GlobalTrekker

California's High Tax / High Benefit Model: A Constantly Renegotiated Bargain

A little balance in the comments wouldn't be a bad thing. I'd still live in CA over TX any day of my life, but that's just a personal quality of life issue. I, for one, admire much of what Texas has done in growth and improvement.

But I'll take San Francisco over Dallas, and LA over Houston summer or winter. Sacramento versus Austin, you have an argument. I have a small business in the Golden State, and through careful and legal tax-minimization techniques, my taxes are quite manageable, lower than in other states I've worked and owned. The beauty and the weather and the people and the food and the nature facilities are fantastic.

CA has to clean its act up, but it's most because of its super-majority budgetary system. Too many highly paid municipal union workers, for sure, but I have to say in permits, courts, police, emergency workers, I am startled by how much competence and decency I encounter, so much greater than in the East or the middle South. People are also consistently friendly, pretty smart, helpful -- something I've found a rarity though much of the rest of the world, and even in large parts of the U.S.

That said, I've nothing in terms of bad experiences with Texas -- just a little distaste for their over-zealous executions (I know it's very popular in Texas, and it's for Texans to decide; just hate parts of our country to be in such tight concert with Saudi Arabia, Iran, and China on this expensive, mistake-prone retribution).

California Won't Even Accept Its Own IOUs

This is all tired Uni-bomber-lite stuff (twin-party dictatorship, indeed). When was the last dictatorship you lived in that allowed you to cash out all your securities, climb on a plane, and fly to another country to live? California is in a mess. It has everything to do with a horrible state constitution and a bad economy. But in California it's easier than anywhere else in the country, maybe in the world, for the people to directly change the government's structure by popular referendum. That's how we got that acting fool in as Governor in the first place. The unexciting truth is that CA will muddle through this. and in a few years CA, and the U.S. will be back to its *normal*, more moderate fiscal sloppiness. And we, and the country more broadly, will be fine but poorer. This is the grown-up results of our profligate spend and borrow culture.