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ants-fleeing-middle-class/
NATIONAL REVIEW
Wealth, Poverty, and Flight: The Same Old State of California
By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
<https://www.nationalreview.co
(Robert Galbraith/Reuters)Insulated coastal elites, impoverished immigrants,
and a fleeing middle class
California ranks first among the states in the percentage of residents over
25 who have never finished the ninth grade- 9.7 percent of California
residents, or about 4 million Californians. It also rates 49th in the number
of state residents who never graduated from high school - or about 18
percent of the current population.
In other words, about 7 million Californians do not possess a high-school
diploma, about equal to the size of the nine counties of California's Bay
Area, roughly from Napa to Silicon Valley. In some sense, inside California,
there is a shadow state consisting of high-school dropouts that's larger
than 38 other U.S. states.
Yet California also is home to some of the most highly educated
municipalities in the United States. In fact, Palo Alto claims that 40
percent of its city population has an M.A, degree or higher, making it No. 1
among American cities with a population above 50,000.
In the same ranking of wealthiest communities, two other California
municipalities, nearby Cupertino and Mountain View, were also in the top
ten. How can a single state be calibrated as both so educated and so
uneducated?
In many global ratings of world research universities, California has four
universities (Cal Tech, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and UCLA) in the top 20 -
more than any other single nation except the United States itself. Yet the
23-campus California State University system - the largest university in the
world - has a student body in which about 20 percent are not proficient in
English. The remediation rate (unable to meet minimum college admittance
standards in math and English) of incoming freshmen was about 35 percent -
at least until such gradations, along with required remedial education, were
recently considered archaic, offensive, or worse, and thus scrapped.
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To fathom California's near medieval asymmetry, ask how a state with such
high taxes can offer such poor services. The top California income-tax rate
is 13.3 percent (the nation's highest). The state's average sales tax is
(conservatively) about 8.5 percent (ninth in the nation). California's
bewildering combined array of gasoline taxes are about 55 cents per gallon
and rising (second-highest in the nation).
In exchange, California public-school test scores rank between 44th and 46th
in the nation. Its roads and infrastructure are rated in various surveys
between 42nd and 45th. Driving from the state's interior to the coast on
roads mostly unchanged from 45 years ago takes about twice the time as in
the past - if carefully planned at particular times and days of the week.
One no longer just drives on any two-hour or longer journey in California.
Instead, he navigates, with the planning, apprehension, and wariness of a
16th-century galleon captain sailing to the New World.
What is going on?
Three concurrent - and yet antithetical - trends explain the malaise, though
they're rarely talked about. Indeed, one of the landmarks of the new
California mentality is denial and self-righteousness that assume it is
illiberal to notice that a quarter of the nation's homeless population
sleeps on California streets, or that violent crime is 20 percent higher in
California than the national median, or that San Francisco ranks No. 1 in
per capita property crime rates of all the nation's largest cities.
The Keep
First, lots of highly educated people have congregated in California's
coastal corridor of some 30 million from La Jolla to the Napa Valley.
Google, Apple, Facebook, and assorted appendages enjoy market capitalization
in aggregate well over $3 trillion dollars. The coast of California faces a
booming Asia of China, India, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, not a tired
and shrinking Europe mired in European Union bureaucratic suicide. The
California coast is where steel, plastic toys, and Hondas arrive and
everything from California almonds to airplane parts leave. Three of the top
five ports in the country are in California - the top two in Long Beach and
Los Angeles.
No wonder that communities such as Atherton, Hillsborough, Brentwood, and
Los Altos Hills rank near the top of the nation's richest municipalities as
measured by average household income. California has more billionaires than
any other state. The state's elite universities (Cal Tech, Stanford, UC
Berkeley, UCLA, USC, UC San Diego) are on the coastal corridors, as are most
of its UC campuses and private elite undergraduate colleges. The corporate
headquarters of Silver Lake, Disney, Oracle, Gap, Intel, and Kaiser
Permanente are too.
So there is a separate state of Coastal California, a manor of prosperity.
And it is probably the richest urban area in the world, or rather in the
history of civilization - drawing on its geostrategic location, long
coastline, weather, climate, blue-chip universities, and high-tech
industries. Residents have the disposable income and leisure to live the
life of aristocrats - and do so if gauged by their lifestyle choices,
travel, hired servants, and appurtenances.
California residents buy far more Lexuses and Mercedes than people buy in
any other state; 16 percent of all in-state car sales are luxury brands. The
reigning ideology of aristocratic wealth, however, is neither conservatism
nor blue-stocking Republicanism, but a strange blend of capitalism and
socialism.
Or, rather, it's explained best in the medieval terms of absolution and
penance: a Gallic-like psychological syndrome of wanting lots of money in
the concrete but in the abstract justifying such retrograde appetites by
promoting cultural progressivism, with the caveat that the wages of
entitlements, high taxes, illegal immigration, radical environmentalism,
soaring home prices, multiculturalism, and diversity do not really affect
those in Palo Verdes, Malibu, Healdsburg, or Menlo Park.
In other words, the costly effects of green mandates on power and gasoline,
the rising bloated diversity bureaucracy in the public schools and colleges,
the release to the ocean of millions of acre feet of precious stored water
in reservoirs, and the $100 billion high-speed-rail debacle under way in
Fresno and Kings County are simply the psychological atonements for living
the life in a cloistered Versailles.
The Grapes of Wrath - in Reverse
Second, in the last decade and a half, about 6 million Californians over the
age of 25 left the state; in the last 30 years, perhaps 10 million fled.
There are no accurate statistics on the political ideologies of the departed
or even their actual numbers. But most studies suggest that the reasons for
radical outmigration were quality-of-life complaints, soaring home prices
and taxes, poor state services, failing infrastructure and schools, and
rising crime.
The emigrants in aggregate likely mirrored the old core of conservative
support in California that once elected Governors Ronald Reagan, George
Deukmejian, and Pete Wilson.
In many state-by-state rankings of the "business climate" (regulations and
taxes), California now rates anywhere from 47th to last. Translated, that
means that small-business operators relocated to more business-friendly
states (for example, 60,000 Californians on average have left for Texas each
year of the last decade), as did retirees on fixed incomes and young people
shut out of the high-priced coastal housing market. According to one study,
at least 13,000 companies fled the state over the last decade.
And the results have been striking in political terms.
In the last election, there was no Republican senatorial candidate on the
ballot. Nor is there a Republican holding any statewide office. Republicans
in 2016 lost seven congressional seats in California - many of them well
after Election Day, as apparent Republican winners were buried by a sea of
late-arriving "harvested" absentee ballots. Of the state's 53 seats, only
seven now remain Republican.
Certainly, the missing 10 million-plus who left California over the last
generation and their absent offspring help explain why Hillary Clinton won
the state by well over 4 million votes. It is not just a conservative
perception that migration out of California has largely been an affair of
the middle and upper-middle class who tired of California's regulatory
morass, or of those who, after cost-benefit analyses, have sought a more
lucrative retirement elsewhere. Would-be Calexit leader Shankar Singam, in a
recent television appearance, was unapologetically candid in celebrating the
departure of the middle class from California. Indeed, he saw it as a sort
of win-win bargain for the state: The tired people are leaving, and the
energetic people are replacing them. So Singam argued that the United States
"should be grateful for us" for ridding the state of its middle class: "If
everyone in the middle class is leaving, that's actually a good thing. We
need these spots opened up for the new wave of immigrants to come up. It's
what we do."
The Crime Whose Name Must Not Be Spoken
Third, both legal and illegal immigration have also radically changed the
demography of the state. It is not just that about 40 percent of the
nation's 11-20 million immigrants live in California, a state in which now
one in four residents was not born in the United States.
Rather, it is the result of two or three generations of mass influxes of
impoverished residents who on average arrive without a high-school diploma,
English proficiency, capital, or often legality. California now hosts one of
three Americans who are on some sort of federal, state, or local welfare
supplement. About a fifth of the state lives below the poverty level. Half
of all births in California were paid for by the state-run Medi-Cal program,
and 30 percent of Medi-Cal births were to mothers of undocumented
immigration status. The San Ysidro border crossing between Tijuana and San
Diego is the world's busiest, where some 70 million people cross on foot and
in cars into and out of California each year.
The presence of millions without English and without diplomas helps explain
much of the alarming poverty in California, for the most part concentrated
away from the coast, in the eastern environs of southern California, some of
the coastal foothill communities, and the state's Central Valley.
The effect of so many immigrant poor has certainly transformed California
into not so much two different states as two different worlds: a highly
sophisticated, highly regulated, and uniform coastal gentry versus an
impoverished interior of largely immigrant and first-generation Californians
who have little ability or desire to adhere to California's labyrinth of
rules and regulations. Well over half of all immigrant households in
California receive some sort of public assistance. One unmentioned fact of
California's metamorphosis is the kinetic effect of millions of immigrants
from the poorest regions of an impoverished Mexico - increasingly the state
of Oaxaca - joining one of world's most highly educated and affluent
populations, in the California coastal corridor.
Three houses within a half-mile of my own home have been the scene of gang
shoot-outs, illegal trash dumping, and illicit commerce. This week there was
one mass robbery attempt (of farm workers) and a shoot-out on the freeway
within a two-mile radius of where I write. I found a stolen and stripped
spray rig last night in the orchard. In the Central Valley, two illegal
aliens in the last two weeks have murdered three innocents, one a policeman.
Their stories are now frighteningly predictable and monotonous: false
identities, past deportations, prior felony arrests, aid and comfort from
accomplices or family members.
It is illegal in California to rent out trailers behind one's house without
proper permits, sewage, or power hookups. It is also illegal to park dozens
of unregistered cars without applying for non-use registration. It is not
permitted to have dogs that are unlicensed and unvaccinated. And so on.
None of the rules apply, on the unstated theory that enforcement of
California's strict regulations would be impossible, or not cost-effective,
or somehow biased or racist. The state, then, assumes that part of the
population will be hyper-regulated and pay through the nose for misdemeanor
violations as a way of subsidizing the other part that will by
hypo-regulated and that cannot be cited for felonious behavior.
Requiem
So why is California a blue state? In part, because its conservative base
fled, a future blue-state constituency arrived, and both the very wealthy
and the very poor, albeit for quite different reasons, preferred a high-tax,
big-government redistributionist state government.
It is easy to envision California largely in a tripartite fashion. One
population has wealth and privilege enough to create a garden of Eden, with
the proviso that it need not experience firsthand any downsides of its
envisioned utopia.
The second population is largely that of first- and second-generation
immigrants, millions of them without legality, and many of them poor and
dependent on generous state entitlements and the non-enforcement of myriads
of rules, and regulations.
Then there is the third zombie population: those who want to, or in fact are
preparing to, follow the millions who left. They're convinced that they lack
the connections and clout of the wealthy that would let them navigate around
the new regulatory morass, and they pay more in taxes than they receive in
state services. In the end, the diminishing middle lacks the romance of the
distant poor and the panache of the coastal affluent.
But California is explained not only by sociology but also by psychology.
There is a new mentality in which the virtue-signaling elite enjoy the cheap
labor of the poor and do not much care about the poor's inability to access
reasonably priced gasoline and electrical power, safe neighborhoods, and
quality schools and infrastructure. From their secure keeps, they square
that circle by offering generous entitlements, open borders, and progressive
empathy - and lots of self-righteous bumper-sticker rhetoric.
At least for now.
If the southern border were to close, if immigration were to become
measured, diverse, meritocratic, and legal, if the population were to
assimilate more rapidly and eschew identity politics, then perhaps one day
the long-gone middle class might rebirth itself, and California once more
would be a sane state of three rather than two classes. But for now, that is
too many ifs.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
<https://www.nationalreview.co
contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution
and the author, most recently, of The Second World Wars: How the First
Global Conflict Was Fought and Won. @vdhanson
<https://www.twitter.com/vdhan
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