George Rebane
Intrepid left-of-center columnist George Boardman is one of our county’s recognized students of the human condition who regularly shares his observations and interpretations in the op-ed pages of The Union. RR is proud to also number him among our regular readers and commenters. In his 14may18 column – ‘California shines again, much to the annoyance of our critics’ – he paints a salubrious picture of California that goes a long way to explain why our Sacramento socialists see nothing wrong with what they have done to our state over the last few decades. Not only that, but their sharing Mr Boardman’s view will not cause the loss of even a smidgen of momentum in our headlong rush towards the People’s Republic of California (perhaps even unto its status as a sovereign nation-state).
Mr Boardman’s analysis is supported mainly by ignoring the growing dumbbell shape of CA’s income demographic. As I pointed out in ‘Solar Panels …’ and ‘California’s Common Core …’, the state’s population is growing slowly, mainly by the steady ingress of the welfare-seeking poor and succor-seeking illegal aliens, along with a thin cohort of knowledge workers joining the state’s unique high tech sector. The slow growth rate is due to the concurrent exodus of middle class workers (especially in the second quintile) who can no longer afford to live here due to the low wages that their limited and rapidly redundant skill sets command. What is left behind is a small hump on the high earnings end and a large hump on the low/no earnings end supported by government checks. The middle earnings area is on its way to becoming a wasteland that is devastated by California’s high taxes and countless regulations which increase every aspect of our cost of living.
Now, what Mr Boardman points out but does not lament is that the people leaving California are of the vaunted middle-class that the Democrat politicians all celebrate and claim their policies are designed to help. Well, you can’t get more Democratic than California, and that’s where the real rubber meets the road on socialist policies. Pointing out that no one really wants to go live in North Platte, Nebraska is not exactly an example of keen insight. Most people know the decline of regions generating wealth through agriculture, that require fewer and fewer workers, which actually started about 125 years ago. Yes, cities are where the country’s wealth is generated in the modern age. However, the record of Democrat governance of America’s urban areas is an ongoing and growing tragedy of the human condition.
To understand this as a socialist (or thereabouts?), Mr Boardman should examine the history of California’s Gini Index that measures the equality of income distribution – e.g. CA’s Gini Index is one of the nation’s highest and rose 18.2% during 1979 – 2012. As technology accelerates and California attracts more and more low/no earners (1 of 3 US welfare recipients live in California), the Left-fostered income inequality will continue to ramp upward. Given the strong correlation between income and critical thinking, the Democrats see perpetuating such inequality as a virtuous cycle that ensures their hardening grip on power as the dumbbell demographic accentuates. California is now home of the coastal well-to-do who can still afford the taxes and increased costs, and those legions of the poor who rely on government transfer payments to make ends meet.
Finally, that the fewer rich, who are sufficient to operate the California companies commanding margins which make the state’s GDP one of the highest in the world, should be no surprise to those who mastered Econ 101. However, all that will also end when even the rich must eventually sell Sacramento the rope with which they will be hanged.
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