Thanks as always to Pirate’s Cove, The Other McCain and Bacon Time for the Rule Five links!
Spring is coming to the Great Land, surrounding us with melting snow, swelling buds on the birches, swans flying overhead and mornings full of birdsong. Meanwhile, down south, California’s decline continues apace. Excerpt:
Once among the most egalitarian regions in the country, Silicon Valley has become among the most segregated places in the country. CityLab has described the technology hub as “a region of segregated innovation,” a trend becoming more pronounced, according to recent research. Silicon Valley now boasts its own underclass of those who clean its buildings and provide food service. Nearly 30 percent of its residents rely on public or private financial assistance.
Similarly, according to the Brookings Institution, San Francisco, the technology industry’s most important urban center, has experienced the most rapid growth in inequality among the nation’s large cities in the last decade. The California Budget and Policy Center has named the city first in California for economic inequality; the average income of the top one percent of households in the city averages $3.6 million, forty-four times the average income of the bottom 99 percent, which stands at $81,094 in a city and state with a high cost of living.
The situation is worse elsewhere in the state. Over the past decade more than 80 percent of California jobs paid under the median income, and most under $40,000 annually, a poverty wage in California. Worse yet, as demonstrated in our analysis, California lags all peer competitors – Texas, Arizona, Tennessee, Nevada, Washington and Colorado – in creating high wage jobs in fields like business and professional services, as even tech growth begins to shift elsewhere.
The biggest losers in California have been those industries that historically provided the best opportunities for working-class people – manufacturing, construction, energy – as well as agriculture, the state’s historic economic powerhouse. On a per capita basis, California builds only a fraction of the housing compared to its main rivals, while corporate new investment, suggests a new Hoover Institution study, has shriveled to a rate one-tenth Texas and one-sixteenth that of Ohio.
This should, of course, come as a surprise to no one who has been paying attention for the last couple of decades. I’ve worked in California, have spent a lot of time in the Los Angeles and Bay areas, even maintaining second residences in those places for some time. In 2017, I spent the entire year working in Silicon Valley, and maintained a one-bedroom furnished apartment, for all 800 square feet of which I paid a bit over five grand a month. Ten years earlier I leased a similar residence for eighteen months in the north end of the LA area (Valencia) for about three and a half K a month.
That’s just crazy.
I can see why California appealed to people at the outset. The country is pretty, the weather is salubrious, and the state offers space from mountain to beachfront to desert. But the lunatics running that state have driven it into the ground – and the next generation will only see things made worse.
As was once said about South Carolina, California is too small to make a nation and too big to make an insane asylum. But the lunatics are nevertheless in charge.
