Wednesday, April 25, 2012

WSJ: "Joel Kotkin: The Great California Exodus"

"California is turning into a two-and-a-half-class society. On top are the 'entrenched incumbents' who inherited their wealth or came to California early and made their money. Then there's a shrunken middle class of public employees and, miles below, a permanent welfare class. As it stands today, about 40% of Californians don't pay any income tax and a quarter are on Medicaid.

It's "a very scary political dynamic," he says. "One day somebody's going to put on the ballot, let's take every penny over $100,000 a year, and you'll get it through because there's no real restraint."

2 comments:

eahilf said...

Kotkin is a fucking idiot. To put it mildly.

California is proving that you cannot have a first world standard of living with a second or even third world population. Soon Hispanics will be the largest ethnic group in CA. Check out the high school graduation rate in the heavily Hispanic LAUSD.

Here's what Kotkin said earlier about the demographic destruction, err transformation, of CA:

Nor is this [demographic and cultural] transformation contrary to American tradition, Throughout our history, America’s racial and cultural identity has been in constant flux, reacting to each new wave of immigration. Today’s immigration, primarily from Asia and Latin America, continues that pattern…. From its earliest days, the U.S. has always been something of a “world nation.”

IOW, it's nothing to worry about. Oops.

BTW, the word "immigration" does not appear anywhere in that WSJ article. So naturally neither does illegal immigration. Which is funny because anyone who lived there -- like I did for almost 30 years -- saw that a massive influx of foreigners is what destroyed the place.

CP said...

Right, but the excerpt that I quoted is interesting and true.