“Socialism is a
philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy.” Sir Winston Churchill
George Rebane
There’s good news and bad news about liberal states going to hell in a handcart. The good news is that the faster they implode, the more chance there is for even the most minimally informed electorate to come to their senses and turn away from socialism. The bad news is that minimally informed electorates seldom turn back from their race over the cliff.
And from a selfish point of view, being a resident of one of the worst states in this quandary, California will lead the way along almost every pernicious metric you can imagine. The most obvious one is net migration which Bill Watkins of Cal Lutheran University in his ‘California is in for World of Hurt’ calls the “canary in the mine” that gives advance warning to jurisdictions headed for failure.
Established residents of our state and others have been emigrating to greener pastures for years. But now, as the nearby chart shows, immigration is no longer able to stem the net outflow. Even poor people are leaving in droves, being hurt by the same innumerate idiots that they sent to Sacramento. Citing data from California’s Department of Finance, Watkins writes –
“California’s political class, led by Governor Brown, has been patting itself on the back for solving California’s problems. This celebration is ludicrous. What they’ve done amounts to a mere slowing down in a long-term political, fiscal, and demographic decline. … Demographic trends themselves are creating a crisis brought about by a population that is simultaneously losing its children and getting older, and to a frightening extent poorer. From 2000 to 2010, the percentage of Los Angeles’ population under 15 years old fell by 15.6 percent. This was the greatest decline of any U.S. major metropolitan area, and about double the U.S. average of 7.4 percent.”
In the 27mar13 WSJ Art Laffer and Stephen Moore take a broader national look (here) at how the blue states are headed into the toilet, and what the red states are doing to avoid the same fate. From independent Census Bureau sources they observe –
“You can tell a lot about prosperity in America by observing the places people are moving to and where they are packing up and moving from. New Census Bureau data on metropolitan areas indicate that the South and the Sunbelt regions continue to grow, while the Northeast and Midwest continue to shrink. … Among the 10 fastest-growing metro areas last year were Raleigh, Austin, Las Vegas, Orlando, Charlotte, Phoenix, Houston, San Antonio and Dallas. All of these are in low-tax, business-friendly red states. Blue-state areas such as Cleveland, Detroit, Buffalo, Providence and Rochester were among the biggest population losers.”
Laffer and Moore go into some detail to compare and contrast the tax and regulatory policies between the red and blue states. Part of the good news here is the clear contention between diametrically opposing economic policies of tax and control socialism, and low tax and regulation capitalism. They observe that “the contrast sets up a wonderful natural laboratory to test rival economic ideas.”
I don’t know how effective this display of successes and failures will be to the rank and file American workers and transfer payment recipients. But with great purpose our Founders did put in place a republic that can concurrently try out different approaches to make the country grow and prosper. The Left has been doing its level best to squash this diversity of liberty into one of centrally controlled homogeneous squalor. So far their success has been short of complete as we observe that “red states of the South and other areas of the country are moving forward with pro-growth tax reform, while California and the blue states of the Northeast are doubling down on Obamanomics and European progressivism.”
[30mar13 update] SESF published its first report on unfunded liabilities in 2007 and presented it to the Board of Supervisors. RR started warning its readers of the magnitude of debt facing Nevada County, California, and jurisdictions across the country. These reports were politely sniffed away by politicians and bureaucrats ignorant of what was owed. Now as Europe’s fiscal fractures are making daily news, and the magnitude of the Obama financial mismanagement of the country becomes clear, reports like this one – ‘The Debt Bomb that Taxpayers won’t see coming’ – in the 30mar13 WSJ are starting to clamor about the amounts that was committed by scumbag politicians end running their electorates.
None of this should be news to RR readers. The news is that it is only now being recognized in the media, but not yet by the public. And the progressives will be forever blind to what the public service unions have bamboozled from the public that their members were supposed to serve.
rebanesruminations.com 
Leave a comment