What It's Like Living In Leftist California

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past thirty years, you are well aware that California ain't what it used to be. Fifty percent of this decline is probably due to one party rule and the other half being the sharp left turn the Democrat party took starting in the 60's. Any way you shake it, it's a complete sh*tshow.

Fortunately, this period of temporary insanity will come to a end [probably in another 10-15 years] as I am confident future Californians will return their state to the pristine living environment our ancestors found it [in the 19th century and first half of the 20th centuries].

As beautiful as this state is and as vibrant as the economy has been over the past 75 years, one might believe that Californians would be the happiest people on Earth, but no, they might just be among the most miserable.

In my small town in SoCal [which has very nice homes and you can't spit five feet in any direction without hitting a Tesla], you would think that you were visiting a homeless encampment as a large percentage of the residents have incredibly stressed out looks on their faces [and couldn't be bothered with smiling or saying hello].

Beyond the financial house of horrors, it is the people that make California what it is today. This is the result of decades of horrendous governance and an elite who believed that the only purpose of housing was in making a small percentage of the population wealthy...the only purpose of education was enriching administrators through corrupt public unions...paying many who work in state and local governments absurd salaries and benefits...and erecting a superstructure of government that dictates nearly every little you must do in every walk of life.

Philosophically, leftist leaning people are just plain miserable. They see the world as the battle between oppressor and oppressed, that is, you're either a victim or an exploiter. They seem to detest anybody who doesn't agree with their extreme narrative and fear everything...a fair percentage believing that the climate is going to soon cause mass extinction. And they expect everybody else to jump aboard their fear and anxiety juggernaut as it slowly but surely chugs down the track to Hell.

Could you have a more potent formula for creating misery in people? Oh, I forgot all the folks who moved on from bumper stickers in the 60's and 70's to yard signs declaring such pearls as, "Housing Stops Homelessness," and, "Black Lives Matter," an organisation started by avowed Marxists who have been revealed as rogue capitalists [purchasing million dollar homes for themselves in elite, mostly white neighborhoods]. Yet the signs are still out there in full display to this day.

People are leaving California mostly because they simply can't afford to be here anymore. Others have moved to states like Texas and Florida because the leftist influence emanating from Sacramento [especially during COVID] went from being horrendous to the absurd, Governor Newsome essentially assuming dictatorial powers with the unrelenting lockdowns which did unimaginable levels of harm to Californians [especially the children prevented from pursuing their education because of the power of teachers' unions]. Absolutely disgraceful.

And whereas woke goes to Florida to die, woke is born and thrives in California! Woke practice being the practical manifestation of post-modern and neo-Marxist ideology is ruining everything it touches with its absurd approaches to modern issues.

If this is what being awake is like, I would like to suggest that these folks take a nap and re-awaken with an alternative narrative. Everybody wants life to improve for as many people as is possible, but implementing policies and practices that spectacularly failed around the world in the 20th century does not make a great deal of sense.

The good news is that California has great weather [on the whole], incredible natural resources, and awesome natural beauty and will eventually recover from this mis-calculation of the politically stupid. It's only a matter of time.

Although illegal immigration is not the way to go, many of the people migrating to California are escaping from places that attempted to stymie economic growth through politician oppression, so I believe it will be the next generation of Hispanics who will not for a second put up with leftist anything [as it destroyed their homeland], and California will move back to the the center and embrace another round of economic prosperity in the 2040's and beyond...

 

It is usually warm in Sunny.
It has the highest GDP almost twice that of the second best state
Parts of it do have some problems with polution
Its schools are highly rated and its universities are among the best in the word
There are 39 states that have had higher per capita death rates due to covid (only 11 who have had higher rates than Florida)
average pay in California is higher than every state except New York more than Florida by about $25,000 a year.

It sounds like a nice place to be.

 

You mentioned poverty and education



And two bonus charts







Is anyone else noticing what seems to be the common denominator for failed states?

But yes, California is the issue.

 

California is a state of extremes so the averages come out looking much better than the reality for most folks. Even those who are doing relatively ok find it quite difficult to get by. And look at what happened to SF, LA, and now even SD. It's not a good situation made worse by incredibly incompetent leadership.

Just the same, there are a lot of highly successful people and businesses that are slowly leaving to states where it's a great deal easier to do business and where good paying jobs mean people can actually afford to live decently. How much do you believe you have to earn to afford a million dollar house?

 

I’m from NJ and moved to So Cal back in the early 90s. I had heard about the wackos but it wasn’t that bad because around that time voters wanted marriage defined as being between one man and one woman, no benefits for illegals, and the three strikes like. It doesn’t matter if I agreed with those things or not, the rest of California did. Then things took a hard turn for the worse, taxes kept going up, fees kept going up, new regulations almost daily, illegals were more important than citizens, and the overall weirdness factor went through the roof. I left the state in 2012 and my wife, who was born and raised there, said she would never go back after experiencing the freedom she has by not living there.

 

Ah, so you have an issue with income inequality then?
I agree, what do you believe should be done about it on a national level?

Wealth tax maybe?

Before we go further, you should look up the demographics of who is leaving and entering Cali. People that can afford it want to live there, people that cannot afford it also want to live there but cannot do so comfortably.

 

All of nature is steeped in inequality. It's the way EVERYTHING is. Who am I to have a problem with it? What I do have a problem with is the massive corruption which has caused enormous issues throughout the system.

More and more, people are finding that it's just not worth it, economically, for sure, but politically, as well. I've just about had it myself.

 

The graphs only represent the average. In a state with massive extremes in all categories, it doesn't reveal much. I am actually thinking of going ex-pat.

 

The thing is that you can live outside of the system somewhat, but the over-reach of the government is so pervasive at this point that it's screwing up everything. But mostly, it has created a really negative energy among the residents of the state because EVERYTHING has become extreme. And extreme is not comfortable nor is it sustainable.

They took paradise and turned into a social experiment gone really, really bad.

 

Do you have a few polls showing that the majority of people leaving California are doing so due to political reasons and not due to costs?

Or is it just how you really really feel?

 

I don’t want to vacation there. The best wine is good. Politically, it’s a cesspool except for pockets of sanity.

 

I could make Afghanistan sound nice by cherry picking stats too.

 

The Party really cemented its power in the state beginning in the mid-1990s. (Mostly due to changing demographics fueled by high levels of illegal immigration)

(the election of governor Schwarzenegger in 2003 was a brief exception, he was really more of a moderate, and politics did not change much in the state during that time)

related threads:
Epidemic of Homelessness in California
"A Tale of Two Countries"
California: Soaring unemployment, trillions in debt, exploding crime, illegal immigration
http://www.politicalforum.com/index...s-out-of-van-california-too-expensive.525229/

 

Actually, during the 90s, under the governorship of Repub Pete Wilson, that the state got raped by Enron. That corruption was internal, nothing to do with demographics.

 

What freedoms was she denied?

 

I think it's much more complicated than that, and you're really trying to bring up a red herring to change the issue.

I will very quickly address your map, looking at the darkest areas. Mississippi and Louisiana have much higher African American percentages than average, New Mexico has traditionally had a much higher Hispanic percentage than average (nearly 50%). If you want to focus on the more white states, West Virginia and Kentucky, West Virginia actually elected a Democrat senator. To address what the real connections are, you know as well as I do that it's going to be very complicated and we're going to have to have a separate thread to discuss it.

The fact is, California WAS a successful and prosperous state, going back to the 1920s all the way up until the 1990s. It's not like this was a place that was always poor and always had these problems.

 

Of course you say that.

 

A poster claimed that California had a poverty and education issue — of the top 10 with the highest instances of these issues, California appears on neither list.

How is that a red herring.

If any states need to be cleaned up it’s Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi. They seem to be in competition to be the worst poorest state in the nation while y’all complain the state that rivals the GDP of many nations is the real issue.

 

Your argument isn't even logical, the "logic" seems to be superficial, designed to appeal to stupidity and emotion. Yes, your statement is true, but you seemed to be trying to use that as a counter to my argument, when the two obviously have nothing to do with each other. I didn't even mention the issue of corruption in my post you responded to.

 

Well, it would appear at the top of the list if we counted the concept of "housing poverty" (I know, a little bit more abstract).
People who are homeless or struggling to afford living there.

People may not be the poorest in the country (in terms of how much money they have), but being poor is all the more terrible when there's no way of ever affording or renting a house, and the average cheapest one bedroom apartments cost 85% of your income (and that's before taxes).

 

You're trying to change the issue.
There are reasons why those states have the problems that they do.
Unfortunately if I started a thread to discuss it, I know you would all just ignore it.
Because you're really not interested in the actual issues.
You just like to keep bringing that up as a deflection in other threads to derail the topic.

I notice you always do this on the first page too. Never on the third or fourth page of a thread. Try to head off the discussion at the first opportunity, off into some area that you will know will be overly complicated and will cloud the issue.

 

Lack of affordable housing isn’t a California issue, it’s an issue every major metropolitan area faces.

 

Identifying states that are worse off than what you people are saying is a horrible state is showing the “issue” is cherry picked.

That you have excuses for them but ignore reasoning for California show the bias.

 

I pointed out racial factors and change over time.
You think we should compare California to other parts of the country that have always had lots of poverty and huge poor minority populations.

And have other reasons why they are poor. For example, Kentucky and West Virginia are on the periphery of the Rust Belt. So have been hit hard in recent decades, just like Ohio (which is half Republican and Democrat). And those two states have more remote mountainous regions, never had the connections to outside to develop industry and wealth.

California has a population more than 6 times both Kentucky and West Virginia combined, so who is the one cherry picking?

At least poor people in Kentucky can rent a beat-up old house or live in a mobile home.

 

I lived in Riverside county which at the time was red. I moved to el Paso which is run by Democrats and they were more conservative than riverside county.