by Victor Davis Hanson, Activist Post:
California’s high taxes, crime, and regulations are driving an exodus, shifting political power to red states as the once-prosperous blue-state model collapses under economic and social strain.
While the media and the new Democrat Party grow hysterical over the Trump counter-revolution, they are missing some of the most revolutionary and insidious changes in American society of the last century.
Much has been written about the collapse of the old orthodox Democratic Party, along with the growing irrelevance and dysfunction of the legacy media, elite universities, and state and federal agencies. But their growing unattractiveness is all related and was not just the result of top-down development.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
Rather, current Democrat Party radicalism, street theater, and violence were merely reflections of its own preexisting cultural antipathy toward the middle class. The party is now a pyramidal coalition of the very wealthy and professional classes comprising the capstone, resting atop a vast, expanding bottom of the subsidized and working poor, strapped pensioners and retirees, angry indebted students, 30s-something urban wannabees, impoverished immigrants—including perhaps 30 million here illegally—and, increasingly, trapped residents of a dystopian big-city America.
The collapse of the blue-state/blue-city model and those who work within and promote it reflects the radical environmentalism of the college-educated, as well as an array of high taxes, high crime, endless government regulations, housing shortages, massive homelessness, illegal immigration, critical-legal-theory prosecutors, ethnic and racial chauvinism, defund-the-police city councils, and, most importantly, chronic budget deficits and vast, unfunded pension liabilities and obligations.
In response to this progressive implosion that accounts for Democrat Party unpopularity, under the radar are historic demographic shifts. They reflect two insidious phenomena.
One, the blue-state, urban/professional/college-educated profile has become antithetical to fertility.
No one knows exactly the contributory relative roles to childlessness played by the progressive embrace of abortion on demand or secularism and atheism. Certainly, the fixations on higher education certification, massive student loan debt, years of student limbo, prohibitive housing prices, and a cultural value system that places status, titles, careers, and degrees over children all further promote a declining birthrate.
But in the end, the cause of asymmetrical fertility does not matter: red-state, traditional populations are simply growing, while blue-state fertility remains stagnant.
Second, we are witnessing the greatest internal migration in U.S. history since the post-Civil War era. Millions are leaving California, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Illinois, and other northern blue states. And they usually head to Florida, Texas, Tennessee, South Carolina, and other red, low- or no-tax states. So large have become the dislocations that conservative red states will in the next decade grab some 10-12 congressional seats away from liberal blue states along with some 10 or so votes in the electoral college.
The trends are not static but occurring at a geometric rate. The upper-middle and professional classes head to states with perceived lower crime, lower taxes, fewer regulations, better schools, and more affordable housing. Meanwhile, those left in blue states to pay the tab for the subsidized poor and expanding social welfare overhead shrink. For these remaining, the burdens per capita surge—in turn feeding even more exoduses.
We also may be witnessing soon the de facto implosion of a once affluent California—its growing poverty already visible in its decaying roads and infrastructure, dangerous and substandard public schools, soaring property crime, overcrowded, dysfunctional, and dangerous health care system, ethnic fragmentation, and the general bankruptcy and medievalism of San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Those left to pay for its escalating social welfare costs and debt service are beginning to lament that the advantages of the state’s climate, beauty, and once upbeat culture are no longer worth the downsides of its costs: big-city homelessness, decayed infrastructure, incompetent government workforce, crime, and general social dystopia.
In California, 50 percent of all births are now paid for by Medi-Cal, which serves 40 percent of the state. And yet the health welfare system is flat broke, nearing $7 billion in the red. California has the highest taxes in the nation at 13.3 percent (plus an additional millionaire’s tax). Its sales and gas taxes are also among the nation’s steepest, while utilities charge the highest gas and electricity rates in the continental U.S.
These disequilibria are increasingly unsustainable.
One percent of Californians pay well over 50 percent of the state’s income taxes—and is leaving in droves. Power is exorbitant, in part due to inefficient solar/wind/green mandates, restrictions on oil, natural gas, nuclear energy, and new hydroelectric production.
In addition, some 4 million—or nearly 25 percent of utility users—simply no longer pay their monthly power bills and are yet usually not subject to cutoffs of power. They in turn must be subsidized by a shrinking number whose rates climb almost yearly.
