Making America More Like California Is A Terrible Idea!

"Just saw on the news that Biden and Harris want to make our country just like California. My wife and I fled California 2.5 years ago to get away from those policies. Where can we run to now?" - Ken Hulsey 

I honestly hate being right sometimes. Just over two years ago I told my wife that the Democratic Party was using the state of California as a laboratory to see how their progressive policies could be developed and tested in a real-life environment. Know that a Democratic president is in the White House those policies are about to be unleashed nationwide.

There is only one problem, those policies failed in California leading to over one million people fleeing the state over the last decade.

From the LA Times:

California is emerging as the de facto policy think tank of the Biden-Harris administration and of a Congress soon to be under Democratic control. That’s rekindling past cliches about the state — incubator of innovation, premier laboratory of democracy, land of big ideas — even as it struggles with surging COVID-19 infections, a safety net frayed by the pandemic’s toll, crushing housing costs and wildfires, all fueling an exodus of residents. 

 There is no place the incoming administration is leaning on more heavily for inspiration in setting a progressive policy agenda. The revival in Washington of the California model of governance was cemented by Democrats’ recent recapture of the Senate majority, and comes after a Trump-era hiatus during which the state was road-testing ambitious new policies. Another factor: California Sen. Kamala Harris is about to become vice president.

“California has never had a Democrat on a national ticket, much less a ticket that won,” said former Democratic Gov. Gray Davis. “Kamala Harris will be in all the meetings and have the last word with the president after they are over. She’ll be sharing ideas, innovations and breakthroughs from California that might help solve problems on the national level.”

Again the problem here is the simple fact is that California not only didn't prosper under these proposed policies it actually suffered greatly under them.

From The City Journal:

California today boasts a fabulously rich technology elite; it’s also home to the highest poverty rate among the states, adjusted for costs, according to the U.S. Census. Under its largely one-party regime, notes liberal economist James Galbraith, California has seen inequality grow at among the fastest rates in the country. The state endures the widest gap between middle and upper incomes in the country—72 percent, compared with a national average of 57 percent. The Golden State may see itself as a standard-bearer among advanced economies, but it suffers a level of inequality worse than Mexico. According to a recent United Way study, close to one in three families in the state are barely able to pay their bills.

The Biden administration wants to embrace a new environmental policies based on those that have been in place in California for the past two decades. 

From The LA Times:

California’s plan to remove carbon-emitting power sources from its electricity grid entirely by 2045 also inspired the incoming administration. Biden is proposing an even more aggressive timeline, looking to move the grid to zero emissions nationwide by 2035.

The state’s plan was the most ambitious of its kind when it was approved in 2018, a snub at Trump’s unrelenting push to revive demand for fossil fuels. It moved several other states to push up their decarbonization timelines. “My thinking was we had to be a beacon of hope and opportunity while Trump was trying to undo all of our policies at the national level,” De León said.

When Trump moved to withdraw the United States from the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, California committed to meeting its objectives regardless, and launched a successful crusade to persuade 23 other states to do the same. Biden is now preparing to reenter the accord. California’s landmark tailpipe emissions standards that the Trump administration worked furiously to erode are again central to that effort, helping to push the nation’s vehicle fleet toward electrification.

An environmental task force set up last year with members across the Democratic Party’s spectrum — co-chaired by former Secretary of State John F. Kerry, since appointed to Biden’s Cabinet as climate envoy — urged the incoming administration to seek counsel from California. “Immediately convene California, due to its unique authority, and other states with labor, auto industry, and environmental leaders to inform ambitious actions,” the group’s report advised.

Only one problem, these policies did very little to lessen carbon emissions, despite costing the tax payers millions of dollars:

From The City Journal

A future Harris administration would likely impose California’s green mandates on the nation. These measures have burdened California with electricity rates that since 2011 have increased five times as rapidly as the national average. They’ve also been linked to wildfires and, seemingly every summer, rolling blackouts. The state’s purposeful closing of nuclear and gas plants, notes environmental author Michael Shellenberger, means that “the tens of billions that Californians have spent on renewables come with high human, economic, and environmental costs.”

Under its local version of a Green Regime, California produces some high-wage jobs, but five times as many are below the median wage: a remarkable 86 percent of all new California jobs pay below the median income, while almost half pay under $40,000. Particularly vulnerable to the state’s crippling energy prices has been the traditionally higher-paying industrial sector. Over the last decade, California has fallen to the bottom half of states in terms of manufacturing employment growth, last year ranking 44th, with a new job-creation rate one-third to one-quarter that of prime competitors, such as Texas, Virginia, Arizona, Nevada, and Florida.

Here is the big picture folks:

From The LA Times:

“California has never had a Democrat on a national ticket, much less a ticket that won,” said former Democratic Gov. Gray Davis. “Kamala Harris will be in all the meetings and have the last word with the president after they are over. She’ll be sharing ideas, innovations and breakthroughs from California that might help solve problems on the national level.”

Other Californians will be doing the same from Biden’s Cabinet. Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra is nominated to run the massive Health and Human Services Department. The nominee for Treasury secretary, former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen, is a professor at UC Berkeley, as is the nominee for Energy secretary, Jennifer Granholm. Longtime California resident Alejandro Mayorkas is the nominee to run the Department of Homeland Security.

And in Congress, of course, San Francisco Democrat Nancy Pelosi will be running point on the California agenda as House speaker.

Not that Biden needs the nudge. He’s been pushing to nationalize some of the state’s pioneering efforts on climate action, workers’ rights, law enforcement and criminal justice, healthcare and economic empowerment since he was vice president in the Obama era. He continued to champion the cause while he and Harris were still rivals in the 2020 presidential race.

And how did that work out in say California's biggest city San Francisco?

From The City Journal"

Though making up less than one-fifth of the state’s population, the Bay Area—the base for Harris, former governor Jerry Brown, current governor Gavin Newsom, Senator Dianne Feinstein, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi—dominates California politics. With a large edge in Democratic registration, the area has been a fount of green and social-justice proposals cloaked in notionally progressive idealism but devastating to the middle and working classes.

Any notion that the Bay Area exemplifies egalitarianism falls apart on quick scrutiny. As recently as the 1980s, the San Jose area boasted one of the country’s most upwardly mobile economies, but with a greatly reduced industrial presence, it has morphed into what CityLab describes as “a region of segregated innovation,” where the rich add to their gains, the middle-class shrinks, and the poor live in increasingly chronic poverty. In San Francisco, a major center of the Bay Area tech scene, inequality grew most rapidly out of the nation’s large cities in the last decade, according to the Brookings Institution. The left-leaning California Budget and Policy Center has named the city first in California for economic inequality.

Yet despite this, and San Francisco’s growing reputation as crime-ridden, filthy, and ungovernable, Harris’s key allies still see the city as a role model for urban living. They ignore the reality that the vast majority of all new growth in the past decade has taken place in suburbs, even in the environs around San Francisco, which are 75 percent suburban.

At this point I want to visit an often repeated quote for some insight:

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result."

I can't for the life of me begin to understand how this new administration could possibly believe that the failed policies of California could possibly work on a national scale. I thought about it this way. I want to turn cheese into gold so I perform several experiments over a decade to see if any of my many hypothesis could achieve my desired result. None of them do, yet I'm so invested in my theory that I decide to go all in and build a giant factory to produce gold from cheese despite the fact that all of my data clearly points to the fact that it will never happen.

That's insanity and that's what the Democratic Party is hoping to make policy.

Want more proof? Here is an excerpt from an article on the Triton Times website:

Chief Executive claims California is a less favorable business environment than other midwestern states, and it is easy to understand why so many companies are relocating their headquarters. Some of these companies include Toyota, Nissan North America, Chevron, Nestle USA, and Carl’s Jr, a fast food chain that originated in California. Because of various companies leaving California, many people are losing their jobs, revenue for the state is decreasing, and the overall economy is taking damage.

Even Tesla will be leaving California soon. A company that is known to be infinitely rich has had it with the California business environment, and that is truly saying something. Tesla employs thousands of people, yet all the governor said is, “I’m not worried about Elon leaving.” Governor Nuisance is definitely worried. 

Is California no longer the golden state? Have housing prices and taxes become too high for people to stay here? Well one thing is for sure: the government needs to meet the people’s demands, or else we are going to see many more people and businesses moving away from California.

In closing I want share a little story about California. I the early nineties my friends and I used to go down to Huntington Beech and spend the night around a bonfire, enjoying adult beverages, playing music and generally having a great time. Let's fast forward thirty years. Everything I just described is now illegal. You can't have fire on the beach. Alcohol is not permitted on the beach. No loud noises are permitted on the beach and for that matter no one is even allowed on the beach after dark. If you Google "Huntington Beach Hours" and you will see that the beach is open to the public until ten. Despite that, the last time I went down there after dark, I was run off by a police officer.

Is this what we want for our country?