean it took about 2-3 minutes. If someone is interested in it why not?
Posted on 2/13/21 at 8:41 am to tiggerthetooth
California: A beautiful state filled with shitty people.
Posted on 2/13/21 at 8:42 am to TigerFred
quote:
TigerFred
If youre going to anchor this thread then just move it to the poliboard please. Thanks.
Posted on 2/13/21 at 8:43 am to Jcorye1
yeah the problems cited in the article are primarily about the middle class, which is squeezed due to taxes and every day regulations (like housing policies). rich people don't give a frick about this marginal increase, but it crushes the middle class terribly and prevents the poor from advancing
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