As the Biden administration settles in and begins to formulate its agenda, progressive pundits, politicians, and activists point to California as a role model for national policy. If the administration listens to them, it would prove a disaster for America’s already-beleaguered middle and working classes.
Biden, suggests an ecstatic account in the Los Angeles Times, seeks to “make America California again,” and he will have plenty of help. Californians will run Health and Human Services, the Treasury, Homeland Security, and Energy. Former California senator Kamala Harris is vice president, and San Francisco’s Nancy Pelosi rules the House of Representatives. Progressives like Laura Tyson and Lenny Mendonca see the shift as embracing “California’s distinctive approach to market capitalism.” The Golden State, they insist, can “show the way forward” toward a more socially just future.
As a California resident for nearly half a century, I wonder if these worthies see the same state I do. California has its wonderful spots, great neighborhoods, beautiful vistas, amazing entrepreneurs, and great amenities, but it makes a poor advertisement for social democracy. It suffers the nation’s highest poverty rate and presents the widest gap between middle- and upper-middle income earners of any state. Minorities—notably African-Americans and Latinos—do worse in California’s metros than elsewhere in the country, according to a recent study that we conducted at the Urban Reform Institute. In Atlanta, African-American median incomes, adjusted for costs, are almost double those in San Francisco and Los Angeles; Latinos earn $20,000 more in midwestern and southern cities than in the enlightened metros along the California coast.
California’s vast inequality is sustained not by broad prosperity but by the presence of three of the world’s biggest technology firms—Apple, Google, and Facebook— whose shareholders generate huge capital gains. The state’s model depends as well on venture-capital firms, many of them the same funders of earlier start-ups. Rather than the dazzlingly innovative and diverse economy of its heroic past, the California economy is now dominated by giant information cartels that seem happy, like feudal lords, to divide the vast digital domain among themselves. This top-down model was embraced recently by Governor Gavin Newsom, who boasts that a new round of initial public offerings demonstrate that the state’s growing billionaire class is “doing pretty damn well.”
Read the rest here: https://www.city-journal.org/biden-touts-california-as-model-for-america
“…progressive pundits, politicians, and activists point to California as a role model for national policy.”
Oh boy, how’s that for a lead-in on how to go down the tubes. Sure, make the nation impoverished, jobless. Make owning a home so expensive that few can afford it. Be sure to hand out needles at all the tent cities. Have an over-the-top university system spewing Marxism and condoning every perversion under the sun. Make Political Correctness, the Supreme Law, with Freedom of Speech viewed as old-fashioned and selfish. DISARM all pot smokers; hey, why not just disarm EVERYBODY. Have a leadership on the hill luxuriating in affluence, while the people struggle to meet ends. Tax the people to death. Assure seasonal fires to destroy and uproot. And above all, open all borders and let everyone take what they want. One could go on, but…
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