8/10/2017 - Victor Davis Hanson Townhall.com
Corporate
profits at California-based transnational corporations such as Apple, Facebook
and Google are hitting record highs.
California
housing prices from La Jolla to Berkeley along the Pacific Coast can top $1,000
a square foot.
It seems as
if all of China is willing to pay premium prices to get their children degreed
at Caltech, Berkeley, Stanford, UCLA or USC.
Yet
California -- after raising its top income tax rate to 13.3 percent and
receiving record revenues -- is still facing a budget deficit of more than $1
billion. There is a much more foreboding state crisis of unfunded liabilities
and pension obligations of nearly $1 trillion.
Soon, new
gas tax hikes, on top of green mandates, might make California gas the most
expensive in the nation, despite the state's huge reserves of untapped oil.
Where does
the money go, given that the state's schools and infrastructure rank among
America's worst in national surveys?
Illegal
immigration over the last 30 years, the exodus of millions of middle-class
Californians, and huge wealth concentrated in the L.A. basin and Silicon Valley
have turned the state into a medieval manor of knights and peasants, with ever
fewer in between.
The
strapped middle class continues to flee bad schools, high taxes, rampant crime
and poor state services. About one-third of the nation's welfare recipients
reside in California. Approximately one-fifth of the state lives below the
poverty line. More than a quarter of Californians were not born in the United
States.
Many of the
state's wealthiest residents support high taxes, no-growth green policies and
subsidies for the poor. They do so because they reside in apartheid
neighborhoods and have the material and political wherewithal to become exempt
from the consequences of their own utopian bromides.
Blue
California has no two-party politics anymore. Its campuses, from Berkeley to Claremont,
have proven among the most hostile to free speech in the nation.
A few
things keep California going. Its natural bounty, beauty and weather draw in
people eager to play California roulette. The state is naturally rich in
minerals, oil and natural gas, timber and farmland. The world pays dearly for
whatever techies based in California's universities can dream up.
That said,
the status quo is failing.
The
skeletons of half-built bridges and overpasses for a $100 billion
high-speed-rail dinosaur remind residents of the ongoing boondoggle. Meantime,
outdated roads and highways -- mostly unchanged from the 1960s -- make driving
for 40 million both slow and dangerous. Each mile of track for high-speed rail
represents millions of dollars that were not spent on repairing and expanding
stretches of the state's decrepit freeways -- and hundreds of lives needlessly
lost each year.
The future
of state transportation is not updated versions of 19th-century ideas of
railways and locomotives, but instead will include electric-powered and
automatically piloted cars -- all impossible without good roads.
Less than
40 percent of California residents identify themselves as conservative. But
red-county California represents some 75 percent of California's geographical
area. It's as if large, rural Mississippi and tiny urban Massachusetts were one
combined state -- all ruled by liberal Boston.
Now, a
third of the state thinks it can pull off a "Calexit" and leave the
United States. Calexit's unhinged proponents have no idea that they are
mimicking the right-wing arguments of the Confederate states that prompted the
Civil War. Like South Carolina residents in 1861, Calexit advocates seem to
assume that federal law should apply everywhere else except in California. Many
of these California residents also believe that the federal Environmental
Protection Agency should always override local ordinances, but not so with
another federal bureau, Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
South
Carolina started the Civil War by shelling and capturing federal property at
Fort Sumter in Charleston Bay. Calexit wannabe secessionists similarly assume
that thousands of square miles of federal property -- from California federal
courtrooms and post offices to national parks such as Yosemite to huge military
bases such as Camp Pendleton -- belong to the state and could simply be
confiscated from the federal government.
Calexit
proponents assume California can leave the union without an authorizing
amendment to the Constitution, ratified by three-fourths of all the states. And
they fail to see that should California ever secede, it would immediately split
in two. The coastal strip would go the way of secessionist Virginia. The other
three-quarters of the state's geography would remain loyal to the union and
become a new version of loyalist West Virginia.
Buying a
home on the California coast is nearly impossible. The state budget can only be
balanced through constant tax hikes. Finding a good, safe public school is
difficult. Building a single new dam during the California drought to capture
record runoff water in subsequent wet years proved politically impossible.
No matter.
Many Californians consider those existential problems to be a premodern drag,
while they dream of postmodern trains, the legalization of pot-growing -- and
seceding from the United States of America.
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