Walters: Will two new laws push
California to its tipping point?
A reported ‘13,000 companies moved out of state’ from 2008
to 2016–new rent control, gig worker laws won’t help
Could California reach a tipping point when taxes, regulation,
traffic and soaring housing and utility costs overwhelm the positives of living
and doing business here?
Circa
of America got its start more than a half-century ago, during San Francisco’s
Hippie heyday, when Ronaldo Cianciarulo began making and selling leather belts
out of his van in the city’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood.
During
several changes of ownership and names, it continued to make belts in a factory
in San Francisco’s Bayview District, the largest manufacturing facility
remaining in the city.
However,
earlier this month, Circa announced that it was closing its plant, laying off
92 employees and moving its headquarters to Atlanta.
“Due
to changing economic conditions in the city and globally as well as a shifting
customer base, Circa of America has made the business decision to move,” a
Circa spokeswoman told the San Francisco Chronicle.
Circa
had reached its tipping point, when the disadvantages of operating in San
Francisco outweighed the advantages.
A
two-hour drive to the southeast, Jim deMartini had already reached his tipping
point.
A
prominent farmer and Stanislaus County supervisor, deMartini announced in July
that he was not only giving up his political position, but had sold his 1,100
acres of farmland and was moving to Nevada. Not for business reasons. “I’ve had
it with California,” deMartini said.
Circa
apparently isn’t alone. Joseph Vranich, who helps businesses relocate, has
published a report, entitled “Why Companies Leave California,” claiming that
between 2008 and 2016, “at least 13,000 companies moved out of state during
that nine-year period.”
Vranich
says high taxes and increasingly onerous regulatory laws are the major reasons
for business departures.
DeMartini
isn’t alone either. California routinely loses more people to other states than
it gains, with Texas the No. 1 destination of ex-Californians. There are
numerous anecdotal reports of wealthy people, such as deMartini, quietly opting
to relocate to no- or low-tax states such as Nevada and Texas as their tax
burdens increase.
The
larger question is whether California as a
whole could reach a tipping point
when high
taxes, regulation, soaring housing, utility and fuel
costs, choking
traffic congestion, disease-ridden
encampments of the homeless and other
negative
factors overwhelm the positives of living and
doing business here and
the state begins to
experience economic and social erosion.
We
have seen tipping points in California before, both positive and negative.
We
saw the San Francisco Bay Area explode as a generator of jobs and wealth when
technical innovation, venture capital and entrepreneurial spirit combined in
just the right proportions.
We
saw Los Angeles County implode when the end of the Cold War ravaged its
aerospace industry and more than a million people fled the region, leaving it
with the worst poverty in a state with the nation’s worst poverty.
What
might be California’s tipping point? Could it be one or more of the bills just
passed in the Legislature?
Could
it be Assembly Bill 5, which would, by codifying a state Supreme Court
decision, force businesses to place more workers on their payrolls, rather than
treat them as contractors?
Could
it be Assembly Bill 1482, which imposes limits on rents in older apartment
houses?
Or
could it be one of the measures that voters might face next year to raise
property taxes on commercial real estate or boost income taxes on the highest
income Californians?
We
may not be there yet, but logic — and history — tell us that there is always a
tipping point. The decline and fall of the Roman Empire is one obvious
reminder.
More
to the point, we should remember that Detroit, the booming Silicon Valley of
its time, arrogantly assumed that its prosperity was impregnable, and then
stumbled into a socioeconomic abyss.
Leaving
California to the Homeless
Donald
Trump visited enemy territory this week.
He came
out here to the deep blue state of California to raise a few million bucks at
private fundraisers in Silicon Valley and Beverly Hills.
He also
went down to the border with Mexico to inspect the wall the federal government
is building to stop illegal immigration and protect what no longer deserves to
be called the Golden State.
What
the president couldn't see while he was out here were all the wealthy and
productive Californians who are leaving this state in droves.
They are
the people who are tired of being tortured by high state taxes and bad laws
like the ones that prevent low-income housing from being built, or that make
their electricity and gasoline so expensive.
They are
the people who've watched the sidewalks of their great cities being turned into
permanent tent communities for the poor, the homeless, the drugged and the
mentally disturbed.
They
are the tax base that has been footing the bill for the social welfare benefits
and government services that are bestowed so generously on state citizens and
illegal immigrants.
They have
seen the grim future of their formerly great state and said to themselves,
"We're outta' here."
But
millions of Californians like me can't leave. We have kids and grandkids here.
We love
the state and its people. We love the weather, the beaches, the deserts and the
mountains.
What
we don't love is what the Democrat Party and its policies have been doing for
decades to harm California and its big cities.
The
Democrats running this state almost act like they hate it. All they seem to
want is more illegal immigrants, more crippling environmental laws and higher
prices for everything.
The
shocking TV images of huge homeless communities living in tents in Los Angeles
and San Francisco are the most glaring sign of the Democrats' failure.
Even
Democrats like Gov. Gavin Newsom agree that it has been state policies like
strict building laws and environmental regulations that have created tens of
thousands of homeless people.
Only
let's please not call them "homeless people." It's a misnomer.
Most of
the thousands of people you see on TV living in tents and sleeping bags are
homeless by choice.
They're
mostly drug addicts. Or mentally ill. Or bums or vagrants who've chosen to live
on the street amid their own garbage, used drug needles and human waste.
They're
also mostly males.
There are
lots of genuinely homeless people in California who need assistance from
government or private social agencies.
But
they're usually women and children and they're usually living in shelters where
they can get the help they need.
Shelters
have rules you have to follow and homeless mothers and their kids will abide by
them. Men won't.
We keep
hearing that we need to build more low-income housing units for the homeless.
But the
truth is, most of the men on the sidewalks of downtown L.A. wouldn't stay in a
shelter if it was located in the penthouse of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel.
Half of
the country's unsheltered homeless people live in California. LA Mayor Eric
Garcetti wants President Trump to solve the state's homeless crisis.
But it's
the responsibility of the Democrat-controlled state government, the Democrat
governor and the Democrat mayors - the ones who created the crisis in the first
place.
For
California natives like me, it's a crying shame.
The
most beautiful state in the U.S. has been wrecked by Democrats and it's only
going to get worse as more illegal immigrants arrive from Mexico and Central
America.
I'm
afraid it's only a matter of time before the state runs out of money and the
productive people who provide it. -
Self-Destruction in the Golden State
Relocating to California was once the goal of
many Americans. But in recent years, the luster of living in the “Golden
State” has dimmed considerably. Those who still desire to move to what was once
widely viewed as a semi-paradise on the West Coast might want to assess what
they’ll find before pulling up stakes and heading there.
The Los Angeles Times has surveyed and published some
unnerving California developments. In the area served by this newspaper, Times investigators discovered what certainly
should be termed failing grades if the region were an educational institution.
It’s not, of course, but over recent months, the hard truths they found
include:
• 95 percent of warrants for murder in Los
Angeles and 75 percent of those on the “most wanted” list contain the names of
illegal immigrants.
• Over two/thirds of the births in L.A. County
are from illegal immigrant parentage and are paid for by taxpayers.
• Nearly 35 percent of inmates in the state’s
detention centers are illegal immigrants.
• According to the FBI, half of the gang
members in Los Angeles are illegal immigrants from south of the state’s border.
•
In Los Angeles County, 5.1 million people speak only English and 3.1 million
speak only Spanish.
This information came from the mass-circulation
newspaper known for its liberal stance on almost all issues. Featuring
information about the effects of illegal immigration isn’t its usual practice.
The numbers we have cited didn’t appear in a single article. The bad news
compiled in this column was spread out over time. The bad news has led many
Californians to relocate themselves and their businesses to other parts of the
Golden State, even to other states.
Rather than simply accept the conclusions
reached above, I decided to ask a close friend who lives in Los Angeles County
if all of it was verifiable. He responded: “Yes it is. But there are bigger
problems that weren’t mentioned.” For instance, he pointed to the growing
number of vagrants living — and defecating — in the streets. He said the water
at the beaches is becoming hazardous to health and dangerous for swimming. He
told of business owners who have to get their sidewalks cleaned each morning.
And he reported that rats and disease-carrying insects have proliferated. Los
Angeles, he assured me, is filled with tents and absolute filth.
He then added the following:
Illegals
are registered to vote. Many are without a driver’s license and they get around
in dilapidated autos without insurance. A large number of these individuals
find jobs and demand to be paid only in cash. That way, there are no taxes paid
or reported. While many illegals are hard-working and otherwise model citizens,
they are encouraged to skirt the laws that everyone is supposed to obey. Even
they would confirm what the LA Times reported.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has responded to the
situation by calling for the imposition of a new “windfall tax” on retirement
incomes and stock market gains. She wants to distribute the funds to unemployed
illegal immigrants. Wasn’t it Karl Marx who suggested this as the way to solve
such problems (“From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”)?
Pelosi regularly scoffs at President Trump’s
plan to build a wall at the border. She never airs the most important reason
for her opposition to keeping illegals from simply walking into the United
States. But her reason for such a stance is obvious: She expects that the
illegals who have already arrived and those who continue to cross into the
United States will vote for Democrats. And she’ll do whatever she can to care
for them, protect them, and urge their relatives to cross the border as well. Illegal
immigrants, like many legal immigrants and native-born Americans, are
overwhelmingly ignorant of limitations on government that made America great.
As soon as they are given the privilege of voting, they will speed the
conversion of California and the entire United States into a duplicate of
Venezuela or Cuba where central governments have total power.
Sad to state, California isn’t alone in
suffering from these problems. Pelosi’s home city of San Francisco is close
behind Los Angeles in its degradation. Other cities are close behind. The
entire nation seems determined to commit suicide. Illegal immigration must be
eliminated.
“MORE THAN 10 MILLION” ILLEGALS IN
CALIFORNIA ALONE
Xavier Becerra breaks the news, files suit against Trump administration
public-charge rule.
August 19, 2019
More
than 22 million people are illegally present in the United States, according to
a recent study by scholars at MIT and
Yale.
Pew Research pegged the figure at 11 million, and for years it stood as the
official count for media and government. It now emerges that 11 million is more
like the number illegally present in California alone.
“California
is home to over 10 million immigrants,” reads a chart displayed by California
attorney general Xavier Becerra and governor Gavin Newsom as they announced a lawsuit against the Trump
administration’s public-charge rule. “Immigrants,” is California code for
“illegals,” a term the state’s ruling class has banned. As Rachel Bovard notes
at American Greatness, even a legal immigrant’s ability “to stay
off the welfare system must be taken into account when considering
qualifications for a green card.”
California
heaps welfare benefits on those illegally present, including nearly $100 million for health
care in
the recent budget. Many of those 10 million illegals came to California
specifically to get those taxpayer-funded benefits. It disturbs Becerra and
Newsom that this disqualifies the recipients from any future legal status, but
there’s more to it. As attorney Madison Gesiotto
explains in The Hill, voting must also be taken into
account.
“Voting
as an illegal alien in federal elections is a crime punishable by fine,
imprisonment, deportation, or inadmissibility.” According to a State Department
investigation, false-documented illegals have been voting in federal, state and
local elections for decades. In 1996, illegals cast 784
votes against Republican Robert Dornan in a congressional race Democrat
Loretta Sanchez won by only 984 votes.
If
Newsom and Becerra are certain that more than 10 million people illegally
reside in the state, they doubtless know how many voted in 2016. Trouble is,
California Secretary of State Alex Padilla refused to release any voter
information to a federal voter-fraud probe.
Back
in 2015, Padilla told the Los Angeles Times, “At the latest, for
the 2018 election cycle, I expect millions of new voters on the rolls in the
state of California,” with “new voters” code for ineligible voters. True to
form, by March, 2018, more than one million
“undocumented” immigrants received driver’s licenses from the state
Department of Motor Vehicles, which automatically registered them to vote under
the “Motor Voter” program.
Padilla
is now claiming that only six “California
residents” were erroneously added to voter rolls for 2018, that it was
all due to DMV errors, and that none was guilty of “fraudulently voting or
attempting to vote.” To paraphrase John Goodman in The Big Lebowski,
this is what happens when the governor’s own department of finance, not the
official state auditor, investigates the DMV.
In
reality, California officials know full well how many non-citizens voted in
2016 and 2018. With more than 10 million illegals in the state, the ballpark
figure of one million illegal voters is probably low. In California, illegals
are the Democrats’ electoral college, and the Democrats reward them with
welfare benefits and protection from deportation through sanctuary laws. This
raises another issue.
Illegals’
use of welfare benefits and practice of voting in federal elections
disqualifies them from legal residency and citizenship. This makes for a
permanent group of more than 10 million foreign nationals in California alone.
In these conditions, Congress should start pushing back.
Public
officials who apportion taxpayer-funded benefits for foreign nationals should
be required to register as agents of the governments of those foreign
nationals. The primary candidates would be the governments of Mexico, Honduras,
Guatemala and El Salvador, which Gavin Newsom
visited before he had even toured his own state.
State
and federal governments should also bill the foreign governments for welfare,
medical, education and incarceration costs. Some of this could be
alleviated by a tax on remissions, such as the 33.4 billion Mexicans abroad
sent back last year. That amount is impossible without massive inputs from
U.S. taxpayers. Legitimate citizens and legal immigrants have no obligation to
relieve foreign governments of responsibility for their own citizens.
Meanwhile,
as Rachel Bovard also notes, the Trump administration’s new rule only updates a
1996 law proclaiming “inadmissible” those aliens likely to become a public
charge. The law was supported by Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Joe Biden and
other leading Democrats. The Trump administration measure gives more definition
to what constitutes a welfare benefit, food stamps, Medicaid, public housing
assistance and such. Those benefits are all for legitimate citizens and legal
immigrants but Bovard cites Census data showing that 63 percent of non-citizens
use the welfare system.
Those
who thought there were only 11 million illegals nationwide were mistaken.
Thanks to Jerry Brown crony Gavin Newsom, and Xavier Becerra, once on Hillary
Clinton’s short list as a running mate, Americans now understand that “more
than 10 million” illegally reside in California alone, and that might
understate the figure.
The
MIT-Yale estimate ranges as high as 29.1 million nationwide, more than the
population of Australia, with
25,088,636 and a veritable occupation. To all but the willfully blind,
politicians have abandoned the rule of law, and made false-documented illegals
a protected, privileged class.
This
is how a nation loses its sovereignty.
Report:
California’s Middle-Class Wages Rise by 1 Percent in 40 Years
Justin
Sullivan/Getty Images
3 Sep 2019172
6:24
Middle-class wages in
progressive California have risen by 1 percent in the last 40 years, says a
study by the establishment California Budget and Policy Center.
“Earnings for California’s
workers at the low end and middle of the wage scale have generally declined or
stagnated for decades,” says the report, titled “California’s Workers Are
Increasingly Locked Out of the State’s Prosperity.” The report continued:
In
2018, the median hourly earnings for workers ages 25 to 64 was $21.79, just 1%
higher than in 1979, after adjusting for inflation ($21.50, in 2018 dollars)
(Figure 1). Inflation-adjusted hourly earnings for low-wage workers, those at the
10th percentile, increased only slightly more, by 4%, from $10.71 in 1979
to $11.12 in 2018.
The report admits that the
state’s progressive economy is delivering more to investors and less to
wage-earners. “Since 2001, the share of state private-sector [annual new
income] that has gone to worker compensation has fallen by 5.6 percentage
points — from 52.9% to 47.3%.”
In 2016, California’s Gross
Domestic Product was $2.6 trillion, so the 5.6 percent drop shifted $146
billion away from wages. That is roughly $3,625 per person in 2016.
The report notes that wages
finally exceeded 1979 levels around 2017, and it splits the credit between the
Democrats’ minimum-wage boosts and President Donald Trump’s go-go economy.
The 40 years of flat wages are
partly hidden by a wave of new products and services. They include almost-free
entertainment and information on the Internet, cheap imported coffee in
supermarkets, and reliable, low-pollution autos in garages.
But the impact of California’s
flat wages is made worse by California’s rising housing costs, the report says,
even though it also ignores the rent-spiking impact of the establishment’s
pro-immigration policies:
In just the last decade
alone, the increase in the typical household’s rent far outpaced the rise in
the typical full-time worker’s annual earnings, suggesting that working
families and individuals are finding it increasingly difficult to make ends
meet. In fact, the basic cost of living in many parts of the state is more
than many single individuals or families can expect to earn, even if all adults
are working full-time.
…
Specifically, inflation-adjusted
median household rent rose by 16% between 2006 and 2017, while
inflation-adjusted median annual earnings for individuals working at least 35
hours per week and 50 weeks per year rose by just 2%, according to a Budget
Center analysis of US Census Bureau, American Community Survey data.
Many workers are being paid
little more today than workers were in 1979 even as worker productivity has
risen. Fewer employees have access to retirement plans sponsored by their
employers, leaving individual workers on their own to stretch limited dollars
and resources to plan how they’ll spend their later years affording the high
cost of living and health care in California. And as union representation has
declined, most workers today cannot negotiate collectively for better working
conditions, higher pay, and benefits, such as retirement and health care, like
their parents and grandparents did. On top of all this, workers who take on
contingent and independent work (often referred to as “gig work”), which in
many cases appears to be motivated by the need to supplement their primary job
or fill gaps in their employment, are rarely granted the same rights and legal
protections as traditional employees.
The center’s report tries to
blame the four-decade stretch of flat wages on the declining clout of unions.
But unions’ decline was impacted by the bipartisan elites’ policy of
mass-migration and imposed diversity.
In
2018, Breitbart reported how Progressives for
Immigration Reform interviewed Blaine Taylor, a union carpenter, about the
economic impact of migration:
TAYLOR: If I hired a framer to do
a small addition [in 1988], his wage would have been $45 an hour. That was
the minimum for a framing contractor, a good carpenter. For a helper, it was
about $25 an hour, for a master who could run a complete job, it was about $45
an hour. That was the going wage for plumbers as well. His helpers typically
got $25 an hour.
…
Now, the average wage in Los
Angeles for construction workers is less than $11 an hour. They can’t go lower
than the minimum wage. And much of that, if they’re not being paid by the hour
at less than $11 an hour, they’re being paid per piece — per piece of plywood
that’s installed, per piece of drywall that’s installed. Now, the subcontractor
can circumvent paying them as an hourly wage and are now being paid by 1099,
which means that no taxes are being taken out. [Emphasis added]
Diversity
also damaged the unions by shredding California’s civic solidarity. In 2007,
the progressive Southern Poverty Law Center posted a report with the title
“Latino Gang Members in Southern California are Terrorizing and Killing
Blacks.” In the same year, an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times described another murder by Latino
gangs as “a manifestation of an increasingly common trend: Latino ethnic
cleansing of African Americans from multiracial neighborhoods.”
The center’s board members
include the executive director of the state’s SEIU union, a professor from the
Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and
the research director at the “Program for Environmental and Regional Equity” at
the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
Outside
California, President Donald Trump’s low-immigration policies are pressuring
employers to raise Americans’ wages in a hot economy. The Wall Street Journal reportedAugust 29:
Overall, median weekly earnings
rose 5% from the fourth quarter of 2017 to the same quarter in 2018, according
to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For workers between the ages of 25 and 34,
that increase was 7.6%.
The New York Times laments that reduced immigration does force wages
upwards and also does force companies to buy labor-saving, wage-boosting
machinery. Instead, NYT prioritizes "ideas about America’s identity and
culture.” http://bit.ly/2Zp2u2J
NYT Admits Fewer Immigrants Means Higher Wages, More
Labor-Saving Machines
.
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