M2RB: The Eagles
And she said "We are all just prisoners here, of our own device"
And in the master's chambers,
They gathered for the feast
They stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can't kill the beast
Last thing I remember, I was
Running for the door
I had to find the passage back
To the place I was before
"Relax, " said the night man,
"We are programmed to receive.
You can check-out any time you like,
But you can never leave! "
Unlike the State of California, Obama's America would be more like Hotel California: "You Can Check-Out Any Time You Like, But You Can Never Leave."
Voting with your feet would no longer really be an option since California or Illinois would be as attractive as Texas - tax and regulatory-wise.
By Joel Kotkin
Conservatives of the paranoid stripe flocked to the documentary “America: 2016”
during the run up to the election, but you don’t have to time travel
to catch a vision of President Obama’s plans for the future. It’s
playing already in California.
Some East Coast commentators like Jeff Greenfield
saw the election as “a good night” for the Golden State, which the
President carried by 20 points, 10 times his margin elsewhere — a
massive bear hug from Californians. It certainly was a great night for
Democrats, who now have a two-thirds majority in the state legislature
and can spend a massive tax increase that targets families making over
$250,000 a year.
For A Preview Of Obama's America In 2016, Look At The Crack-Up Of California
These results assure that California will serve as the prime testing
ground for President Obama’s form of post-economic liberalism. Every
dream program that the Administration embraces — cap and trade, massive
taxes on the rich, high-speed rail — is either in place or on the
drawing boards. In Sacramento, blue staters don’t even have to worry
about over-reach because the Republicans here have dried into a
withered husk. They have about as much influence on what happens here
as our family’s dog Roxy, and she’s much cuter.
California now stands as blue America’s end point, but contrary to
the media celebration, it presents not such a pretty picture. Even
amidst our decennial tech bubble, the state’s unemployment is among the
highest in the country, and is trending down very slowly. Over the
past decade, California has slowed as a source of fast-growth
companies, as a recent Kauffman Foundation study shows, while other states such as Washington, Virginia, Texas and Utah have gained ground.
Old-style liberals might point out that California’s progressive
policies have not done much for the working- or middle-class folks often
trumpeted as its beneficiaries. Instead income inequality has grown far more than the national average.
True, the fortunate sliver of dot-com geniuses make billions, but the
ranks of the poor have swollen to the point that the state, with 12%
of the nation’s population, account for one third of its welfare cases. Large parts of the state, notably in the interior regions, suffer unemployment in the 15% range and higher.
Demographics may be working to the Democratic Party’s favor, but not
so much for the state. As California loses its allure as a place of
opportunity for all but a few — the best connected, educated and
affluent — the state is losing its magnetic appeal to migrants from both
inside and outside the state. Domestic migration has been negative
for 18 of the past 20 years; immigration from abroad is at the lowest
point in the past two decades. In terms of growth in college-educated
residents, only San Diego managed to add more than the national
average from 2000 to 2010; both the Bay Area and Los Angeles were
considerably below. (See “The U.S. Cities Getting Smarter The Fastest“)
The growing diversity, a good thing in itself, masks a demographic
stagnation. California, remarkable for its population growth over the
past century, now is heading toward “zero population growth,”
notes economist Bill Watkins; the state now barely grows 1% a year.
Los Angeles, the state’s largest urban area, grew less, in total
numbers, in the last decade than at any time in the last 100 years.
Although this might elicit hosanas among greens, who generally would
like to see fewer people, the emerging reality is sobering.
Increasingly the state bifurcates between a generally older,
predominately white and Asian coast, and an interior increasingly
populated by generally less affluent Hispanics and African-Americans.
California now ranks near the bottom in science skills, and while its
population over 65 is the fifth largest in the nation, the number of
those under 35 is only 23rd. And the future looks even bleaker:
California’s eighth graders rank a pathetic 47th in terms of science test scores.
So how did the ladder of opportunity crack in a state that has
massive natural and human resources, not to mention a kind climate and
spectacular scenery?
To some extent, California is suffering the aftereffects of a
century of success. Over that period, a large coastal affluent class,
now increasingly elderly, enjoyed a spectacular run of rising real
estate prices and in some places, like Silicon Valley, a progression of
stock windfalls. Once split among liberals and conservatives, this
group is now almost uniformly deep blue, as epitomized by Marin
County, which voted almost three to one for Obama.
Blacks, Hispanics and young people may be the new core of the
Democratic Party, but aging affluents may be the most important
constituency. Unlike minorities or young people, they have increasingly
little reason to support growth. After all, they have theirs and more
people simply means more traffic, congestion and crowded schools.
Increasingly many affluents also don’t have children — the liberal
heartland of San Francisco has among the lowest fertility rates on the
continent — the need to create jobs and opportunities for the next
generation is not a pressing priority. Feeling “good” about themselves,
by voting for the progressive agenda, is good enough for themselves.
Perhaps the most shocking impact of California’s shift to one-party
rule has been the complicity of the once powerful business community.
In recent years, California’s business community has accommodated
itself to the state’s ever higher taxes and regulations. They
acquiesced meekly to the state’s climate change regulations, making
the development of anything than largely undesired dense housing
developments all but impossible. Industries that use energy —
including oil refineries but also chip-makers and server farms —
simply go elsewhere, either to another country or across the border to
less relentlessly regulated states.
In the battle over the Proposition 30 tax hike, notes small business
advocate Joel Fox, Governor Brown and his legislative allies prevented
business leaders from opposing the tax hike. “It was a lot of support
the Governor — or else,” he says. Some business organizations, like
the establishmentarian Bay Area Council, even actively promoted the
income tax increase, which makes the state’s rate the highest in the
continental United States. For this, they get praise from progressive
mouthpieces like The San Francisco Chronicle as “brave business leaders.”
To me, this “bravery” looks like a lot more like “Stockholm
syndrome,” where a hostage, as famously happened with Patty Hearst,
begins to identify with their captors. Once world-beaters and fierce
political competitors, California’s business leaders know that if they
oppose the Governor or the legislative leadership’s tax or regulatory
agenda, he can threaten them with measures specifically targeted at
their industry. So the magnates meekly accept an impossible business
climate, knowing, like much of the state’s middle class, that they will
be welcomed elsewhere.
In this sense California business has devolved into something
analogous to Mexican enterprise under the old PRI regime. If you want to
survive, you bow, curtsey and pay up — or else. Business demanded
little in return, for example, insisting that education funds be
conditional on comprehensive reform. After the election some business
types belatedly have started to express concerns
about the new Democratic supermajority and what they will do with those
new tax revenues. But their inevitable fallback strategy will likely
be falling on one knee to beg Governor Brown to save them from an ever
more invigorated progressive majority.
This cringing and economically counterproductive approach to
governance will soon make its appearance in a Washington. In the next
few months, business lobbyists will wear out their knee pads trying to
appease the increasingly all powerful regulatory clerisy. Some of the
new players may also be the very people who have been killing
California. There’s already widespread talk of bringing L.A.’s
term-limited Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to Washington for a big cabinet posting, perhaps as Transportation Secretary. All this rewards an empty suit who has presided over Los Angeles’ economic and demographic decline, leading that great city to the brink of bankruptcy, and a political system rife with cronyism.
But in Barack Obama’s America, failure can often pave the road to
success. In this age, incompetence is no barrier to promotion, and
failed states like California and Illinois are taken not as examples to
avoid but as models to emulate. So if you want to get an advanced look
at what America could look like in 2016, don’t go to the movies. Just
hop a plane to California; after all, the Golden State is a wonderful
place to visit in winter. And , as things are going, we will need the
cash.
Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a
distinguished presidential fellow in
urban futures at Chapman University,
and contributing editor to the City Journal in New
York. He is author of The City: A Global History. His newest book is The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, released in February, 2010.
Related:
Obama's America: You Can Check-Out Any Time You Like, But You Can Never Leave???
The Great California Exodus
California at Twilight
Mr Obama, Build Up That Wall!
Soft Apartheid: The Income Inequality Factor Liberals Can't Talk About
Thunderdome In California?
Pension Envy?
What the Heck, Let's Tax the Rich!
Are Exit Taxes and Corrals Coming Soon to "My Progressive Little Ponyland"?
Hotel California - The Eagles
On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair
Warm smell of colitas, rising up through the air
Up ahead in the distance, I saw a shimmering light
My head grew heavy and my sight grew dim
I had to stop for the night
There she stood in the doorway;
I heard the mission bell
And I was thinking to myself,
"This could be Heaven or this could be Hell"
Then she lit up a candle and she showed me the way
There were voices down the corridor,
I thought I heard them say...
Welcome to the Hotel California
Such a lovely place (Such a lovely place)
Such a lovely face
Plenty of room at the Hotel California
Any time of year (Any time of year)
You can find it here
Her mind is Tiffany-twisted, she got the Mercedes bends
She got a lot of pretty, pretty boys she calls friends
How they dance in the courtyard, sweet summer sweat.
Some dance to remember, some dance to forget
So I called up the Captain,
"Please bring me my wine"
He said, "We haven't had that spirit here since nineteen sixty nine"
And still those voices are calling from far away,
Wake you up in the middle of the night
Just to hear them say...
Welcome to the Hotel California
Such a lovely place (Such a lovely place)
Such a lovely face
They livin' it up at the Hotel California
What a nice surprise (what a nice surprise)
Bring your alibis
Mirrors on the ceiling,
The pink champagne on ice
And she said "We are all just prisoners here, of our own device"
And in the master's chambers,
They gathered for the feast
They stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can't kill the beast
Last thing I remember, I was
Running for the door
I had to find the passage back
To the place I was before
"Relax, " said the night man,
"We are programmed to receive.
You can check-out any time you like,
But you can never leave! "
Warm smell of colitas, rising up through the air
Up ahead in the distance, I saw a shimmering light
My head grew heavy and my sight grew dim
I had to stop for the night
There she stood in the doorway;
I heard the mission bell
And I was thinking to myself,
"This could be Heaven or this could be Hell"
Then she lit up a candle and she showed me the way
There were voices down the corridor,
I thought I heard them say...
Welcome to the Hotel California
Such a lovely place (Such a lovely place)
Such a lovely face
Plenty of room at the Hotel California
Any time of year (Any time of year)
You can find it here
Her mind is Tiffany-twisted, she got the Mercedes bends
She got a lot of pretty, pretty boys she calls friends
How they dance in the courtyard, sweet summer sweat.
Some dance to remember, some dance to forget
So I called up the Captain,
"Please bring me my wine"
He said, "We haven't had that spirit here since nineteen sixty nine"
And still those voices are calling from far away,
Wake you up in the middle of the night
Just to hear them say...
Welcome to the Hotel California
Such a lovely place (Such a lovely place)
Such a lovely face
They livin' it up at the Hotel California
What a nice surprise (what a nice surprise)
Bring your alibis
Mirrors on the ceiling,
The pink champagne on ice
And she said "We are all just prisoners here, of our own device"
And in the master's chambers,
They gathered for the feast
They stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can't kill the beast
Last thing I remember, I was
Running for the door
I had to find the passage back
To the place I was before
"Relax, " said the night man,
"We are programmed to receive.
You can check-out any time you like,
But you can never leave! "
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