The Goat Pen

hedge wrote: ↑Tue Jun 14, 2022 5:12 am You'd think people would be fleeing California by the millions if that article eCat posted was even remotely true, and yet it's the most populace state in the country, by a pretty big margin. Crazy how so many people choose to live in complete and utter squalor and anarchy in a state with (if we are to believe the screed eCat posted) absolutely no redeeming qualities, jobs, housing, laws, or opportunities whatsoever. I can't believe the guy didn't mention feral pigs roaming the streets...

eCat wrote: ↑Tue Jun 14, 2022 1:13 am We hear plenty of reasons for the perfect storm that imploded California. One-party, progressive government, of course. Decades of unchecked illegal immigration, without doubt. Years of mass flight out of state of the productive middle classes, certainly.

But perhaps the most important, but overlooked, reason has been the infusion of trillions of dollars of mostly tech capital into the state. Unimaginable sums of market capital warped politics and led to a top-down, feudal society, run by progressive elites who are shielded from the ramifications of their own toxic ideologies.

More specifically, the common denominator was the emergence in California of a selfish, monied, left-wing political class. In concrete terms, it cared little for others but masked that unconcern with abstract leftism, emulating medieval penance and indulgences to assuage guilt over its enjoyment of sheltered and very good lives. .........

If it were a question of drilling more oil while transitioning to clean power or shrugging that nobody José Martinez in Sanger would pay $6.50 a gallon to commute to work, it was a no brainer: Mr. Martinez was simply out of sight, out of mind collateral damage.

So too all of California’s poor and lower middle classes who could not afford to flee and now cannot afford shelter, food, fuel, and safety, due to decades of policies that zoned away new home construction, strangled the gas, timber, and mining industries, taxed and regulated gas and diesel to the point of unaffordability, neglected the needs of the state’s once rich farming industry, and loved fish far more than people. Apparently, these well-educated and self-declared Socrateses believed that Californians could drink Facebook, eat Google, drive Twitter, and live on Snapchat.

The far-left Atlantic’s various contributors for years have been cheerleading most of the policies adopted by the Bay Area elite—defunding the police, decriminalizing an array of crimes, appeasing homelessness, ignoring dangerous drug use and dealing, and urging more redistributive taxation and entitlement.

But now Atlantic essayist Nellie Bowles warns us that San Francisco is a “failed city.” And she is correct in that the city is increasingly medieval. Its downtown is emptying, filthy, toxic, dangerous, and pre-civilizational—perhaps an unfair term since it was rare in pre-Roman Gaul or nomadic North Africa for tribal residents to sleep in the village pathways, fornicate and defecate openly among children, and violently attack random passersby.........

Over one-fifth of the state lives below the poverty rate. Urban geographer Joel Kotkin recently noted that African Americans and Latinos in California suffer among the lowest real incomes in the nation, 48th and 50th respectively. How could that be true in the land of Mark Zuckerberg, Nancy Pelosi, and Jerry Brown?

One-third of Americans on public assistance live in California. To drive through the rural center of the state is to revisit the 1930s world of the Joads. Ramshackle farmhouses now house 20 or some immigrants. Many of them reside here illegally, in trailers, shacks, and illegal add-ons. A state famous for regulating the life out of the middle classes simply ignores systemic flagrant violations of sewage, water, power, and building codes, in the manner of the exemptions given the homeless: out of sight, out of mind.

California’s mid-size cities nudge out other blue-state metropolises to rank among the nation’s leaders in property crimes. The nation’s highest gas taxes, income taxes, and near highest sales taxes either do not mitigate the above pathologies or perhaps help fuel them.

If our liberal political elites lived in crime-ridden Stockton, San Bernardino, or Modesto, had two children in the Los Angeles City public schools, commuted daily on the 99 from Delano to Visalia, flew weekly commercial out of LAX, tried to buy a California home on their salaries as public officials, rode BART to Oakland each evening home, or depended on a business supplying the state with lumber, gas or oil, food, transportation, or construction—the stuff of life—then they might fathom how assuaging their left-wing guilt in the abstract destroyed the lives of those they never see and never wish to see.

Jungle Rat wrote: ↑Tue Jun 14, 2022 12:50 pmYep. Weird

hedge wrote: ↑Tue Jun 14, 2022 2:26 pm So California has lost 1.6 million in population over the past decade, or about 160K per year. I would guess this is the first ten year period in a long time, maybe ever, that Cali actually lost population. At any rate, 160K per year would only be less than a half a percent of their total population, but when I checked this website, it appears that California actually gained population in all of the past 5 years (and all the years before that) except for last year. Why did you lie, aTm? Irregardless, if things were as bad in California as that hysterical screed eCat posted suggests, you'd think that people would literally be fleeing by the literal millions every year. But they're not...

https://www.macrotrends.net/states/cali ... rom%202017.

hedge wrote: ↑Tue Jun 14, 2022 2:26 pm So California has lost 1.6 million in population over the past decade, or about 160K per year. I would guess this is the first ten year period in a long time, maybe ever, that Cali actually lost population. At any rate, 160K per year would only be less than a half a percent of their total population, but when I checked this website, it appears that California actually gained population in all of the past 5 years (and all the years before that) except for last year. Why did you lie, aTm? Irregardless, if things were as bad in California as that hysterical screed eCat posted suggests, you'd think that people would literally be fleeing by the literal millions every year. But they're not...

https://www.macrotrends.net/states/cali ... rom%202017.

hedge wrote: ↑Tue Jun 14, 2022 2:53 pm I wonder why these people aren't fleeing by the millions, running hysterically across Death Valley to escape the hell that California has become?

U-Haul customers made Texas and Florida their top two destinations from 2016-19. Texas had the largest net gain of one-way U-Haul trucks for three consecutive years before Florida flipped the order and became No. 1 last year. Texas is second for growth, and Florida third, for 2020.

Ohio, Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina and Georgia round out the top 10 states for 2020 growth as self-movers continue to migrate to the Southeast, as well as markets in the Southwest, Midwest and Rocky Mountain regions.

California ranks last by a wide margin, supplanting Illinois as the state with the greatest net loss of U-Haul trucks. California has ranked 48th or lower since 2016. Illinois has been 49th or 50th since 2015, when U-Haul began ranking states based on annual net gain.

sardis wrote: ↑Tue Jun 14, 2022 3:35 pm I'm not going to jump on the "California is imploding" bandwagon. It has 39M people. Losing one million over a decade is not much except a couple of house seats. It's a wierd state, economically, because it it is a boom or bust all depending on the tech industry. It's government is enjoying billion dollar surpluses because of tech's success in 2021. It probably be billions in deficits next year this time. Pacific ocean and weather draws people and its trade position with Asia will always keep it relevant.

To me, I don't understand why anyone would move to CA, TX, or FL. Getting too crowded and their infrastructures can't support the populations. All will probably have electric grid disruptions this summer and it's too damn hot.