ROGER SIMON: Brentwood to Brentwood: Is It Taxes or Politics?

I have been meaning to write a piece with the (mildly) ironic title “Brentwood to Brentwood” for some time. The opportunity arose over the weekend when I attended a party for Nashville area refugees from California.

The party was given by Galen Walker and his wife Kathy at the Bold Patriot Brewery they originally opened in Norco, Calif. in 2012 and then relocated to Nashville in 2019, making it an appropriate venue for such an event.

The migration from California to Tennessee (and other red states) has been going for some time but seems to have picked up speed just before and during COVID. Sometimes it seems that everyone who can get out of California does.

Of course, that’s far from true and moving even across town for most people is an arduous task the majority are loathe to undertake.

Nevertheless, a significant number are moving from California to Tennessee and I like to call it “Brentwood to Brentwood” because both states feature a well-known community called Brentwood.

In the case of California, Brentwood is a very upscale part of Los Angeles that, in the nineties, became one of the best known neighborhoods in the country, even the world, as the then-residence of one Orenthal James Simpson who, after a sojourn in prison, now resides in Las Vegas after the Florida attorney general advised him to leave.

Brentwood, Tennessee is not quite as upscale, or as famous, but definitely a well-to-do suburb of Nashville and a sought after place to live for country music stars and executives of the area’s dominant healthcare industry.

Obviously, not everyone is lucky enough to go Brentwood to Brentwood, but the most interesting question is why they pick up and go at all.

Is it politics, taxes, a combination, or are they just sick of California?

What life has become in locales like Venice—the once desirable beachfront capital of hippiedom now infested with homeless tents and littered with used syringes—would argue for the latter, but, it’s safe to say, it’s complicated.

For one thing, Nashville itself is blue—though not blue in the California sense. Most liberals here are of the relatively sane sort, although, ominously, there is a growing “woke” contingent.

Some of us migrants were surprised and taken aback by this. I know I was.

Further, though the state of Tennessee itself is one of the reddest of the red, GOP politicians, particularly on that state level, tend to lag behind their constituents. (Florida is the reverse.)

I have been told these Republican state politicians, some of them anyway, are really just new clothes versions of the old Southern Democrats that once ruled Tennessee. That strikes me as excessive, but there is some validity.

On the positive side for genuine conservatives and libertarians, however, those same GOP constituents are beginning to fight back and make their views and feelings known. You have the sense that change is in the air and that the politicians will have to respond or be primaried out.

This is particularly true now that Critical Race Theory is rearing its ugly head throughout the educational system.

* * * * * * * *

A couple of years ago, my friend University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds recommended on his site Instapundit that Tennessee residents should set up a welcome wagon for all those coming here, to remind them to leave their liberal politics behind. They were coming here for a reason.

I thought that was a good, and amusing, idea at the time. Now I’m not so sure it’s necessary.

Governor Ron DeSantis reports that the majority of those coming to his state of Florida are registering Republican.

That could well also be true of Tennessee (as well as a number of other red states that are growing).

Last week, Bryan Preston noted that “Newcomers moving to Texas will also receive a pamphlet outlining the history and policies that make Texas what it is, thus putting the ‘welcome wagon’ project that myself, Glenn Reynolds, and others have sought to establish into state law.” I rarely disagree with my former boss, but I’d like to see additional red states institute their own Welcome Wagon projects.

WHEW: Dems Thought They Could Win Texas, But They Can’t Even Win Fort Worth.

Texas is changing — but not that much. As it turns out, newcomers to Texas seem to take on the character of their state and don’t listen to those who want to change the state’s streak of independent thinking. They don’t care what the national Democrats — or national Republicans — think.

Still though, how’s that Welcome Wagon project coming along?

Related: McAllen, TX, Citizens Flip Mayor’s Office by Electing Republican Javier Villalobos.

More: GOP Sweeps in Texas Races Signal Growing Hispanic Support for the Party.

Don’t get cocky, y’all.

SOCIALISM: IF YOU BUILD IT, THEY WILL FLEE. Here Are the 10 States Where You’ll Pay the Highest Lifetime Taxes.

How’s Glenn’s Welcome Wagon project coming along?

SOCIALISM: IF YOU BUILD IT, THEY WILL LEAVE. Study: San Francisco lost the most residents of any major city in the United States.

How is Glenn’s Welcome Wagon project coming along?

CNBC: The California Tech Exodus.

Best to avoid Texas though. In addition to the feral hogs and the recent “neanderthal” order by Gov. Abbott to stop enforcing mask orders, ‘Douche’ father-of-seven sales exec who moved his family from California to Texas then BACK again is blasted for complaining about Austin’s ‘rude locals, bland culture, oppressive heat and Yelp’s bad food choices’ in scathing Op-Ed. “Alder described Texas with its lower income taxes as a ‘conservative dystopia’ and said he felt cramped – even though his house was twice the size.”

In any case, how’s that red state “Welcome Wagon” project coming along?

KEVIN WILLIAMSON: Ezra Klein Misapprehends California’s Problems.

A newspaper editor once described journalists as people who have the bad taste to learn in public. Ezra Klein, a rhetorician who poses as a policy analyst, is doing some learning in public, and learning the hard way.

But what would we do without him? Who but Ezra Klein could survey the wreck left-wing Democrats have made of California and conclude that the state’s problem is its excessive conservatism?

* * * * * * * *

Klein and others of his ilk like to present themselves as dispassionate pragmatists, enlightened empiricists who only want to do “what works.” Conservatives have long understood that our choice is not between a bundle of prejudices and enlightened scientific management but between a bundle of prejudices and a different bundle of prejudices. Klein mocks San Francisco for renaming schools (Begone, Abraham Lincoln!) while it has no plan to reopen them, but he cannot quite see that these are two aspects of a single phenomenon.

Klein is a practitioner of what Michael Oakeshott called “rationalism in politics.” What is meant by “rationalism” there is not “reason,” but rather the cultic conviction that all social arrangements and sources of human unhappiness are subject to scientific improvement through (generally) inductive methods. It is a superstition. It is also a cover for ideology and camouflage for bias.

Read the whole thing.

Related: California Exit Interview: Fleeing $17 salads and ‘general lawlessness.’

Kieran Blubaugh dreamed of living in California when he was growing up in Indiana. He played the Tony Hawk Pro Skater video game and envisioned himself skateboarding down San Francisco’s crazy hills.

IF YOU TAX IT, THEY WILL GO: Taxes driving wealth out of Massachusetts and into Florida, New Hampshire: report.

Wealthy residents and businesses are leaving the state at a troubling rate — an exodus that could grow now that working remotely is gaining widespread acceptance, a new Pioneer Institute report states.

Massachusetts has seen a net loss of $20 billion to other states, especially New Hampshire and Florida where taxes are much lower, the report warns.

“COVID has dramatically accelerated working from home and that’s bad news for the state,” said Pioneer Institute Research Director Greg Sullivan, who co-authored the report on “Do the Wealthy Migrate from High-Tax States?”

The Pioneer report found wealthy residents have been packing up and moving out of state over the last 25 years, taking with them much-needed taxable income. . . .

That news hits as Massachusetts’ Democratic lawmakers have proposed a hike in taxes on the rich to bolster funding for education and transit. Another vote, Sullivan says, is expected to come up again this spring.

He warns the post-pandemic economy will see companies be more mobile and searching for the best deals they can — all while employees could be free to choose where they want to live also.

My Welcome Wagon Project is underway.

WHY WOULD YOU STAY? The NYC exodus that de Blasio refuses to see. “Mayor de Blasio released his new, bigger-than-ever city budget this week pretending that federal aid would make up for City Hall’s losses thanks to the pandemic. And, worse than that delusion, he still hasn’t faced up to how his policies had New York shrinking long before the pandemic even began. That’s right: The mass exodus from the city dates to at least 2018; the flight since then is just adding to New York’s woes.”

I am, by the way, working on making the “Welcome Wagon” project a reality. I’ll report more at an appropriate time. I realized that instead of calling on other people to make it happen, it was time for me to take a hand myself.

THE EXODUS IS HERE: Techxodus: The flight of terrified techies from California to Texas marks the end of one era, and the beginning of a new one.

The “pull” factors of Texas and similar conservative states—the absence of a state income tax, a pro-business (and anti-labor) political climate—are real enough. But these factors are not new—and if they were the real causes of the flight from California of industry and population, that flight would have occurred long ago, in the 1970s or 1980s.

What has made California so repulsive that many of its star companies and most talented individuals are making like East Germans trying to scramble over the Berlin Wall? We can begin with the squalor of San Francisco with its streets littered with needles and human feces and its public parks turned into homeless encampments. Though the crisis of public order is usually blamed on low-density zoning restrictions, the homeless tend to be drug addicts or the deinstitutionalized mentally ill, not working-class people and professionals priced out of local home ownership. Meanwhile, a wave of woke education policy aimed at the ritual leveling of Bay Area’s few actual meritocratic institutions—like San Francisco’s sole merit-based STEM high school—augurs poorly for the prospects of the children of tech workers whose parents can’t afford private schools.

Whether they realize it or not, they’re fleeing Democratic governance. It’s important to make sure that they know it. Hence, my Welcome Wagon project.

No, really: “Will the refugees from the West Coast Californicate the rest of the country? My home town of Austin, once the laid-back home of outlaw country music and slackerdom, now reminds me of San Francisco circa 2010, with food snobs, arrogant bikers, and a city government at war against plastic bags and cars.”

I’ve actually started working on trying to make the Welcome Wagon project a reality. I hope to have some news later.

HOME PRICES ARE RISING FASTER IN THE MIDDLE OF THE U.S. AS COVID DRIVES PEOPLE AWAY FROM COASTS.

GOP governors better get cracking on Glenn’s Welcome Wagon kits ASAP, if they want to keep their states in the red column.

LIVING IN MONTANA — THINGS THEY DON’T TELL YOU:

Much of his advice is universal for those fleeing locked down and/or riot-torn urban areas for the country.

Exit quote: “Because so many people from California, and they’re turning it into northern California. So that’s the one thing: If you’re moving here from out of state, the reason you’re moving here is why people love it here, so don’t change it. People like it the way it is and they don’t like to be told what to do, and they’re willing to let you do the same thing. Just don’t push where you came from onto the people here, and you’ll get along just fine.”

GOP governors better get cracking on Glenn’s Welcome Wagon kits ASAP, if they want to keep their states in the red column.

BRYAN PRESTON: Elon Musk Is GTT.

Combining just some of his companies — rockets and spaceflight, electric cars, tunneling — draws the eyes from the plains of Texas to the sands of Mars where Musk’s true ambitions may lie.

Musk says he’s looking to put a human there within this decade. I would not bet against him. And I would not bet against him succeeding because he has moved his operations to the big red state known for the big, bright star on its flag.

As for Texas, GTT will have consequences. The state welcomes its new residents as friends, but do many of the new residents know and understand the policy set that has driven them from one state, most likely declining and blue, to the Lone Star State?

Someone should definitely do something about that.

GOP governors better get cracking on Glenn’s Welcome Wagon kits ASAP, if they want to keep their states in the red column. Otherwise, as a — [cough] — longtime resident of Texas myself, I’m all in favor of this proposal by America’s Newspaper of Record: Texas Passes Law Banning Californians From Voting After They Move There.

UNEXPECTEDLY!* Goldman Plots Florida Base for Asset Management in a Blow to New York.

GOP governors better get cracking on Glenn’s Welcome Wagon kits ASAP, if they want to keep their states in the red column.

* It is a Bloomberg article, after all.

#BUILDTHEWALL: Just As We Feared – California’s Economic Refugees Ruined Arizona in the 2020 Election.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): It’s really time for my Welcome Wagon Project, to educate voters moving from blue to red states.

THE EXODUS IS HERE: Tech giant Hewlett Packard Enterprise moving headquarters from California to Spring, Texas, near Houston.

GOP governors better get cracking on Glenn’s Welcome Wagon kits ASAP, if they want to keep their states in the red column. Otherwise, as a — [cough] — longtime resident of Texas, I’m all in favor of this proposal by America’s Newspaper of Record: Texas Passes Law Banning Californians From Voting After They Move There.

WHO COULD HAVE SEEN THIS COMING? San Francisco wealth tax will fuel next blue exodus for rich earners.

It’s not like they weren’t warned. And we need a separate version of my Welcome Wagon Project just for rich people who move.

CALIFORNIA, THERE IT GOES:

Hey Gavin: Pluck you, man! It’s time to stop the virulent Covidfornia virus before it infects every other place it touches. As the saying goes, if you don’t fight them over there, you have to fight them over here.

Therefore: we stay. We stick it out while they burn it down. After all, you’ve got to hit rock bottom before you can recover.

Lucky for me, we may be hitting rock sooner than I thought, thanks to Newsom, Mayor Garcetti, and L.A.’s newly elected district attorney, George Gascón.

George Gascón is a proud supporter of both BLM and Antifa. He is a far-left progressive and one of many District Attorneys who has enjoyed the generous patronage of George Soros. He thinks looting is reparations. His policies are a complete enshrinement of BLM demands: defund police, stop arresting criminals, and close down the jails, because they’re racist. The only people he plans to target for arrest are cops, of course, and innocent people guilty of things like home self-defense, white privilege, and insufficient public wokeness.

In other words, George Gascón is the disease—and the cure. Once he takes a wrecking ball to public safety, Lord help us all. The popsicle sticks and chewing gum holding this place together won’t stand a chance.

It is about to get real ugly, real fast. But at last, perhaps, people who have silently grumbled for years and years about tent cities and filth and robberies and junkies shooting up on the formerly beautiful beaches will have finally had enough.

The luddite mentality of aging San Francisco leftists is quite telling: ‘Good riddance’: Tech’s flight from San Francisco is a relief to some advocates.

Over the years, San Francisco residents tried a variety of tactics to protest the tech industry’s effects on the city: blocking corporate buses, halting expensive new condo buildings, proposing tax increases and even threatening to limit office cafeterias.

Affordable housing advocates, local politicians and longtime San Francisco residents hoped the well-off newcomers would contribute more to their new community, or if they didn’t, then perhaps leave.

Elberling, who before the pandemic spearheaded new restrictions on skyscrapers in San Francisco, is among those who believe the city was being overrun by people who arrived for one reason.

“The motivation got to this get-rich-quick attitude,” he said. “And that isn’t what our city is about. You can make a lot of money here, obviously, but that’s not the persona of San Francisco.”

San Francisco has a history of boom-and-bust cycles, stretching back to the 1849 gold rush and including multiple tech bubbles. But that’s not why people stay, Elberling said.

“If all you care about is money, I suggest you go to Texas,” he said.

GOP governors better get cracking on Glenn’s Welcome Wagon kits ASAP, if they want to keep their states in the red column. Otherwise, as a — [cough] — longtime resident of Texas, I’m all in favor of this proposal by America’s Newspaper of Record: Texas Passes Law Banning Californians From Voting After They Move There.

DON’T ‘CALIFORNICATE’ THE REST OF AMERICA:

With taxes soaring, quality of life plunging as violent crime and homelessness surge, home prices out of reach, nonsensical government regulations spreading, an increasingly heavy-handed government and a slumping job market, California now ranks 47th out of 50 states on the widely followed Economic Freedom Index issued annually by Canada’s Fraser Institute.

As their future prospects dim, many longtime and even native Californians are leaving for better times in neighboring states such as Nevada, Arizona, Idaho, Utah and New Mexico.

More recently, the departing have moved even farther away, relocating in Texas, Tennessee, the Carolinas, Georgia and Alabama. It’s a “reverse Beverly Hillbillies” migration.

From 2007 to 2016, some 7 million Californians (gross total) left the state, most of them middle-class or upper-class in income. In 2018 alone, the number of economic and quality-of-life refugees surged by nearly 700,000, and the flood appears to be continuing today.

GOP governors better get cracking on Glenn’s Welcome Wagon kits ASAP, if they want to keep their states in the red column. Otherwise, as a — [cough] — longtime resident of Texas, I’m all in favor of this proposal by America’s Newspaper of Record: Texas Passes Law Banning Californians From Voting After They Move There.

PLEASE, DON’T CALIFORNICATE THE REST OF AMERICA: One might think people fleeing a disaster would avoid at all costs doing things that could repeat the calamity in their new home.

Sadly, as Issues & Insights notes in today’s editorial, that’s not always the case: “Here’s the problem. It’s one thing to move from a state because it’s going in the wrong direction. It’s quite another to move and not understand that you had something to do with it.”

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Time for my Welcome Wagon Project to educate voters who move on why they should’t replicate the environment they’re fleeing:

If I were one of those conservative billionaires (hello, Koch brothers! hi, Sheldon Adelson!) who are always donating tens of millions to support Republican candidates, I think I might try spending some of the money on something more useful: A sort of welcome wagon for blue state migrants to red states. Something that would explain to them why the place they’re moving to is doing better than the place they left, and suggesting that they might not want to vote for the same policies that are driving their old home states into bankruptcy.

Would it work? I don’t know. But it’s likely to be more useful than money thrown down the political-consultant rat hole. And if nothing else, it might spread a bit of economic literacy, which is always in short supply.

It’s time.

THE EXODUS IS HERE: New Yorkers Are Abandoning the Big Apple in Droves Despite Cheaper Rent, Report Shows. I’d like for this to be true: “Perhaps one reason Democrats failed to pick up a single state legislature this year is due to this migration pattern: Americans are escaping blue state policies (which include stricter lockdowns) and they aren’t about to vote for them to take control in their new red-state homes.”

But I think we need to get going on my Welcome Wagon Project.

C’MON DOWN Y’ALL*: America’s Fiscal Landscape Might Change as Wall Street Weighs Move to Texas.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott will welcome representatives from major stock exchanges, including Nasdaq, to Austin on Nov. 20 as the state makes a bid to be the top choice if the exchanges make good on threats to move their trading platforms out of New Jersey.

The Dallas Morning News reported last month that the governor’s office was in talks with Nasdaq and other exchanges about moving data centers to Dallas that power billions of dollars in trades each day on Wall Street.

The governor’s office confirmed the meeting, touting the state’s business-friendly environment.

“Texas continues to be the premier economic destination in the country, attracting more leading businesses than any other state,” spokeswoman Renae Eze said in a statement to The News. “The governor looks forward to meeting with Nasdaq and showcasing Texas’ business-friendly environment, skilled workforce, robust infrastructure, and low taxes, all of which foster greater economic growth in the Lone Star State.”

* But: Texas zillionares might want to start printing Glenn’s Welcome Wagon Project toot suite, considering that, as Kevin Williamson wrote in 2009: Losing Gordon Gekko: Wall Street has gone over to the Democrats. Unlike who New Yorkers apparently prefer as their mayor, I don’t want the next governor of Texas to be Bane, but with a cowboy hat on top.

JOEL KOTKIN: So Much for Turning Texas Blue.

President Trump won the state easily over Joe Biden, though his margin this time was just seven points, down from nine in 2016. Demographic changes seem to be part of the reason, as Texas becomes not only more urban—more than 85 percent of the population lives in cities—but also more heavily minority. Urban areas like Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston, notes demographer Wendell Cox, have become enormously attractive to the foreign-born, whose numbers have grown at twice the national average.

Yet diversity turns out to be a lot more diverse than pundits think. Hispanics now outnumber whites, and the nonwhite population, including many African-Americans, exceeds 57 percent. Yet Texas minorities tend to be less rigidly Democratic than those in places like California and New York. Indeed, Hispanic voters in Texas broke far more for Trump than expected, giving him a remarkable 40 percent of their votes, even in the longtime Democratic bastion of the Rio Grande Valley.

Texas’s Zapata County, which hasn’t voted Republican in a century, is 93.3 percent Hispanic and went for Trump 52.5 percent. Kenedy County, 76.7 percent Hispanic, went 65.5 percent for Trump; and Cameron County, 88.1 percent Hispanic, gave Trump 44.4 percent of the vote. In Starr County, a 95 percent Hispanic county and one of the nation’s poorest, Hillary Clinton won in 2016 by 60 points; Trump reduced that margin in 2020 to just 5 points. The number of voters leaving down-ballot races blank indicate that many in the county turned out just to vote for president.

This shift among Latinos comes just in time for the GOP, whose leaders fret about losses in the still largely white middle-class suburbs, with their generally well-educated voters, who have dominated growth in Texas.

Someone still needs to implement my Welcome Wagon Project.

EXCELLENT ADVICE FROM AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Texas Passes Law Banning Californians From Voting After They Move There.

To the relief of Texans across the state, Governor Greg Abbott has signed a law prohibiting escaping Californians from voting after they move to Texas. Experts say this will prevent the happy and prosperous slice of heaven from sliding into the endless despair and crushing poverty of leftist policy.

“Yeah, all you weirdo Californians are welcome to partake with us in this blessed land,” said Chuck Dillon, a local accountant who dresses like a cowboy. “Bring your music and your little girly men and your avocado toast, but please leave your godless heathen communism in California where it belongs!”

As a long time resident of Texas who is (hopefully) grandfathered in, I highly approve this law, y’all.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): You couldn’t actually do that, which is probably too bad, but you can implement my Welcome Wagon proposal for migrants from blue states to red states.

If I were one of those conservative billionaires (hello, Koch brothers! hi, Sheldon Adelson!) who are always donating tens of millions to support Republican candidates, I think I might try spending some of the money on something more useful: A sort of welcome wagon for blue state migrants to red states. Something that would explain to them why the place they’re moving to is doing better than the place they left, and suggesting that they might not want to vote for the same policies that are driving their old home states into bankruptcy.

Would it work? I don’t know. But it’s likely to be more useful than money thrown down the political-consultant rat hole. And if nothing else, it might spread a bit of economic literacy, which is always in short supply.

And somebody really should.

SMART: Dropbox Makes Remote Work Permanent in ‘Virtual First’ Shift.

Dropbox acknowledged that all those back-to-back video conferences can be overwhelming and said isolation from peers can sometimes lead to miscommunication. To help address this, the company plans to facilitate in-person collaboration with existing real-estate or other flexible spaces it’s calling “Dropbox Studios.”

“We’ll have Studios in all locations we currently have offices—whether they’re dedicated spaces in places we currently have long-term leases and a high concentration of employees, the company said, adding that it would allow some employees the flexibility to relocate to locations where it currently does not have offices. “We expect Dropbox to become more geographically distributed over time.”

Every red state needs to get serious about Glenn’s “welcome wagon” idea.

LIVING ON TULSA TIME: Bay Area applicants flood program that pays them $10,000 to leave California.

“Hi, remote workers! We’ll pay you to work from Tulsa. You’re going to love it here,” reads the welcome message from Tulsa Remote.

The program, started by the George Kaiser Family Foundation, is paying people $10,000 to move to Tulsa, Okla., to work remotely, and a surge of applicants are now coming from the Bay Area.

“We’ve had over a thousand applicants just in the last two weeks alone. Over half of them are from California, many from the Bay Area,” Grant Bumgarner, the program’s community manager, told News on 6. “It’s been a wild time for us.”

GOP governors better get cracking on Glenn’s Welcome Wagon kits ASAP, if they want to keep their states in the red column.