California is The Lindsay Lohan of States

[incarcerated]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703506904575592612400443370.html?m od=googlenews_wsj

California: The Lindsay Lohan of States

Sacramento is headed for trouble again, and it shouldn't expect a bailout.
OPINION
NOVEMBER 8, 2010
By ALLYSIA FINLEY
Listen up, California. The other 48 states—your cousin New York excluded—are sick of your bratty arrogance. You're the Lindsay Lohan of states: a prima donna who once showed some talent but is now too wasted to do anything with it.

After enjoying ephemeral highs and spending binges, you suffer crashes that culminate in brief, unsuccessful stints in rehab. This cycle repeats itself every five to 10 years, as the rest of the country looks on with a mixture of horror and amusement. We'd feel sorry for you if you didn't constantly flip us the bird.

Instead, we're making bets on how long it will be before your next meltdown. Oh, wait—you're already melting down.

You've racked up nearly $70 billion in general obligation debt, and that doesn't include your $500 billion unfunded pension liability. Your own analysts predict you'll face a hole of at least $80 billion over the next four years.

Your government's run by a brothel of environmentalists, lawyers, public-sector unions and legislative bums. When they're not taxing or spending, they're creating regulations and commissions like the Board of Barbering and Cosmetology and the California Blueberry Commission. Many businesses would leave if it weren't for your sunny climate.

Which may explain why you're so obsessed with climate change. If your climate changes, no one, including your Hollywood friends, would tolerate you anymore. So you've created a law to tax carbon emissions—no matter that it will kill jobs.

It's not as if you don't recognize that you've got problems. Roughly three-quarters of you say you're headed in the wrong direction, according to a recent survey by the Public Policy Institute of California. You're even more depressed than Illinois and New York, and you've got sunshine 10 months of the year!

You appropriately give your government low marks—28% approval for outgoing Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, 16% for the legislature—yet you continue to re-elect the politicians who got you into this mess. Not a single incumbent state legislator lost re-election this year, including one Democrat who died a month ago (no joke). What's scarier is that you've just given almost all of the keys to statewide offices to Democrats.

Jerry Brown will be your new (old) governor. This is the man who acted as a gateway drug to your spending addiction three decades ago when he gave public-sector employees collective bargaining rights. Helping enforce your wacky laws will be Lt. Gov-elect Gavin Newsom, the San Francisco mayor who flouted state law by allowing same-sex marriage. On the plus side, he has nice hair and loves you just the way you are. This is what he had to say after winning his race:

"We're nothing but a mirror of our consistent thoughts. You tend to manifest what you focus on. If you look around for what's wrong, you'll find it. But as all we know up here in San Francisco, when you focus on what's right, you see it all around you. . . . There is absolutely nothing wrong with California that can't be fixed by what's right with California. . . . If you're from another state, you'd love to have the problems of California."

You've also just re-elected Barbara Boxer (that's Senator Barbara Boxer) to a fourth term. She boasted on election night that it's her "eleventh straight election victory, and what a sweet one it is . . . [since] everything was thrown at us, including the kitchen sink, and the stove and the oven and everything, millions of dollars of negative ads from known and unknown opponents, millions and millions of dollars."

We've tried to help you, California. Some spent millions on campaigns to entice you to change your reckless behavior. And you told them to kick rocks.

So here's our final warning: When you inevitably crash and burn, don't count on us to bail you out.


Ms. Finley, a lapsed Californian who still wears Birkenstocks, is an assistant editor of OpinionJournal.com.

[mojaveman]

With Jerry Brown in office I'm abandoning Lindsay Lohan. :p

[Ret10Echo]

With Jerry Brown in office I'm abandoning Lindsay Lohan. :p

They will probably start dating.

[monsterhunter]

They will probably start dating.

Do you mean Jerry Brown and Lindsay Lohan or Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom?:D

[Ret10Echo]

Do you mean Jerry Brown and Lindsay Lohan or Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom?:D

I don't think Linda Ronstadt is available...so Lindsay


(Milka-wha???) :D

[incarcerated]

Do you mean Jerry Brown and Lindsay Lohan or Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom?:D

That's a tough call.

:D

[incarcerated]

http://blogs.forbes.com/joelkotkin/2010/11/15/california-suggests-suicide-texas-asks-can-i-lend-you-a-knife/

California Suggests Suicide; Texas Asks: Can I Lend You a Knife?

Joel Kotkin
Nov. 15, 2010
In the future, historians may likely mark the 2010 midterm elections as the end of the California era and the beginning of the Texas one. In one stunning stroke, amid a national conservative tide, California voters essentially ratified a political and regulatory regime that has left much of the state unemployed and many others looking for the exits.

California has drifted far away from the place that John Gunther described in 1946 as “the most spectacular and most diversified American state … so ripe, golden.” Instead of a role model, California has become a cautionary tale of mismanagement of what by all rights should be the country’s most prosperous big state. Its poverty rate is at least two points above the national average; its unemployment rate nearly three points above the national average. On Friday Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was forced yet again to call an emergency session in order to deal with the state’s enormous budget problems.

This state of crisis is likely to become the norm for the Golden State. In contrast to other hard-hit states like Pennsylvania, Ohio and Nevada, which all opted for pro-business, fiscally responsible candidates, California voters decisively handed virtually total power to a motley coalition of Democratic-machine politicians, public employee unions, green activists and rent-seeking special interests.

In the new year, the once and again Gov. Jerry Brown, who has some conservative fiscal instincts, will be hard-pressed to convince Democratic legislators who get much of their funding from public-sector unions to trim spending. Perhaps more troubling, Brown’s own extremism on climate change policy–backed by rent-seeking Silicon Valley investors with big bets on renewable fuels–virtually assures a further tightening of a regulatory regime that will slow an economic recovery in every industry from manufacturing and agriculture to home-building.


Texas’ trajectory, however, looks quite the opposite. California was recently ranked by Chief Executive magazine as having the worst business climate in the nation, while Texas’ was considered the best. Both Democrats and Republicans in the Lone State State generally embrace the gospel of economic growth and limited public sector expenditure. The defeated Democratic candidate for governor, the brainy former Houston Mayor Bill White, enjoyed robust business support and was widely considered more competent than the easily re-elected incumbent Rick Perry, who sometimes sounds more like a neo-Confederate crank than a serious leader.

To be sure, Texas has its problems: a growing budget deficit, the need to expand infrastructure to service its rapid population growth and the presence of a large contingent of undereducated and uninsured poor people. But even conceding these problems, the growing chasm between the two megastates is evident in the economic and demographic numbers. Over the past decade nearly 1.5 million more people left California than stayed; only New York State lost more. In contrast, Texas gained over 800,000 new migrants. In California, foreign immigration–the one bright spot in its demography–has slowed, while that to Texas has increased markedly over the decade.

A vast difference in economic performance is driving the demographic shifts. Since 1998, California’s economy has not produced a single new net job, notes economist John Husing. Public employment has swelled, but private jobs have declined. Critically, as Texas grew its middle-income jobs by 16%, one of the highest rates in the nation, California, at 2.1% growth, ranked near the bottom. In the year ending September, Texas accounted for roughly half of all the new jobs created in the country.

Even more revealing is California’s diminishing preeminence in high-tech and science-based (or STEM–Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) jobs. Over the past decade California’s supposed bulwark grew a mere 2%–less than half the national rate. In contrast, Texas’ tech-related employment surged 14%. Since 2002 the Lone Star state added 80,000 STEM jobs; California, a mere 17,000.

Of course, California still possesses the nation’s largest concentrations of tech (Silicon Valley), entertainment (Hollywood) and trade (Port of Los Angeles-Long Beach). But these are all now declining. Silicon Valley’s Google era has produced lots of opportunities for investors and software mavens concentrated in affluent areas around Palo Alto, but virtually no new net jobs overall. Empty buildings and abandoned factories dot the Valley’s onetime industrial heartland around San Jose. Many of the Valley’s tech companies are expanding outside the state, largely to more business-friendly and affordable places like Salt Lake City, the Research Triangle region of North Carolina and Austin.

Hollywood too is shifting frames, with more and more film production going to Michigan, New Mexico, New York and other states. In 2002, 82% of all film production took place in California–now it’s down to roughly 30%. And plans by Los Angeles County, the epicenter of the film industry, to double permit fees for film, television and commercial productions certainly won’t help.

International trade, the third linchpin of the California economy, is also under assault. Tough environmental regulations and the anticipated widening in 2014 of the Panama Canal are emboldening competitors, particularly across the entire southern tier of the country, most notably in Houston. Mobile, Ala., Charleston, S.C., and Savannah, Ga., also have big plans to lure high-paid blue collar jobs away from California’s ports.

Most worrisome of all, these telltale signs palpable economic decline seem to escape most of the state’s top leaders. The newly minted Lieutenant Governor, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, insists “there’s nothing wrong with California” and claims other states “would love to have the problems of California.”

But it’s not only the flaky Newsom who is out of sync with reality. Jerry Brown, a far savvier politician, maintains “green jobs,” up to 500,000 of them, will turn the state around. Theoretically, these jobs might make up for losses created by ever stronger controls on traditional productive businesses like agriculture, warehousing and manufacturing. But its highly unlikely.

Construction will be particularly hard hit, since Brown also aims to force Californians, four-fifths of whom prefer single-family houses, into dense urban apartment districts. Over time, this approach will send home prices soaring and drive even more middle-class Californians to the exits.

Ultimately the “green jobs” strategy, effective as a campaign plank, represents a cruel delusion. Given the likely direction of the new GOP-dominated House of Representatives in Washington, massive federal subsidies for the solar and wind industries, as well as such boondoggles as high-speed rail, are likely to be scaled back significantly. Without subsidies, federal loans or draconian national regulations, many green-related ventures will cut as oppose to add jobs, as is already beginning to occur. The survivors, increasingly forced to compete on a market basis, will likely move to China, Arizona or even Texas, already the nation’s leader in wind energy production.

Tom Hayden, a ’60s radical turned environmental zealot, admits that given the current national climate the only way California can maintain Brown’s “green vision” will be to impose “some combination of rate heights and tax revenues.” Such an approach may help bail out green investors, but seems likely to drive even more businesses out of the state.

California’s decline is particularly tragic, as it is unnecessary and largely unforced. The state still possesses the basic assets–energy, fertile land, remarkable entrepreneurial talent–to restore its luster. But given its current political trajectory, you can count on Texans, and others, to keep picking up both the state’s jobs and skilled workers. If California wishes to commit economic suicide, Texas and other competitors will gladly lend them a knife.

[mojaveman]

Caifornia has the worst business climate?

Our workers compensation insurance costs at work went from 25K a year to 50K a year overnight. We are a small company with about twelve employees. The trend will not be able to continue. California will never be the Golden State again.

Anyone know where I can buy a few acres in Texas?

[ZonieDiver]

I don't think Linda Ronstadt is available...so Lindsay


(Milka-wha???) :D

Linda has gained a LOT of weight! Brown looks like he has AIDS!

Let's hear it for the 'Stone Ponies'!

[akv]

Anyone know where I can buy a few acres in Texas?


Nacogdoches, pretty country too...

[drymartini66]

I left Commifornia back in 1997. Thank God I did.

[Nightfall]

And a song once sang...

"California Uber Alles" :)

I am Governor Jerry Brown
My aura smiles
And never frowns
Soon I will be president...

Carter Power will soon go away
I will be Fuhrer one day
I will command all of you
Your kids will meditate in school
Your kids will meditate in school!

[Chorus:]
California Uber Alles
California Uber Alles
Uber Alles California
Uber Alles California

Zen fascists will control you
100% natural
You will jog for the master race
And always wear the happy face

Close your eyes, can't happen here
Big Bro' on white horse is near
The hippies won't come back you say
Mellow out or you will pay
Mellow out or you will pay!