Been too long since I did a Texas vs. California roundup, so here it is:
Dark Age California:
There are large areas of Central California that resemble life in rural Mexico. Within a radius of five miles I can go to stores and restaurants where English is rarely spoken and there is no racial or cultural diversity—a far cry from Jeb Bush’s notion of an “act of love” landscape.
With unemployment at 10% or more in the interior of the state, with the public schools near the bottom in the nation, and with generous entitlements, it is no accident that one in six in the nation who receive public assistance now live in California, where about a fifth of the population lives below the poverty line.
One in four Californians also were not born in the United States; more than one in four who enter the hospital for any cause are found upon admittance to suffer from Type II diabetes. The unspoken responsibility of California state government is to bring state-sponsored parity to new arrivals from Oaxaca, and to do so in ideological fashion that ensures open borders and more government. It is the work of a sort of secular church, and questioning its premises is career-ending blasphemy.
“California has come a long way to dig itself out of budget deficits, but the state remains on shaky ground due to nearly $400 billion in unfunded liabilities and debt from public pensions, retiree health care and bonds.” More: “It’s California’s debt and liabilities that are concerning financial analysts, particularly the state’s rapidly growing unfunded retiree health care costs, which grew more than 80 percent over the past decade. California has promised $74 billion more in health and dental benefits to current and retired state workers than the state has put aside.” (Hat tip: CalWatchdog.)
And new accounting rules make those unfunded liabilities harder to ignore.
The problem might not be quite as bad as it is did not CalPERS and CalSTARS insist on politically correct investments. (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
San Francisco political officials indicted:
A retired city employee and a former city commissioner who are at the center of bribery allegations involving Mayor Ed Lee were charged with multiple felonies including bribery and money laundering, San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon announced at a news conference Friday afternoon.
Also charged Friday was political consultant and former San Francisco Unified School District Board of Education President Keith Jackson, who pleaded guilty last year to racketeering charges.
The district attorney’s office charged recently retired Human Rights Commission employee Zula Jones, ex-HRC commissioner Nazly Mohajer and former political consultant Keith Jackson.
Remember that Zula Jones and Nazly Mohajer were fingered by Leeland Yee’s attorneys as being the go-betweens for bribing Lee. This brings up the question (yet again): Why hasn’t Lee himself been indicted?
And speaking of California government officials being indicted: “Retired Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca pleaded guilty Wednesday to lying to federal investigators, a stunning reversal for the longtime law enforcement leader who for years insisted he played no role in the misconduct that tarnished his agency.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Jerry Brown vetoes kangaroo court minimums for college sexual assault cases.
“Brown pushed for the giant pension fund CalPERS to lower its assumed investment return from 7.5% to 6.5%. Given that the world is headed towards deflation and that CalPERS earned only 2.4% for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2015, Brown’s request seemed entirely reasonable. Instead, the board approved a staff proposal to move to the 6.5% target over 10 years.” (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
CalPERS board President Rob Feckner, serving his twelfth term, casts deciding vote against proposal for term limits for board members. “Feckner was president of the California School Employees Association for four years and executive vice president of the California Labor Federation for five. Such a conflict of interest wouldn’t be tolerated with the president of other boards of directors. But with CalPERS, it’s par for the course.” (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
San Diego voters: We want pension reform! Union-stacked Public Employment Relations Board (PERB): Get stuffed, peasants! Result: Lawsuit. (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
The middle class is fleeing California. “In 2006, 38 percent of middle-class households in California used more than 30 percent of their income to cover rent. Today, that figure is over 53 percent.”
California tech industries continue their exodus to Texas:
The tech industry in the Bay Area has become a victim of its own success – and state policies. Like many other California businesses, tech firms are relocating or expanding operations in others states – particularly Texas – at an alarming rate.
Some companies spend significant amounts of time and money finding and training the right workers, only to see them poached by a flashy startup within a number of months. The need for a more stable workforce was one of the main reasons cloud-computing company LiveOps Cloud moved from Silicon Valley to a suburb of Austin, Texas, CEO Vasili Triant told the San Francisco Chronicle.
Other reasons to move or expand out-of-state are government-created: high taxes, burdensome regulations, unaffordable housing due to excessive development fees and restrictive land-use policies. California’s highly-educated workforce is not so unique anymore, and its quality of life has been tarnished by regulatory and affordability issues. Texas, by contrast, has no personal income tax and no corporate income tax (though it does have a less-onerous gross margins tax), and is universally hailed for having one of the friendliest business climates in the nation.
Google, Facebook, Apple, Dropbox, Oracle and nearly two dozen other Bay Area tech companies have all built or expanded facilities in Texas just since 2014, the Chronicle reported. There have been more than 1,500 publicly reported California “disinvestment events” across all industries over the past seven years, according to a November report from Spectrum Location Solutions, an Irvine-based business relocation consulting firm, although it estimated the actual tally at as high as 9,000. A California business “can save 20 percent to 32 percent of labor costs by relocating a facility out of state,” Spectrum president Joe Vranich told us last year.
More on the theme:
Between 1997 and 2000, during the peak of the dot-com boom, the Bay Area was a net importer of Texans: About 1,500 more households moved into the region from Texas than vice versa, bringing an additional $191 million (2015 dollars) in taxable income into the region, according to IRS data, which tracks the movement of taxpaying residents.
The trend changed in the early 2000s, and Texas has been a net importer of Bay Area households ever since. Between 2009 and 2012, as the recession was winding down and the second tech boom was revving up, the region lost about 1,430 households to Texas, and nearly $390 million in taxable income.
Snip.
I had a guy working for me (in the Bay Area) making $200,000 a year, struggling to pay his bills,” company CEO Triant said. “In lots of places in the country you’re living high on the hog on $200,000. … As far as work life balance and employee morale, we have absolutely seen a remarkable increase since moving here; it’s night and day.”
The firm still keeps a small Bay Area office, and Triant speaks fondly of his hometown of San Diego and California in general.
But when it comes to building a company and running a business, he has found a new home in Texas. “I want my employees to be able to have a good quality of life, live in a city with low crime rates, good schools,” he said. “And that’s what we’re doing here.”
“It’s no coincidence that Texas and Florida have thrived while New York and California have not. High levels of taxes, spending, and regulations make it more difficult for entrepreneurs to be successful. When entrepreneurs cannot expand their businesses and hire new workers, everyone is hurt, not just the rich.”
In the course of verifying a Rep. Joe Straus campaign ad, Polifact confirms that Texas has grown twice as fast as the rest of the country.
The University of California, Berkeley, is running a $150 million deficit this year. (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
UC Academic Senate rejects task force’s proposed retirement benefits plan that, keeping with Jerry Brown’s modest pension reforms, would pay them a measly $117,020 pension benefit. (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
“What’s more important: High-speed rail or water? Proponents of a proposed ballot measure would force voters to choose just that. The measure would redirect $8 billion in unsold high-speed rail bonds and $2.7 billion from the 2014 water bond to fund new water storage projects.”
Speaking of water restrictions, looks like Californians will get to enjoy them for another year.
Sure, Covered California (California’s ObamaCare) may be incompetent. But it’s also corrupt. The state auditor “criticized the exchange for not sufficiently justifying its decision to award a number of large contracts without subjecting the contractors to competitive bidding.”
California is releasing many felons as part of a “mass forgiveness” program. Including a murderer who tied up a husband and wife and beat them to death with a pipe.
California adds Aloe Vera to list of cancer-causing substances. “The problem is that the 800+ chemicals listed in Proposition 65 are not devised to protect consumers, but rather serve as a cash cow for private trial lawyers to sue small business and reap the hefty settlement payout. Since 1986, nearly 20,000 lawsuits have been filed, adding up to over half a billion dollars in settlement payments by business owners.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
San Francisco’s planning process is designed for gridlock.
Bankrupt San Bernardino has reached a settlement with its firefighters union.
Heh. “The movement to emblazon state legislators with the logos of their donors has collected tens of thousands of signatures for its would-be ballot initiative.The measure, formally called the ‘Name All Sponsors California Accountability Reform (or NASCAR. Get it?) Initiative,’ would require all state legislators to wear the emblems or names of their 10 top donors every time they attend an official function.” The ballot initiative has already collected 40,000 signatures…
Huge soda pop collection is coming to the Dr Pepper museum in Waco.
Tags: Austin, Berkeley, California, CalPERs, CalSTARS, Crime, Democrats, Ed Lee, high speed rail, Keith Jackson, Lee Baca, LiveOps, Nazly Mohajer, pension crisis, Regulation, Rob Feckner, San Bernardino, San Diego, San Francisco, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, unions, Vance Ginn, Waco, waste, water, Welfare State, Zula Jones
This entry was posted on Thursday, February 25th, 2016 at 10:54 AM and is filed under Austin, Budget, Crime, Democrats, Regulation, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, unions, Waste and Fraud, Welfare State. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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Lawrence,
Nice roundup, but it doesn’t touch on a major problem for Texas: A large number of these California transplants, despite education and intelligence, lack the cognitive abilitiy to connect their voting patterns with the hell they just left. They’ve wreaked havoc in Arizona, Colorado, and various mountain states, and will do so here over time, voting for the same corrupt, politically correct leftists that destroyed California. I’m opposed to mandatory re-education and deprogramming camps in principle, but I might make an exception here.
Best regards,
John
Beware nomadic Progressives — they are like locusts. They have devoured California and now they are moving on to Texas and other prosperous Red states.
As someone who has lived in California my entire life, other than 3 years in Athens, GA, and who may emigrate soon, I have to laugh at these warnings about Californians screwing up other states.
First, progressives dominate San Francisco, LA, and the coast in between. There are millions of conservatives and moderates in this State but we have been outvoted for two decades. The legislature and all of the State elected officials are Democrats. So, a large number of transplants will be folks like you, hoping to find a good job and escape a place dominated by progressives and Democrats.
Second, I laugh when people in Washington or Idaho or Texas tell me not to move there and ruin their state. California took in millions of people from other states in the last 50 years, many of them seeking a better life, so if some Californians choose to emigrate, tough.
Too bad these assholes who move from California won’t change their politics. What they will do is vote for the same idiots who will do to Texas what they did to California…sadly, this is already happening in Florida.
As one who recently moved from the San Francisco Bay Are to the Corpus Christi Bay Area, you can only stand the California crack head government so long. And though there will always be some who want their new locales to be more like what they left (I know such a person who moved from Connecticut to South Carolina and only wants to “change a few things”), most of us are leaving the Blue states and we absolutely know why. So I’m goin’ to get me some queso, drive over to my concealed carry class and not worry about paying income tax for the foreseeable future. Let’s play cowboys and Californians. Texas will win.
Cal
I will definitely steal “California crack head government”. I wish the other posters here knew what it’s like to have to live under Jerry Brown twice!