Atlas has Shrugged in California.

C

Crosshair

New member
It seems like the high taxes, repressive regulations, runaway spending, and such is starting to catch up with California. As in the book "Atlas Shrugged", the productive are leaving and withholding their contributions from a society where the successful and wealthy are punished. However in this case, they are simply moving to other states. Hopefully most of them leave California politics behind as well.

Yea it sucks that my state, North Dakota, is #1 in outmigration in the article, but that is my states problem and for different reasons than CA.

California exodus turns to stampede
High taxes drive jobs, people from one state to another

WASHINGTON – California, which once lured Americans from near and far, is now driving out millions of the most productive residents – including high percentages of the most affluent.

"When California faced a Mount Everest-sized $14 billion deficit in 2003, one of the major causes for the red ink was the stampede of millionaire households from the state," says a report called "Rich States, Poor States" by economists Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore. "Out of the 25,000 or so seven-figure-income families, more than 5,000 left in the early 2000s, and the loss of their tax payments accounted for about half the budget hole."

And it's not just the rich leaving......
Click to expand...

The rest of the article is Here.
 
I traveled thru ND on Route 2 last summer pulling a camper out west. I really enjoyed your state. But that's possibly since I'm a farmer and looking at endless fields of grain appeals to me! I would move there if possible. If nothing more because it has a low "Brady Score!" Keep up the good work!
 
The problem with that report is that most of the info was collected in 2003, with only a minor up-date in 2005. During the past couple of years, there have been some BIG companies that have set up in California, and the job market has never been much of a problem.

On the other hand, Governor Schwarzenegger doesn't quite "get it", and since the state legislature is Democrat controlled, there are new taxes being added, almost on a daily basis.

Funny thing, for California had it pretty good when Ronald Reagan, George Deukmejian and Pete Wilson...all Republicans....were in the Governor's seat. Every time we get a Democrat Governor, things go sour! Schwarzenegger "inherited" a huge bag of turds to get rid of when he took over from Gray Davis (who was ousted in a special recall election). Believe it or not, but about 44% of all California residents are conservatives or moderates....but the small edge that the lunatic liberals hold is enough to keep the "tax and spend" idiots in the state legislature. THOSE idiots are to blame for the restrictive gun laws, the high taxes and everything else that is going wrong in California.
 
The grotesque gerrymandering keeps them in office, as well. They consolidate their voters and deliberately cut up their opposition by surgical slicing of the districts. It's utterly criminal how they rig elections that way.
 
Crosshair wrote:

Yea it sucks that my state, North Dakota, is #1 in outmigration in the article, but that is my states problem and for different reasons than CA.
Click to expand...

I wonder how much that has to do with the shrinking of the two Air Force bases in ND, Grand Forks and Minot. I served 3 years at GFAFB and at the time, in the late 70's, I believe we had about 12K active military personal stationed at the base. Add in civilian workers, wives, children, etc. and who knows how many people were there because of the base. I heard that there are now less than 3K personell assigned to GFAFB. I don't know if that's true or not.

One thing though, North Dakota has a very large population of migrating quackers, if you're into duck hunting. It's one of the best duck hunting spots in the US. You have to be careful of the weather though. One year we were hunting with ice on all but the largest sloughs, with temps around +10 degF. The next year, it was sunny and 74 and the mosquitos just about drove us out. Still, it's a great spot to hunt migrating waterfowl.
 
I thought that Proposition 13 imposed a constitutional requirement of a
2/3 vote of the Legislature to either levy new taxes or raise old ones, read that when Gray Davis took office the Democrats went on a legislative blitz but the one thing they couldn't do was raise taxes. Also read that Gray Davis
tried to borrow his way out of fiscal problems, IIRC the voters passed Proposition 55 in 2004 that forbade the state from borrowing to meet operating expenses.
And yes, people do move and then try to turn where they moved into what they left. Southern New Hampshire and Southwestern Maine filled up with people who left in Taxachusetts in disgust at the high taxation and corruption and selfishness of the political class, now those areas are suburbs
of Boston in all but the legal sense.
 
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