As the election returns poured in on the evening of November 2 and the giant Fox News map began to turn solid red from Arizona to Pennsylvania and from Idaho to Florida, the blue fringes of the east and west coasts stood out in stark contrast.
In California, voters returned Barbara Boxer to the U.S. Senate for another six year term. This is the same woman who openly displayed her ignorance by publicly berating Brigadier General Michael Walsh of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in an open public hearing… and for what reason? For addressing her as “Ma’am” – the prescribed term of address for high-ranking females in the U.S. military and other female dignitaries. Had Boxer represented almost any state other than California, Oregon, Washington, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, or Maryland… all coastal states… she would have paid a heavy price for her boorishness.
But then, in an act of even greater self-loathing, the voters of California reelected “Governor Moonbeam” himself, former governor Jerry Brown, to another term in the governor’s office, defeating former eBay CEO Meg Whitman by 54-41%.
It is exactly what one might expect when the wealthiest, most beautiful state in the nation is left to be plundered by liberals and Democrats. Thanks to decades of kowtowing to every whim of radical environmentalists, labor unions, teachers unions, public employee unions, and other leftist interest groups, California finds itself on a fast track toward a cultural and economic meltdown… with no one left to bail them out. After decades of every conceivable sort of over-regulation of the business community, California is hemorrhaging jobs, businesses, and investors to Arizona, Texas, and other states. How bad is it? Consider that:
• California has a 12.4% unemployment rate (approx. 2.3 million unemployed) while suffocating under a job-killing $8.00 per hour minimum wage… one of the highest in the nation.
• Between 2001 and 2010, factory jobs declined from 1.87 million to 1.23 million, representing a 34% loss in the state’s industrial base. Manufacturing jobs are not likely to return… ever.
• With just 12% of the U.S. population, California is home to nearly one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients.
• The state budget shortfall for fiscal year 2009-10 was $45.5 billion, equivalent to 53% of total state spending – the largest spending/revenue gap of any state in U.S. history.
• The California sales tax is the nation’s highest, and its income tax is the third-highest. In terms of favorable business climate, the Tax Foundation ranks California 48th.
So who is to blame for California’s sad state of affairs? To answer that question we need only note that current unfunded pension liabilities for the state’s public employees may be as much as $500 billion. According to the Howard Jarvis Tax Foundation, “California taxpayers are now paying pensions that exceed $100,000 a year to over 12,000 former state and local government workers, including more than 9,000 state and local employees covered by the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, and over 3,000 former school administrators or teachers covered under the California State Teachers’ Retirement System.”
Coupled with the fact that California is also home to some 25% of the country’s 15-20 million illegal aliens, it is easy to see why the reelection of Boxer and Brown can only be described as a “death wish.”
What it boils down to is that an ever-shrinking population of super-wealthy are now left to feed the insatiable welfare-state monster in states such as California and New York. As the Wall Street Journal tells us (“The Two Left Coasts” – Nov. 5), the economies of Albany and Sacramento are “perched atop a shrinking base of taxpayers, many so wealthy that they don’t care what tax rates are. The highest-earning 1% funds nearly half of the New York budget. The liberal political class then feeds these dollars to its union constituents – not least in the form of gold-plated benefits and pensions – who in turn spend mightily to protect their patrons, even as the state budget’s lurch ever closer to Grecian territory.”
It was all quite predictable, yet it still causes pundits to ponder the age-old question: Why is it that those who live along our coastlines, east and west, tend to be so much more liberal in their politics than those of us who occupy the great geographic center of the nation?
I have a long-held theory about that. I suspect that those who live near the shorelines of our great oceans are much more prone to feelings of helplessness than those of us who live hundreds of miles inland. Staring out to sea and realizing that there is nothing but water for thousands and thousands of miles could tend to make one feel a bit powerless, totally insignificant. Watching the unceasing movement of ocean waves, eating away at sandy beaches and cliffs of stone, could give one a sense of inevitability. In other words, it’s bigger than all of us, so why fight it; why not just give in to it.
On the other hand, those of us who live in the great middle of the country tend to approach things a bit differently. If we decide to build a lake, a highway, a dam, or even to reroute a river, we simply bring enough men with bulldozers and concrete to do the job. And if we find a hill or a mountain in our path we simply bring enough trucks and earthmovers to either move it aside, build a road around it, cut it down to size, or dig a tunnel through it.
The point is, these things tend to shape the way we think about everything in our lives, including the political intangibles that confront us. Which brings us to the question of what, if anything, Californians will do about: a) the ever-growing outflow of jobs and wealth to more business-friendly states, and b) the human waves of illegal immigrants that threaten to overwhelm them. Will they continue to be as sanguine about the incessant waves of humanity rolling over them as they are about the ocean waves that erode their beaches?
Simple arithmetic should tell Californians what everyone should know, which is that no state and no nation can withstand an endless influx of poor and uneducated immigrants, while at the same time exporting millions of manufacturing jobs to competing states and low-wage countries… all the while loading a heavier and heavier burden of taxes on a shrinking business community and investor class. But who said liberals and Democrats ever gave a whit about simple arithmetic?
So, faced with these realities, and with no chance that the rest of the country will bail them out, what will Californians do? Will they come to their senses and try a bit of “tough love,” or will they opt for more of the same? As governor-elect Jerry Brown packs his bags for a return to Sacramento, he never fails to thank the unions for their undying support… leaving little doubt about his priorities. As governor, he can be expected to cater to their every whim.
None of this should give us much hope that Californians will do what is necessary to make illegal immigration both difficult and unpleasant. California’s liberals will likely see illegal immigration, like the incessant waves of the vast Pacific Ocean, as a force too big and too powerful to reckon with and simply opt for more of what got them into trouble in the first place. While voters across the country turned out by the millions on November 2nd to declare that they’d had enough of ever bigger, more oppressive, intrusive, and higher-cost government, California voters lined up to say, “Could we have a bit more of that, please?”
I recall driving from Los Angeles to San Diego during the spring of 1988. And as I drove down I-5 through Orange County, through San Juan Capistrano and San Clemente, I couldn’t help but speculate why the Spanish would give up such a beautiful piece of real estate. Now, more than twenty years later, it appears inevitable that California will one day be reclaimed by Mexico and there’s nothing that anyone can do to stop it.
The invasion and occupation is already well under way, and the hell-hole that is now Tijuana will stretch one day from San Diego to the redwood forests of northern California. And if Californian’s are either unwilling or unable to help themselves, then how can anyone else help them? How can we prevent the Golden State from becoming the world’s largest source of economic and political refugees? The answer is, we can’t.