George Rebane
With the new gas taxes staring us in the face after the new year, you just can’t say enough about the socialist mindset that is driving out California businesses, causing them to expand elsewhere, and convincing outsiders to not to start new enterprises here. The only exceptions that the socialists can point to are businesses who must be close to their California customer base. The big deception that these self-serving politicians push is on the very ‘peehpul’ of whom they claim to be defenders.
While attracting and importing thousands of illegals and people without marketable skills to pack their voter rolls, the regulations and fees Sacramento adds daily do nothing for wealth creation, and everything to keep increasing the state’s population of indigents and welfare recipients. The numbers tell the story. According to taxfoundation.org, California is 48th in the State Business Tax Index, and at 11.2% has the 4th highest burden of state and local taxes.(more here, here, and here)
Today as the middle class depopulates the golden state, we will wind up with the double humped distribution on the wealth scale that is so common in third world countries with massive unemployment. And given the leftwing leeches in the form of rent-seeking NGOs, the countryside is covered with propaganda urging us to work together with Sacramento to make California ‘green’ again – and that ain’t the kind of green that creates the kind of green that makes a difference. Yes, rapidly becoming an old saw (here), but today truer than ever – Anywhere But California.
[25aug14 update] The ‘What Recovery?’ t-shirts worn by the unemployed protesters at the just concluded central bankers’ big do at Jackson Hole underline what RR has been telling its readers for some years – we are in Depression2. There is yet no recovery by any acceptable definition of the term. (Please review the more arcane details in ‘The Recovery Rigmarole’.) A reader sent me the following graphic by Sentier Research that details how the country has been doing in the net worth department over the recent years. Here’s what more of Depression2 data looks like.
All this makes mind boggling the legislation dished out by the double dummies in Sacramento to Californians who are doing their best to stay put and work to pull the state out of its much denied nose dive.
[26aug14 update] Check out the new RoboBrain project of the National Robotics Initiative sponsored by the feds and major corporations. This involves the assembly of a vast online knowledge base of things ranging from common sense to sophisticated probabilistic reasoning, all connected to the everyday life of humans. It will be assembled in a format that is accessible to individual robots serving in various jobs in the home, office, and, more importantly, in service jobs like in restaurants and store clerks.
I include this item here because we are talking about the economy, businesses, and jobs. It appears that the Japanese paradigm for robot assistants is gaining traction. Instead of developing only new robotics systems to make things and perform tasks, robots that have the form factor of humans will make up one echelon of human replacements. It is these robots that have a free form interaction with humans in their existing environment that will need to access RoboBrain in order to function usefully.
The growing impact of all this on systemic unemployment should be obvious to educators, politicians, and policy makers. But it isn’t.
[27aug14 update] Depression2 for the record. Today we learn from filed court documents that both ex-Fed chair Bernanke and ex-SecTreas Geithner both acknowledge that the financial meltdown that started this depression was historically the worst. And we do have to recall that this was again an entirely government induced meltdown, as was the one that made the 1929 market crash into Depression1. Here is a quote from the 27aug14 WSJ report on the matter.
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, a prominent student of the Great Depression, contends that the 2008 financial crisis was actually worse than its 1930s counterpart.
Mr. Bernanke is quoted making the statement in a document filed on Aug. 22 with the U.S. Court of Federal Claims as part of a lawsuit linked to the 2008 government bailout of insurance giant American International Group Inc.
“September and October of 2008 was the worst financial crisis in global history, including the Great Depression,” Mr. Bernanke is quoted as saying in the document filed with the court. Of the 13 “most important financial institutions in the United States, 12 were at risk of failure within a period of a week or two.”
Former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is quoted in the document offering a similarly apocalyptic assessment. From Sept. 6 through Sept. 22, the economy was essentially “in free fall,” he said.
rebanesruminations.com 
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