Once a Golden Trick Pony, Now a Pig that Eats Its Young

It votes almost exclusively Democrat. The Rich Democrats vote to appease the Poor Democrats and to keep them in their place. Los Angeles was much like the Hollywood of Swimming Pools, Sunshine and Palm Trees. Now it is a Barrio that resembles Baghdad. m/r

Land of Inequality | National Review Online

March 10, 2014, issue of NR  2-24-14

By Troy Senik

Gone Forever 

From the end of World War II until the 1990s, California possessed a magnetism unique among the 50 states. It was — according to a mythology that was probably overwrought even in those halcyon days — an American Eden, a place where ambition and unfettered imagination combined to make even the most exotic dreams seem feasible.

One of the reasons that image was so enduring was that the state consistently delivered on the outsized expectations. It came to be the center of American entertainment, with “Hollywood” becoming a metonym for the entire industry. It fostered the digital revolution that would eventually flower in Silicon Valley. It constructed one of the nation’s most extensive freeway systems, built a sophisticated infrastructure for delivering water, and developed one of the most impressive networks of universities in the country.

That California was synonymous with opportunity. It was a beacon to the middle class, a place where it was believed that you could author the future on your own terms.

The California that once beckoned residents from every corner of the nation has been demagnetized over the past quarter century. As an important 2012 Manhattan Institute study by Tom Gray and Robert Scardamalia noted, California led the nation in domestic out-migration in the 20-year period from 1990 to 2010, seeing an exodus of nearly 3.4 million residents that eliminated approximately 80 percent of the gains the state had made in domestic migration in the three decades prior. When those numbers are considered as a percentage of overall population, the Golden State stands alongside the nation’s biggest exporters of citizens: public-sector basket cases like New York, Michigan, Illinois, and New Jersey. In 2010, for the first time in the state’s history, California failed to gain any new seats in congressional redistricting.

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