Not that is anybody left here in our forum to actually read this...but here goes.
Summary of a short article in the OC Register yesterday: »
www.ocregister.com/opini ··· ior.html• California [consist of] two radically different cultures and landscapes with little in common, each equally dysfunctional in quite different ways. Apart they are unworldly, together a disaster.
• [The] narrow coastal corridor runs from San Diego to Berkeley, where the weather is ideal, the gentrified affluent make good money, and values are green and left-wing.
• In the hot interior of blue-collar Sacramento, Turlock, Fresno and Bakersfield, [the Inland Empire] well over half the incoming freshman in the California State University system must take remedial math and science classes. Unemployment is well over 15%.
• In postmodern Palo Alto or Santa Monica, a small cottage costs more than $1 million.
• Two hours away, in premodern and now-bankrupt Stockton, a bungalow the same size goes for less than $100,000
• ...
More than 2,000 upper-income Californians are leaving per week to flee high taxes and costly regulations, yet California wants to raise taxes even higher; its business climate already ranks near the bottom of most surveys.
• [California's] teachers are among the highest paid on average in the nation, but its public school students consistently test near the bottom of the nation in both math and science.
• California's [public] retirement systems are underfunded by about
$300 billion.
• The state wishes to borrow billions of dollars to develop high-speed rail [between] Fresno and Corcoran a corridor already served by money-losing Amtrak. Apparently, coastal residents like the idea of European high-speed rail... at others expense.
• The state population grew by 10 million from the mid-1980s to 2005, its number of
Medicaid recipients increased by 7 million during that period;
33% (one-third) of the entire nation's welfare recipients now reside in California• In the Never-Never Land of Apple, Facebook, Google, Hollywood, [coastal Orange County] and the wine country, millions live in an idyllic paradise. Coastal Californians can afford to worry about the state's trivia as their legislators seek to outlaw foie gras, shut down irrigation projects to save the 3-inch delta smelt, and allow children to have legally recognized multiple parents.
• But in the less feel-good interior, crippling regulations curb timber, gas and oil, and farm production. For the most part, the rules are mandated by coastal utopians who have little idea [or give a rats ass] where the gas for their imported [German] cars comes from, or how the redwood is cut for their decks, or
who grows the ingredients for their [hoity-toity] Mediterranean lunches of arugula, olive oil and pasta.There is a corridor along the California coast that extends from San Diego up through North San Francisco. It runs only about 6-7 miles inland. There are about 150,000 - 200,000 residents along this strip. This is where 96% of the California's most wealthy reside.
The other 39 Million live in the rest of the state.