California Is Stuck in a Doom Loop

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.  

We’ve talked a lot about the crisis that California is in and what it may predict for the rest of the United States should they follow the California blue model. Many of them are. 

I guess we could sum it up as a doom loop. A doom loop. 

California is in a cycle where there’s no chance, unless it makes radical change, that it can get out of it as it heads toward what we might call Third World extinction. 

Now, we need to break it down from the symptoms to the cause. The Greeks had a word, and the historian Thucydides said there was a prophasis, a superficial explanation, an apparent explanation, or sometimes a disingenuous explanation. And then there was the aitia, the real problem. 

People don’t really want to talk about the real problem. 

But here are the symptoms as we know them, the prophasis. 

We have the highest taxes in the United States: a 13.3% income tax, the highest gas taxes, and among the top 10 highest sales taxes. We have the highest gasoline prices. We have the highest electricity prices in the continental United States. 

We have some of the worst services. Reason magazine said our roads are 49th in the nation. We know that our schools are in the bottom 10% based on test scores. 

Half of all births are conducted through Medi-Cal, our state welfare system. Forty percent are on it. Twenty-five percent don’t or can’t pay their power bills every month. 

We’ve got the largest fraud in the country. Over many years, it may have extended up until now to $250 billion. 

Okay, so those are the symptoms, and we know the manifestation of those symptoms. 

We have supermajorities in the state legislature, supermajorities in the Senate and the Assembly, and only seven of 52 congressional seats are held by Republicans. Donald Trump won 38%. Most Republican presidents win 40%. That’s 13% of our congresspeople. 

And remember, that’s considered too generous by the Left. Given their new redistricting plan, we may go down to five Republicans. 

And because we’ve had no statewide offices, I mean governor, we haven’t appointed anybody but a liberal judge. No conservatives, no Republican judges on the state superior court, appellate court, or supreme court in 15 years. 

In the federal system, the Ninth Circuit is already known to be quite liberal. So if you go to court in California, you’re going to be facing a liberal judge. That’s the truth. 

But here’s the real problem. Those are symptoms. 

The real problem is that 300,000 to 500,000 Californians are leaving the state. They can’t put up with what I just discussed. They’re sick of it. 

They’re sick of it for a very strange reason that’s not so apparent. Yes, they’re sick of paying all that money in taxes and power bills and then getting terrible services, terrible roads, not very good health care, and terrible schools. But they’re being insulted. 

They’re being told, “Go. Go. We don’t want you.” 

That’s the message from California. 

Elon Musk is worth a trillion dollars. Can you imagine had he stayed? He wanted to stay in California. And we’re losing a lot of the Google people, and Mark Zuckerberg is leaving. 

They’re leaving because not only do they pay a lot and get very little, but they’re being insulted by this government. It’s truly a socialist government, government in the widest sense of the word—state, local, offices. 

People do not like wealthy, successful people. They feel they cheated, or, as Elizabeth Warren said, “You didn’t build that.” 

So they’re leaving. 

Those are the people who pay 58% of their income in federal, state, and local taxes. Those are the people who pay a large segment of their income at over 10% and even over 13.3%. 

Now they’re being replaced. 

Over 50 years, 12 million of them have left. These were the [Ronald] Reagan voters, the Pete Wilson voters, the George Deukmejian voters, the Arnold Schwarzenegger voters. 

But they’re being replaced. 

Twenty-seven percent of the California resident population was foreign-born, largely from the Western Hemisphere south of the border, Asia, and Africa. Most of them, not all, come here very, very poor and in need, because we’re a kind and humane society, of massive subsidies: health, education, legal, housing, and food. 

That is one reason why we chronically run budget deficits. 

We’re spending enormous amounts of money on redistributive programs, sometimes fraud, but welfare entitlements: Medi-Cal, food stamps, what we used to call food stamps, Section 8 housing, all of that. 

And the people who paid for that are leaving. 

There’s one other wrinkle, the real cause of this problem. 

Silicon Valley inherited at the millennium a global audience of 7 billion consumers for Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and all of it. Fourteen trillion dollars became confined to the area between San Jose and Berkeley, and that has created a political class. 

As that money trickles through the economy to lawyers, Hollywood, elected officials, unions, and all the avenues of left-wing political expression, it’s made a coastal elite not subject to the consequences of their ideology. 

They don’t really care about the price of electricity. They don’t really care about the price of gas. They don’t care that we have almost half the nation’s homelessness. 

They have so much money and such a secure ZIP code that we, the lab rats, experience the consequences of their experiment upon us. 

Let me just sum up. 

We have seen the largest diaspora of population shifts in California history, much bigger than the Oklahoma diaspora to California. 

People are leaving with money who paid the bills, and the people who are coming are the recipients of programs funded by their money. 

And we have an elite who knows this but feels protected, sort of protected sort of like Tom Steyer, who ran for governor, a billionaire who started out funding or investing in Indonesian coal and offshoring his money to avoid taxes and then renouncing billionaires. 

That’s sort of how it works. The wealthy trash the wealthy, and then they take advantage of all the tax advantages that the wealthy alone have the ability to exploit. 

Add it all up, and we’re in a doom loop. 

Yes, everything is bad in California. The elections are bad. We don’t have a Republican Party. There are no conservatives with political power. 

But the reason is there’s this great population shift, and it’s not getting any better. 

And if it continues, as I think it will, California will become sort of like the United Kingdom, a once prosperous, vibrant country in the 1970s, 1980s, and at the millennium, into something now that is poorer than Mississippi. 

Don’t laugh. California can be poorer than Mississippi if the present government, the present demography, and the present migration patterns sustain themselves. 

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