JOEL KOTKIN: Kamalafornia Über Alles. “Yet given the partisan fixations of most mainstream media, few look at the Kamalafornian reality. Since 2000, this state of unmatched attractions has managed to lose a net 3.5 million domestic residents. Critically, it ranks toward the bottom among US states in drawing newcomers, who have always been the critical fuel for its economy. Many of those leaving, according to an analysis of IRS data, are middle-income families in their childbearing years; many are college graduates. Forget Harris’s youthful “vibe”: The state, according to data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, is aging 50 percent more rapidly than the nation—gradually ditching the surfboard for the walker. When Biden was elected in 2020, an overjoyed Los Angeles Times gushed that his goal was to turn America into California. This reflected the reality that the progressive power center lies not in New York, now only the fourth most populous state, or even in the wider Northeast, but in California.”
Plus:
California progressives like to hold up the state as a social-justice model, with establishment left theorists like Laura Tyson and Lenny Mendonca envisioning the state as the epicenter of “a new progressive era.” Others see California, as a New York Times column put it, epitomizing “the shared values of our increasingly tolerant and pluralistic society.”
This is a stretch of planetary proportions. Instead of becoming more of a social democracy, California is becoming ever more feudal: a place characterized by a two-tier economy, with a more affluent educated white and Asian population lording it over a Latino and African-American service class.
California may be home to the highest number of billionaires. Despite its enormous wealth, it is also home to a third of the nation’s homeless people. The Golden State also suffers the highest share of residents living in poverty and the widest gap between middle- and upper-middle-income earners of any state.
Nearly one in five Californians—many working—lives in poverty (using a cost-of-living-adjusted poverty rate). The Public Policy Institute of California estimates that another fifth of residents live in near-poverty, or about 15 million. Most tragic, roughly 20 percent of California’s children lived in or near poverty in 2016.
They’ll turn us all into beggars ’cause they’re easier to please.