It’s not pretty: Higher taxes, reduced public
services, cuts in money for schools, crumbling bridges and highways, all
the ills endemic to out-of-control welfare states.
Californians are still besotted with the dream of living off the
lotus, though growing numbers of them are concluding that the game will
be up soon. Thousands continue to flee California every year. Texas,
Nevada, Arizona, Oregon and Washington are collecting most of the
disillusioned emigrants, though thousands have made it to Georgia and
South Carolina. There’s no John Steinbeck to tell a story of a trek very
different from the journey taken in the opposite direction by the Joads
of Oklahoma, but a study by the Manhattan Institute finds prosperous
Californians fleeing dramatically higher taxes, tightening regulations,
union power that pushes up high labor costs, more expensive electricity
and ever more costly housing and commercial real estate. California is
not quite the golden state it used to be.
The escape is not new; more Californians have left the state than
newcomers have arrived every year since 2005. What is new is the
accelerating trend. More than 4 million new residents arrived here in
the go-go years between 1960 and 1990, attracted by mild and sunny
weather, a lush and varied geography, and most of all by the fervent
belief of nearly everyone that “anything goes” and “everything’s
possible.” The future looked to bear no limit.
Now the future is here. Persuaded by Gov. Jerry Brown, Californians
have adopted a number of new tax initiatives, including Proposition 30,
which would raise the state sales tax to 8.25 percent, and an increase
in the state income tax on taxpayers earning more than $250,000.
Resistance to cutting entitlement to the lotus is great.
California has become radioactive in much of the West. You can still
see an occasional frayed bumpersticker on the back roads of Colorado,
pleading “Don’t Californicate Colorado.” The state’s politics would
hardly be recognizable to Howard Jarvis, a perennial candidate for
various offices whose Proposition 13, slashing property taxes by nearly
60 percent, set off the national tax revolt in 1978. Prop 13, opposed by
most of the politicians and the big newspapers, was enacted in a
landslide.
But lately Californians have returned to a diet of the lotus, the
fruit in Greek mythology that delivers dreamy contentment and idle
forgetfulness.
The lotus is the unofficial state fruit. A new study by
the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Foundation blames the remarkably generous
pay and pensions of state employes for California’s budget problems, now
speeding toward terminal. The per capita salary of state employes,
including benefits, is about twice the per capita salary of everybody
else.
Nevertheless, Californians eagerly approved the $6 billion dollar
bundle of tax increases in November, sold to voters as politicians from
City Hall to the White House always sell taxes, as the only way to avoid
closing the orphanages and throwing little match girls into the street.
“I know a lot of people had some doubts and some questions,” the
governor told an election-night rally, “‘Can you really go to the people
and ask them to vote for a tax?’ Here we are. We have a vote of the
people. I think we are the only state in the country that says, ‘Let’s
raise our taxes, for our kids, for our schools, and for our California
dream.’”
The cost of delivering state services exceeds by a wide margin the
per-worker costs in other highly unionized states, including New York,
New Jersey and Illinois. In one remarkable case, an Afghanistan-educated
psychiatrist arrived in California six years ago and got a state job
paying $90,682 a year.
Now he’s making $822,302 a year. He worked
weekends and even performed some of his duties from home. The state is
investigating how he piled up so much pay. “I’ve been put on leave for
working too hard,” he told an interviewer.
California’s unemployment rate, above 10 percent for most of this
year, is one of the highest in the nation, and the state has lost
855,200 private-sector jobs since 2008. Living here can still be golden
indeed. The lush farms in the San Joaquin Valley can feed half the
nation, the Napa and Sonoma vineyards produce some of the world’s best
wines, and the high-tech corridor is thriving. A gulch will be a
gruesome substitute.
Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.
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