NationStates Jolt Archive


That Bad In California?

Hotwife
14-01-2009, 22:19
Perish the thought...

Dear California Liberals,

We've received your application to relocate out of the disaster zone to a conservative state in better condition. You listed the following reasons in your application:
1. Too many illegal aliens
2. Wage decline for blue collar employment
3. State taxes too high
(The list was much longer but we didn't need to read beyond the section where you checked voting preference anyway).

Your application is denied for the following reasons:
1. Every issue you cite as "creating economic and social conditions impossible to survive" is a direct result of your tree hugging, liberal, and leftist bullshit point of view and politics.

You made your bed now fucking lie in it, hippie. We don't want your kind importing your world destroying insanity to our state.

Sincerely,
Red State


http://www3.signonsandiego.com...011209/?zIndex=35923

By MICHAEL R. BLOOD, The Associated Press
11:54 a.m. January 12, 2009

LOS ANGELES — Mike Reilly spent his lifetime chasing the California dream. This year he's going to look for it in Colorado.

With a house purchase near Denver in the works, the 38-year-old engineering contractor plans to move his family 1,200 miles away from his home state's lemon groves, sunshine and beaches. For him, years of rising taxes, dead-end schools, unchecked illegal immigration and clogged traffic have robbed the Golden State of its allure.

Is there something left of the California dream?

"If you are a Hollywood actor," Reilly says, "but not for us."

Since the days of the Gold Rush, California has represented the Promised Land, an image celebrated in the songs of the Beach Boys and embodied by Silicon Valley's instant millionaires and the young men and women who achieve stardom in Hollywood.

But for many California families last year, tomorrow started somewhere else.

The number of people leaving California for another state outstripped the number moving in from another state during the year ending on July 1, 2008. California lost a net total of 144,000 people during that period – more than any other state, according to census estimates. That is about equal to the population of Syracuse, N.Y.

The state with the next-highest net loss through migration between states was New York, which lost about 125,000 residents.

California's loss is extremely small in a state of 38 million. And, in fact, the state's population continues to increase overall because of births and immigration, legal and illegal. But it is the fourth consecutive year that more residents decamped from California for other states than arrived here from within the U.S.

A losing streak that long hasn't happened in California since the recession of the early 1990s, when departures outstripped arrivals from other states by 362,000 in 1994 alone.

In part because of the boom in population in other Western states, California could lose a congressional seat for the first time in its history.

Why are so many looking for an exit?

Among other things: California's unemployment rate hit 8.4 percent in November, the third-highest in the nation, and it is expected to get worse. A record 236,000 foreclosures are projected for 2008, more than the prior nine years combined, according to research firm MDA DataQuick. Personal income was about flat last year.

With state government facing a $41.6 billion budget hole over 18 months, residents are bracing for higher taxes, cuts in education and postponed tax rebates. A multibillion-dollar plan to remake downtown Los Angeles has stalled, and office vacancy rates there and in San Diego and San Jose surpass the 10.2 percent national average.

Median housing prices have nose-dived one-third from a 2006 peak, but many homes are still out of reach for middle-class families. Some small towns are on the brink of bankruptcy. Normally recession-proof Hollywood has been hit by layoffs.

"You see wages go down and the cost of living go up," Reilly says. His property taxes will be $1,300 in Colorado, down from $4,300 on his three-bedroom house in Nipomo, about 80 miles up the coast from Santa Barbara.

California's obituary has been written before – "California: The Endangered Dream" was the title of a 1991 Time magazine cover story. The Golden State and its huge economy – by itself, the eighth-largest in the world – have shown resilience, weathering the aerospace bust, the dot-com crash and an energy crunch in recent years.

But this time, the news just keeps getting worse.

A state board halted lending for about 2,000 public works projects in California worth more than $16 billion because the state could not afford them. A report by Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., last month said the state lost 100,000 jobs in the last year and the erosion of home prices eliminated over $1 trillion in wealth.

"I don't think the California dream, per se, is over. It has become and will continue to become grittier," says New America Foundation senior fellow Gregory Rodriguez. "Now, perhaps, we have to reassess the California of our imagination."

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is among those who say the state needs to create itself anew, rebuilding roads, schools and transit.

"We've lived off the investments our parents made in the '50s and '60s for a long time," says Tim Hodson, director of the Center for California Studies at California State University, Sacramento. "We're somewhat in the position of a Rust Belt state in the 1970s."

Financial adviser Barry Hartz lived in California for 60 years and once ran for state Assembly before relocating with his wife last year to Colorado Springs, Colo., where his son's family had moved.

"The saddest thing I saw was the escalation of home prices to the point our kids, when they got married, could not live in the community where they lived and grew up," Hartz says. "Some people call that progress."


Wow, they're fleeing New York as well...
Fartsniffage
14-01-2009, 22:22
Isn't the governor of California Republican?
Hotwife
14-01-2009, 22:22
Isn't the governor of California Republican?

In name only.
The Cat-Tribe
14-01-2009, 22:23
*snip*

*laughs at right-wing bullshit and deliberate mischaracterization of the facts*
Hotwife
14-01-2009, 22:25
*laughs at right-wing bullshit and deliberate mischaracterization of the facts*

The AP is a right wing news organization?
The Black Forrest
14-01-2009, 22:35
*laughs at right-wing bullshit and deliberate mischaracterization of the facts*

:)



.
The Cat-Tribe
14-01-2009, 22:35
The AP is a right wing news organization?

1. I don't think the AP wrote your entire post.

2. I'm enjoying the 77 degree temperature and sunny skies too much to care about your sour grapes.
Knights of Liberty
14-01-2009, 22:37
Didnt Colorado go blue last election?
Ristle
14-01-2009, 22:41
Isn't California republican now?
The Cat-Tribe
14-01-2009, 22:48
Isn't California republican now?

Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger has been Governor of California since November 17, 2003. When times were better, he was given a great deal of credit.

Now he is apparently a RINO.
Wilgrove
14-01-2009, 22:50
Didnt Colorado go blue last election?

Isn't California republican now?

Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger has been Governor of California since November 17, 2003. When times were better, he was given a great deal of credit.

Now he is apparently a RINO.

Does it really matter?

I've been to San Fransisco and San Jose many times, and I always enjoy my visits there. San Fransisco is a beautiful city.

I wish I could live there, but I heard that its very costly to live in San Fran. or in San Jose.
The Black Forrest
14-01-2009, 22:52
Does it really matter?

I've been to San Fransisco and San Jose many times, and I always enjoy my visits there. San Fransisco is a beautiful city.

I wish I could live there, but I heard that its very costly to live in San Fran. or in San Jose.

As compared to NC? Sure. It's cheaper there because there is much more open space.
Knights of Liberty
14-01-2009, 22:55
Does it really matter?

I've been to San Fransisco and San Jose many times, and I always enjoy my visits there. San Fransisco is a beautiful city.

I wish I could live there, but I heard that its very costly to live in San Fran. or in San Jose.

I bring up Colorado going blue because DK signed his little letter as "The Red States".
South Lorenya
14-01-2009, 23:04
Keep in mind that they passed an amendment making homosexuals second-class citizens. Even the minimum of the 2%-7% puts that at 735,000 homosexuals there. You should be impressed that California's population flight isn't bigger!
Exilia and Colonies
14-01-2009, 23:43
You should all know by now. Leaders are only Republican until people realise what they're in charge of is bankrupt. Then they magically metamorphose into ebil liberals.
Kryozerkia
14-01-2009, 23:54
Perish the thought...

Dear California Liberals,

We've received your application to relocate out of the disaster zone to a conservative state in better condition. You listed the following reasons in your application:
1. Too many illegal aliens
2. Wage decline for blue collar employment
3. State taxes too high
(The list was much longer but we didn't need to read beyond the section where you checked voting preference anyway).

Your application is denied for the following reasons:
1. Every issue you cite as "creating economic and social conditions impossible to survive" is a direct result of your tree hugging, liberal, and leftist bullshit point of view and politics.

You made your bed now fucking lie in it, hippie. We don't want your kind importing your world destroying insanity to our state.

Sincerely,
Red State

Inflammatory would be a one way of describing this, though troll-baiting would be accurate. You could have started a thread on this topic without the inflammatory, blanket remarks about the left. Warned.