Government can be modeled as a stationary bandit. Unfortunately, California's may have over-extracted in recent years, and it only looks to get worse from here.
39 million people also places it at #37 in population if it were a country.
Throw in Hollywood, Silicon Valley, piggy-backing off the US as a whole, and having a beautiful coastline and great social culture. What do you expect?
I do everything I can to minimize my involvement with California for my businesses.
If by that you mean a combination of soil and climate suitable for some of the most productive agriculture in North America, that's true.
Otherwise it's more a series of other industries, starting with extractive (1849 wasn't known for a “nice weather rush”) but more recently mostly creative & technological.
> Now that that's gone, well...
It wasn't gone during the long drought, and it's not now.
You're actually underestimating the agricultural output of California, it's the most agriculturally productive place (mainly Central Valley I believe) in the history of civilization.
California has a monopoly on the entire mild-weathered west coast of the United States. Its government is permitted to be less effective and less efficient because people are willing to pay extra for its natural geography.
I'm not sure what you mean. I think so, but beside the point. I was replying to the idea that California government "must be doing something right," which is untrue.
Let’s keep letting our forest take care of itself naturally, let’s also build there, seems to be working great. I’m sure more solar panels and Tesla’s will fix the problem. Larry Ellison seems to be doing alright donating his Tesla funds to Trump while pushing electric vehicle usage and the state burns.
Dumb hypocrisy. I’m sick of these false narratives and bullshit causes. If we’re going to tackle problems in this state we need to actually do it. Not pretend we did and glorify the attempt then brag to others about how great we are. What a joke.
It depends on what you mean by "just fine." If you mean "maintain its population," then maybe yes. But I'd say that's exceptionally low criteria for "just fine." It's also a phrasing that dismisses the opportunity cost of having California's efficiency be raised to that of other states, and so seems disingenuous.
But even now, California's population is stagnant [0], and most likely currently shrinking. So, no, it likely cannot continue and be just fine.
It depends on whether you consider ethical behavior important.
States bordering just east of California should be taxing California for their monopolistic taxation of economic activity between them and Pacific trade.
1. The largest public university system in the country (Cal State - 3rd largest on the planet)
2. The absolutely massive UC research machine
3. An established, inexpensive feeder system with the California Community Colleges (hello social mobility)
4. Plenty of world-class private universities (Cal Tech, Stanford, Claremont Colleges, Deep Springs)
5. Access to the Cali-Baja industrial cluster (California has a LOT of manufacturing, it's just in the other California)
6. Some insane levels of cultural diversity (many folks from different cultures can feel at home here - more so than say, Oklahoma)
7. Over 7 medical schools
8. Relatively cheap land in the fast-growing Inland Empire and the Antelope Valley (all it needs is a dash of HSR)
9. Massive agriculture in the San Fernando Valley
10. A massive aerospace industry (Antelope Valley - Skunkworks, etc.)
11. The port of Los Angeles is the largest port in the country followed by the second largest port in the country ....Long Beach, 9th largest is Oakland.
12. The San Diego biotech cluster with its ties to UCSD (Celera, which produced the first draft sequence of the human genome was up north in Alameda, California)
California is an economic machine with infrastructure no other state in the country can come close to.
The central valley is working class Trump country. The mountains are getaways for coastal wealth. You have some minorities that are disadvantaged who clean up after the coastal wealth or farm. Housing is near impossible and stopped at all costs to preserve inequality. If you grew up here you probably had to move, if you have kids here the chances are they won’t be able to afford a home without your help (assuming you’re a home owner).
You and I might have a different experience of California
Housing is actually very available and inexpensive in the inland areas, which are fast-growing (Inland Empire, Antelope Valley, etc.). Cheap housing in places like Palm Springs, plus the influx of coastal money has put a LOT of children of landscapers and restaurant workers, and hotel workers, etc. through the California public university system.
California is a sanctuary state with an excellent community college system, so the children of those disadvantaged minorities have a definite shot of transferring to a school like Berkeley, or even a Cal State, which offers an excellent education at a reasonable (in a relative sense) price.
The economy in the mountains is BOOMING right now, as that coastal wealth funnels into a myriad of small businesses.
Universities/colleges are about to be disrupted and ironically the tech sector is helping this with online learning. My guess is half of them will go away in the next few decades.
Business can and will move.
Sure the port is nice. I'm not sure how many jobs are tied to that thou?
University attendance may dip, but with the rock-bottom prices, and incredibly simple transfer articulation agreements with the Cal States and UCs, I expect to see the community colleges pick up the slack. That's what the CCs were originally intended for anyway. First two years, then transfer to a UC. All of the quality, none of the sticker price.
California Community Colleges already enroll over 2.1 million students. That's more than the population of the state of Idaho.
Port infrastructure is widely documented as a key driver of economic growth.
How many of the 1.6 million need to live here in LA?
> University attendance may dip, but with the rock-bottom prices
You can't compete with online prices if you have brick and mortar, hence Amazon. I would argue some disciplines still need shared spaces like medicine but even then, a lot of the learning could be done online.
Uni's competitive advantage has been certification. There are now better ways to track a candidates fit for employment that also don't require deviations into non-career focused learning like art, literature or history. These classes are not meritless, they just don't help employment.
I don't believe rock bottom prices will save the onslaught to come.
529,000 people. Still more than the population of Wyoming.
I suppose neither of us has a crystal ball. We'll just have to see what happens in 20 years.
How do you think a model would operate for university-level instruction that would both prepare kids for employment, offer a competitive level of socialization, collaborative problem-solving experience in multiple fields, and generalized knowledge so they don't turn into pigeon-holed hyperspecialists?
How do you expose kids to a wide-enough variety of things that they are able to discover something they truly want to do for the rest of their life?
How will you ensure that a university-degree doesn't remain a symbol of status?
Basically, how do you go from University of Phoenix, to what you are describing?
> How do you think a model would operate for university-level instruction that would both prepare kids for employment
Not sure, but Uni level instruction is probably sub-optimal for a large portion of the population. You are also still tethered to the pace set by the professor/instructor. Online would allow for students to move at their own pace.
> offer a competitive level of socialization
I don't think there's much MORE benefit to College socialization. I think this is a normal time period in everyone's life of being free of parents and responsible for yourself that Uni's use as evidence of benefit. EDIT This time period involves socializing with new people.
> collaborative problem-solving experience in multiple fields
I don't think this requires physical presence.
> generalized knowledge so they don't turn into pigeon-holed hyperspecialists
I don't know the numbers but I'm guessing the overwhelming majority of jobs never get much outside of hyperspecialization. This is a benefit of modern economies. Specialization allows for more productivity. But like with any job, people who want to can branch out. It would be easier if you didn't have to adhere to a college schedule.
> How do you expose kids to a wide-enough variety of things that they are able to discover something they truly want to do for the rest of their life?
The friction and overhead in Uni's to try different things is way higher than clicking a link online. Spending the remainder of 16 weeks studying something you hate, then changing majors is infinitely more cumbersome than just bailing and learning something else.
If you want to force a broad subject matter on students, well that model will die out due to inefficiencies.
> How will you ensure that a university-degree doesn't remain a symbol of status?
It totally will. But it will be for the rich. Everyone else doesn't need to blow $200k to do software engineering, operate a camera, make art or pursue mathematics research. Google is already working on a program that will certify job applicants sans a college education.
>Basically, how do you go from University of Phoenix, to what you are describing?
Not sure. Online stuff evolves unlike Uni's which have been essentially the same for the last 50 years. Go to class/lab, listen to a lecture, take a test. Prices skyrocket.
Cal State sticker-price in-state tuition is only $5,700/year. California Community College tuition is only like $1,600/year. If my kid went to our local community college and then transferred to our local Cal State, that's only an average of $3,600/year for four years. Sure, there are families that can't afford that, and we have Cal Grants to help bring that cost down even further.
The $200k figure is something you arrive at when you start sending your kids to schools like USC. Their tuition is $58,000/year.
Assuming you could pony up $3,600/year, what would be an argument for not sending your kids to college in favor of them doing an online thing?
If they can't keep up with the material, they can enroll in fewer classes. If they're bored, they can take more, or take graduate-level classes.
It's no different than what's happening to every other industry.
> If they can't keep up with the material, they can enroll in fewer classes. If they're bored, they can take more, or take graduate-level classes.
It's still rigid compared to online. Still have to study things that might not be necessary for your job or you don't care about. Taking more or less classes doesn't mean at your own pace, it means a rigid schedule you can handle. What if I can complete a course in 6 weeks instead of 16? What if I only want to concentrate on one course at a time for a smaller period of time? What if I'm 9 weeks in, hate it and want to change majors? What if I want to sit at my computer instead of commuting to school or physically going to class? What if the professor talks too slow and I would rather have them go 1.5x speed because It holds my attention? What if I want to rewind them because I missed something they said? What if I can't understand the professor?
That lack of physical space and material allows for greater flexibility.
This stuck with me, I guess because it also implies a lack of social space as well.
For this to work, the majority of people thinking of attending college would need to have an aversion to sharing physical space with others. Otherwise they would derive some utility from sharing physical space with others, which could then be assigned a dollar value.
The dollar value is tuition.
I would concede that there is a nonzero percentage of college students for whom the utility of sharing physical space with others is a net negative. I would also argue that this percentage is in the minority, and although they may not, their parents might derive positive utility from increased socialization of their child.
For the vast majority, the opportunity to share physical space with others engaged in the same pursuit generates positive utility, and can therefore be assigned a dollar value.
As long as there is a dollar value there, tuition will be collected.
There is also the motivational aspect. Due to fundamental adaptations in human nature, external structure is often needed to motivate productivity. Although there are those who are outliers, and are truly motivated by intrinsic interests, these seem to be in the minority. Therefore, having external structure to motivate also generates positive utility and willingness to pay.
You can do all of what you described in your room with a textbook and practice problems, but why doesn't anyone just do that for four years, and then go out and get a job? Sure, it happens in software, but that's unique in that in software you can literally go from NAND gates to DOOM in a sandbox-like environment, but the rest of the world doesn't have that ability to manipulate their field of study from first principles in an interactive environment.
Fair enough. I have no complaints with that scenario.
If someone can cook up a way to deliver remote higher education of complex subjects in an interactive environment with dynamic, real-time feedback in a way that is comparable to in-person education in fields other than software, for your average person of average motivation, with no negative impacts on socialization cheaper than $1,600/year, I really can't argue with that.
Whoever figures out a mechanism for this, they will make a whole wheelbarrow full of cash, and I would be the first to sign up for that program.
On a per capita basis, California's GDP is not remarkable and is significantly worse than some other States. Having a large economy is a function of having a large population, it doesn't imply an exceptionally productive economy.
I'm a native Californian but I've never understood the odd "fifth largest economy!" flag waving given that it is a product of population size. The "doing something right" may not be the thing you are trying to imply.
>On a per capita basis, California's GDP is not remarkable and is significantly worse than some other States
Per capita its still the 5th(6th if you include DC) highest and 30% more than the median state.
I think people reference the fifth largest economy factoid because it also speaks to how Californian has several large industries from tech to agriculture.
Actually on a per capita GDP, California is 8th, 5th if you look at current rather real. Hey, we're right behind Wyoming and North Dakota. Shudder the thought. However, we're 7th in per capita income with Wyoming and North Dakota nowhere to be seen. Sounds like some states have an income distribution problem.
I'm also a native California, born, bred and educated, and I've seen this U-Haul trucks headed for the border tripe every few years, this one from Stanford's (notoriously conservative) Hoover Institute. It's the usual right wing nonsense.
> On a per capita basis, California's GDP is not remarkable, and is significantly worse than some other States.
It's #5 among states, a little over 7% behind #1 Massachusetts, and over 20% ahead of the US as a whole, and over double #50 Mississippi.
> Having a large economy is a function of having a large population, it doesn't imply an exceptionally productive economy.
California has both a large population and, on a per capita basis, an exceptionally productive economy among US states. It's true it's abstractly possible for the former to substitute for the latter in aggregate output measures, but that's not really the case for CA.
California is a tremendously diverse state. For the wealth of the Bay, we also have the poverty of the Imperial Valley and San Bernardino.
It makes California a true melting-pot, and the externalities of the wealthy areas serve as an engine to bring people up out of poverty in those other areas. You can grow up as the child of a dirt-poor undocumented farmworker, attend a California Community College, and transfer to a world-class public university.
>The state also intends to make this [wealth tax] law follow you for up to a decade should you leave. Clever politicians? Maybe, but just how will they convince other states to cooperate once you relocate? Not to mention whether this future provision is constitutional.
Holy smokes, politicians are trying to extract a state wealth tax on individuals after they leave the state? Am I reading this correctly?
Yes they are very serious. But good luck getting any states to go along with that. It's a crazy amount of lawsuits awaiting to happen. Instead they should address why people are leaving.. Maybe.. just Maybe.. it's the knee jerk policies being put in place that will do more economic harm than good.
Not totally off the wall, given that states already will pursue you about income tax that you owe if you leave the state. If the tax were framed as accruing an obligation that is paid off in installments over the next 10 years, then presumably it would pass muster than an individual would owe for the next 9 years after having spent a year in California, even if they then went elsewhere.
I don't know how such a tax would be written that it didn't somehow overlap though. Perhaps imposing a yearly tax that is "0.4% of wealth each year over the next 10 years" but capping the total applicable wealth tax payable each year to "0.4%"? This would be a really weird looking law...
Talk to anyone who got RSUs while working for a company in CA and then moved somewhere else (Seattle in particular is popular). CA wants their chunk of flesh no matter what.
I’ve heard from Canadian friends that this exists for Canadian residents who want to move out of the country. At an almost confiscatory rate too.
But as I note in another comment, AB 2088 didn’t even get a vote in committee so it’s hardly a serious policy proposal at this point. The author is building straw men and knocking them down at a furious rate.
> this exists for Canadian residents who want to move out of the country
Not that I'm aware of. We hired a big fancy consulting company to figure out the tax laws when we moved from Canada to the US. We found that it does exist for US Citizens though. If a US citizen leaves the US, they will (basically) never get a lower tax rate because they will always owe the difference back to the US government. This is to prevent people from pretending to move to tax haven countries while still basically living in the US.
My information is 15+ years old and maybe they changed it. or maybe it’s Canadian citizens and not just residents. And yes the US is only one of two countries in the world that taxes income earned abroad by its citizens. Can be incredibly burdensome in some situations.
"The state also intends to make this [wealth tax] law follow you for up to a decade should you leave."
I'm not up on the current law, but this is how the IRS used to treat people over a certain net worth who renounced their US citizenship. The IRS would assume these individuals did it for tax evasion purposes and continue to tax them for 10 years afterwards.
And if you don't renounce your US citizenship, you pay the difference in tax savings to the US government forever, even if you don't live here anymore. Top of this page:
Note though, that this rule is unique to (last I heard) USA and Eritrea. Eritrea of course has no infrastructure to enforce such a rule, but via FATCA the USA does. So it actually is basically unique in the world.
I always find it amusing when a policy thinktank founded by Herbert Hoover wants to dispense advice on how to build a strong economy.
Welcome to California. While we have plenty of problems, fundamentally, if your company can’t cut it here and decides to relocate to Texas, that’s not an indictment of California. It’s weak companies fleeing to a place where the government is more willing to subsidize their operations at the expense of their residents.
So companies leaving have nothing at all to do with how the state is run?
You don't think that the housing policy of California has any impact on companies struggling to hire because of housing costs? Because it definitely impacts the Bay Area company I work for.
Companies are plentiful and as the fifth largest economy in the world we don’t have to fight like pigeons over our cast offs like other states do. In the time that ~700 commercial entities left, how many more do you think were created here?
Housing here is a legitimate problem but the companies that flee to Texas because of lower taxes aren’t worth keeping.
There are plenty of states who were once economic powerhouses and are either stagnant (Chicago), in decline (Mid-west) or empty shells (Detroit) of what they were.
Saying "I don't care if businesses leave" seems like taking for granted that they'll always be there (or want to come to your state).
This nonsense pundit piece is talking about ~700 or so commercial entities leaving CA. This is a state where that number of corporate entities is a rounding error. I’m shocked the number isn’t higher. We are a long way from Detroit and have an industrial base more diverse than a small handful of powerhouse companies in a specific sector. We also have invested in creating infrastructure for innovation to a level where it isn’t an accident when things happen here.
I think using Detroit as a scare tactic to encourage desperate policies to retain companies in a state that’s lousy with them is a pretty far cry from reality.
> It seems like people in Texas on average are doing better than California.
The same principal applies. If you make it too costly to do business, business will leave. That or a company from somewhere else will use less taxes and regulations as a competitive advantage.
They'll even take losses like shutting down factories.
> ~700 or so commercial entities leaving CA
It will get worse. It's a trend.
> Texas
Cheaper housing, less homelessness, less expenses.
> If you make it too costly to do business, business will leave.
They’ve been saying that for 30 years and the numbers have not significantly changed.
> That or a company from somewhere else will use less taxes and regulations as a competitive advantage.
> They'll even take losses like shutting down factories.
Companies based here are some of the most profitable in the world. Your statements are pure fantasy unanchored to any facts.
> Cheaper housing, less homelessness, less expenses.
If as many people wanted to live in California as want to live in Texas, it would be cheaper to live here too.
In addition, the average California household also makes more, by a not insignificant percentage.
> 30 years and the numbers have not significantly changed.
"How did you lose all the money?" "Slow at first, then very quickly."
> Companies based here are some of the most profitable in the world.
Cat's out of the bag. Most of the tools needed to form companies that are ridiculously profitable are online for anyone in the world to use (AWS). If they're not, the cloud providers are working tirelessly to put them there.
California was the hotbed of innovation due to concentrations of learning from higher institutions in tech. That's all distributed now.
> If as many people wanted to live in California as want to live in Texas, it would be cheaper to live here too.
It’s nice that you’re so invested in your fever dream of CA’s downfall. I hope where ever it is you live turns out nice for you. As long as we don’t descend to full on fascism next year I think I’ll buy a house here. I like California. I stay here because of it. Maybe if enough people who think that Texas is a good idea leave people then who want to be in California can replace them and we can build more housing stock together! :)
FWIW, I’m pretty much entirely for bulldozing local zoning law and control over a lot of housing and have been delighted by our recent progress there and often vote accordingly. I think this is our major issue, not asking people and companies to pay for advancing our communities.
I live in LA. No investment, it's baked into the numbers.
> As long as we don’t descend to full on fascism next year I think I’ll buy a house here.
I would not recommend buying a house for the next couple years at least. Prices are about to crash everywhere.
> I like California. I stay here because of it.
More power to you.
> Maybe if enough people who think that Texas is a good idea leave people then who want to be in California can replace them and we can build more housing stock together!
Seems the opposite is happening. Texas has very lax building regulations. Part of this is due to not being on a fault line but most of this is just bureaucrats justifying their jobs and costing everyone money.
> I think this is our major issue, not asking people and companies to pay for advancing our communities.
Seems like it's had the opposite effect. Some of the highest taxes in the nation with the worst results.
Good luck with your housing purchase. I wish you the best.
I would love it if the people who move to this state and complain about it would just leave. Please go find someplace else instead of moving here for our prosperity and then attacking everything that built it when you arrive.
> It’s weak companies fleeing to a place where the government is more willing to subsidize their operations at the expense of their residents.
A major problem of large public sectors and large tax burdens is citizenry that thinks a government not taking more than it needs to operate is "subsidizing businesses at the expense of residents". Consider the alternative where representative governments intentionally take less at the behest of their citizens. Granted it's not always that way, but much more so than assuming the residents and business interests don't ever align and the government is always against the residents.
This especially doesn't apply in Texas where many of these relocations, while abatements exist, are often in relatively small/growing suburbs and are often encouraged by their residents. If anything, companies are moving from away state level impositions to more local ones where representation is often clearer and it's easier to leave/avoid if you disagree both as a citizen and a business.
I live in CA rather than Texas because I expect the state to take some of the wealth we create with the common infrastructure we’ve built like excellent public education etc and reinvest it in our communities.
That’s why so many companies chose to be here and have their highest paid positions here too.
Other communities in other states are welcome to bend over backwards to enthusiastically attract our tablescraps and feel like it’s a win to their communities to have them. But they don’t get to expect to be taken seriously if they tell us to change how we run our state to be more like them.
Pick your favorite ranking of world universities and let me know how many California universities you have to pass before you find a Texas institution on the list.
It's great that universities here are stellar. But the K-12 students are taking a hit. I feel bad for the vast majority of children going to school in this state.
Wow, the absolute and obvious bias in that article, not to mention the comments. Is there a more neutral source, or at least a source that isn’t so blatantly one-sided?
What did you expect? The Hoover institution is a fundamentalist think tank and their analysis is written entirely to pitch lower taxes and less regulation as always being the right thing. In short, they are living up to the level of brilliance of the economic policies of their founder.
I mean a lot of these people also sit on different boards of many hip western US tech startups. I don't think most of these people are actively involved in partisan politics anymore.
You would think that with 9,000 relocations, this article would come in with stronger evidence than a posturing wealth tax with no path to approval (and essentially abandoned), and a San Diego business that happened to relocate to Austin after being acquired by an Austin-based business.
California has many issues between tax policy and regulation by mob approval, but this is a very weak argument.
For all the armchair California tax policy critics on this website, there are shockingly few people citing Prop 15 in the fall as a positive indicator of the state’s future.
The figure they give is 766 for 2018-2019, far from “thousands” (which comes from their figure of 13,000 between 2009-2016). The sources they cite don’t even agree with these numbers. Everything after the first sentence is just an unsubstantiated rant.
They're using a really common anti-tax argumentation tactic. Instead of establishing a causal link between the 966 business that left and the corporate tax rate by doing a study they've simply called 2 people and quoted them in the article about why they left. So what about the other 964 business owners? Why don't they call those people and ask them too? The fact is they have no idea why those people left, and they have no idea why the other 13,000 businesses left. And they say nothing about new businesses being created.
The rest of the article is some cherry-picked facts about how much it costs to start a business. But no explanation as to why that's unreasonable other than that it's more than any other US state.
The only article about "Regulations" is a Cato Institute ranking. The Cato Institute works tirelessly to eliminate anything that they see as impeding businesses. But some regulations are good. Just because California ranks highest in regulation doesn't mean anything. It's just a smoke screen to convince us there's a problem.
I'm left to conclude the author has no idea what they're talking about.
I have no skin in the game (though no love for the current version of the GOP, either) and actually read the thing, along with their sources. I’d like to think I’d be critical of another fact-free rant after wasting time on it, regardless of the slant.
The Hoover Foundation isn’t exactly unbiased. The thousands comes from the “2009 to 2016” period. No mention of how many businesses were created. Nor comps of other states.
I believe that lots of people wish they could move their business out of state. I also believe many don’t because they actually like it here, it’s access to a ton of well off customers with cash to burn, and while they grumble about the regulatory burden it also creates quite a nicer place to live. I’m sure the latter comment will get lots of attention as there’s innumerable people who are sick of California. I’m looking at moving back after 6 years away.
The Hoover Institution is really a stain on Stanford’s reputation. Full of pseudo-scholars who start with their conclusions and then hunt around for cherry-picked evidence, but don’t spend too much effort worrying about the details, and never bother to admit when they were wrong. It’s fitting that Condoleeza “we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud” Rice is now the director.
The example of the day is Scott Atlas, Trump’s new darling “anti-Fauci” who (without any particular expertise in epidemiology or public health, and without any kind of convincing evidence or reasoning) has concluded that we should just give up against Covid19, and disclaim any responsibility for the results.
Dr. Atlas had some bad judgment getting involved with the Trump administration, which has a unique ability to snap defeat from the jaws of victory. But you’re misrepresenting his policy recommendation, which is actually not that different than what has been tried in other countries:
> Dr. Scott Atlas is the Robert Wesson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, an accomplished physician, and a scholar of public health. For several weeks, Dr. Atlas has been making the case in print and in other media that we as a society have overreacted in imposing draconian restrictions on movement, gatherings, schools, sports, and other activities. He is not a COVID-19 denier—he believes the virus is a real threat and should be managed as such. But, as Dr. Atlas argues, there are some age groups and activities that are subject to very low risk. The one-size-fits-all approach we are currently using is overly authoritarian, inefficient, and not based in science. Dr. Atlas’s prescription includes more protection for people in nursing homes, two weeks of strict self-isolation for those with mild symptoms, and most importantly, the opening of all K–12 schools.
His view is probably the correct one, at least if anybody was competent enough to implement it. We should isolate high risk patients, quarantine the sick (real quarantine, like they do in Asia, not just “go home and infect your family” we do here), and let everyone else get herd immunity.
> Other countries had relatively brief shut downs,
And if the US had actually ever done a shutdown right (or, on a smaller scale, if the few states that did do that on a state level had the legal and practical ability to impose the kind of travel restrictions against the rest of the US that almost every country in the world has against the US because of COVID), it (or those states, in the smaller scale case) might have started to recover after a relatively brief shutdown.
I'm not seeing this one size fits all policy anywhere.
Many schools are in session. Many are not. Some types of businesses are shit down and other types are not.
As for heard immunity, the high r value of this virus indicates that we would need as much as 50-60% of the population to get infected before heard immunity starts working.
You make it sound like it is uncommon for a think tank to publish research that helps its backers and allies. “The example of the day” (provided by NPR?) is just one small feature of a much larger landscape.
No, it’s not uncommon at all. There is a whole industry of billionaire-funded GOP “think tanks” whose business is laundering bullshit. It still reflects very poorly on Stanford though.
You really think that this phenomenon only happens on one side of the political aisle? I can’t relate to any worldview where that situation is possible.
It’s not really comparable. The difference is that scholars who aren’t GOP operatives generally live in what one senior Bush-administration official derisively called the “reality-based community.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community
Of the people who work for CAP, Brookings, or the like, which ones do you think are hack pseudo-scholars?
This world of yours where there are presumably only “real intellectuals” in one camp, and a plague of “hack pseudo-scholars” in the other, is simply absurd. It makes no sense to me so I cannot comment on it.
I could go into how I feel about the whole cult of NPR news-announcers going after their enemies day in and day out, but you probably wouldn’t want to hear it.
And that doesn't include the various grievance studies, nor, epidemiology, which turns out to be absolutely full of hack papers that cherry pick their sources, abuse citations, make absurd assumptions and then bury them in appendices, etc etc. If Dr Fauci has been replaced (didn't know that) then that's certainly just fine given the overall level of intellectual rigour and integrity in the field. You could use a bunch of laymen and get more trustworthy output.
The problem you're decrying is the proliferation of pseudo-science in general, it's not a political problem.
Your argument is: using a university’s reputation to lend credibility to abject bullshit written by career GOP political operatives in return for large donations from billionaires is okay, because grad students at universities often publish piles of methodologically unsound studies in their hurry to get their credentials and get out the door, especially in fields like evolutionary psychology, marketing, management, and criminology.
Seems like a complete non sequitur to me. We were talking about poorly researched and argued advocacy/opinion, not nominally peer-reviewed scholarly papers.
Your link specifically points out that political activism is not directly related to the problems of studies that won’t replicate: “Limited Political Hackery: Some of the most highly publicized social science controversies of the last decade happened at the intersection between political activism and low scientific standards: the implicit association test, stereotype threat, racial resentment, etc. I thought these were representative of a wider phenomenon, but in reality they are exceptions. The vast majority of work is done in good faith.”
But I won’t disagree that there are many problems with academic publishing and the for-profit journal industry; the publish-or-perish career system; the exploitation of grad students, postdocs, and untenured teachers; people throughout academia using statistical tools who lack basic training/competence in data analysis and statistical inference; etc.
It's pretty much the same. I'm sure the Hoover Institution uses some level of peer review for their papers, except those peers probably get paid to review it whereas academics don't. Peer review doesn't do much, it's very much getting you to first base quality wise, often not even that. It can be effective if peers are able and willing to really go deep, burn bridges and object to the core thesis of a paper. Clearly not going to be true at the Hoover Institution but equally untrue within most academic fields.
Many bad papers are bad because they're actually political papers dressed up to look like science, thus (ab)using a university's reputation to lend credibility to abject bullshit. I know that link claims most of them aren't. I think that's good news. But note, that's because many of the papers that replicate, only replicate because they're making vacuous observations. Of the papers that get attention because they make surprising claims, many of them are politically or ideologically motivated.
Partly this depends on how widely you define politically motivated. For instance it's common for supposedly scientific papers to run a model, and then advocate for certain government policies based on the output predictions. This is political activity. It's also often not scientific because the models haven't been validated, and in fact if/when the political recommendations are acted upon it renders their predictions unfalsifiable, which a disinterested scientist should not want.
This problem is much larger than grad students. Bad papers are routinely being written by career academics, professors, large groups of them.
Just look at the sourcing of this report: The number cited comes from the random blog of a Texas real estate company, citing a random (paywalled) newspaper. That's barely the quality of work of a really lazy high school student.
This is an absolutely ridiculous lack of scholarship. There's a good reason why HN prefers primary sources, and the moderators often replace links to secondary sources with the primary source. This particular submission has, at best, FOURTH HAND information (assuming that the Dallas Business Journal did not do original research).
Starting with a hypothesis (conclusion) is pretty standard, otherwise you are just poking around blindly.
The current "strategies" have only been sustainable because our economies had grown enough to sustain the blow, for now. Many countries don't have that luxury and eventually the West will feel it as well.
The strategies are based on a hope that a meaningful vaccine can be found in a timely fashion, and that is no where near guaranteed. So no matter which way you slice it it's all gambling with our lives.
And what percentage of the New York Times editorial board is Democrats? I would still call the Times a non-partisan paper (albeit one with liberal leanings).
A somewhat old (2000) Hoover Institution article notes that 1/4 of its Fellows are Democrats. I would be shocked if 1/4 of the Times editorial Board was Republicans. Or really if even one person on the Times editorial Board was a Republican.
Not a single member of the NY Times editorial board ever worked in the White House (except as a reporter), worked as a full-time political operative, or the like. They’re all career journalists and scholars. It’s not remotely comparable to the Hoover Institution.
Sure, because the Times is a newspaper and the Hoover Institute is a think tank. Part of the mission of a think tank requires having people with real world experience in government. I don’t think that’s a good proxy of whether the work is politically biased (rather than ideologically biased). Arguably, the Times is more overtly politically biased with its new “moral clarity” angle.
You're missing the point. Their bias doesn't come from whether they've literally worked in the White House, it comes from their political beliefs and how strongly those beliefs are held. How many in the NYT vocally support the Republican Party vs vocally support the Democratic Party?
The parent did say editorial board but I would suggest that a criticism of the NYTimes in the same spirit that actually warrants attention is its board of directors. Many if not all of them are wealthy lifelong democrats.
I'm not trying to move the goal posts on you, just pointing out what I think was the original intent of the comment that - that left or right you should always follow the money.
Not a single member of the NYT board of directors ever worked in the White House or worked as a full-time political operative either.
They’re a mix of people from the journalism industry and people who had senior management roles in other kinds of businesses: some lawyers, some finance people, etc.
I certainly have problems with the NYT. It is generally pro-corporate and pro-establishment. It is under strong pressure to accept bullshit at face value, and often succumbs (e.g. in the run up to the Iraq War). It tends far too strongly towards nonsensical “bothsidesism”
There are also a lot of excellent journalists working there, and they do a lot of important work. So it’s a mixed bag.
John W. Rogers, Jr. "was a leading campaigner for ... Bill Bradley's 2000 United States presidential campaign" and "served as a fundraising leader in Project Vote efforts led by former United States President Barack Obama". "He was part of the inner circle of the Barack Obama presidential campaign. He is a long-time Obama associate who serves as the co-chair of Obama's Illinois finance committee and who has been a major fundraiser for Democratic Party candidates. He served along with Bill Daley, Pat Ryan, Penny Pritzker and Julianna Smoot on Barack Obama 2009 presidential inauguration committee."
He’s a rich finance guy who is a major campaign contributor and fundraiser. That’s not the same as being a political operative, working in the White House, or the like.
For example, Brian McAndrews (also on the NYT board of directors) maxed out his campaign contributions to the RNC, Mitt Romney, GOP PACs, etc. But he also isn’t a political operative.
Seems like a very fine distinction you are making. John W. Rogers, Jr. is on the board of the Barack Obama Foundation, and his wife did literally work in the White House.
7% of reporters identify as Republicans versus 28% identify as Democrats.[1]
If we're going to play the "this source is biased" with every article published on HN, then we're going to see a lot of "people should know this paper has a Democratic bias".
I don't think that true, but if it was, that would be even worse since every single reporter for the NYTimes would have to tow the Democratic line. Thank god it's not that bad (they still will have a right-leaning opinion column once a month or so).
From what I remember from the Gentzkow/Shapiro work on media bias, media owners isn't really the source of bias. Paraphrasing, it turns out the bias comes from... the readers, who want a paper where they can read what pleases them.
One amazing fact is that the Democrat:Republican skew among reporters is higher than almost every group traditionally perceived to skew Democratic. Gay people, for example, skew Democrat versus Republican closer to 3:1.
But circling back, this is a theme. Conservative organizations and think tanks (Federalist Society is another example) have more Democrats than putatively objective professions (journalism, academia) have Republicans. That’s bad.
Gay people are not 3:1. You’re making up statistics to further your argument, but it’s not helping. Any source I’ve seen in terms of voting record and polling it’s 5:1 or higher.
You're citing data for voting while the statistic for reporters above is party identification. So you're comparing apples and oranges. This survey cites data for LGBT party identification: https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/20...
> Nearly nine million LGBT adults are registered and eligible to vote in the 2020 general election. Half of registered LGBT voters (50%) are Democrats, 15% are Republicans, 22% are Independent
You're also comparing the 2014 party identification data posted above to 2018 voting data, during the midterm election under perhaps the least popular Republican President in generations. Your own source shows that in 2014, LGBT votes favored Democrats 3:1, similar to the party identification data.
Moreover, many journalists register as independent to avoid perceptions of bias even if they identify strongly with one party. I haven't see data breaking down voting by party, but during the Trump era journalists donated to Clinton by a more than 20:1 margin: https://publicintegrity.org/politics/journalists-shower-hill...
Guessing the NYTimes has less than 3 people on its board that would be put on trial for war crimes at the ICC if the US didn’t forbid it, which isn’t something an org with Yoo, Kissinger, and Rumsfeld can say.
The Hoover Institution is aligned with the Republican Party. It has been since it was named after Herbert Hoover, a Republican president. Like the Nixon library, it exists primarily to redeem the reputation of its namesake.
(For those who need a refresher, Hoover's policies nearly destroyed America during the Great Depression and he spent the rest of his life trying to convince the world that unrestrained free markets and supply side economics was the cure all for everything.
Perhaps you should do some research before defending an ideological propaganda organization that has spent decades promoting economic theories that have been shown not to work.
For this particular opinion piece, they're including data from two economic downturns while excluding the growth period between them.
I don’t know what planet you live in, but we are entering the fifth decade of the Hoover Institution’s ideas being so widely recognized as effective that countries in Western Europe have been undoing their previous approaches at top-down governance to implement decentralized free market ones. Sweden has partially privatized its social security and has cut corporate tax rates to 21%. Denmark has gotten rid of its communications regulator. Macron is preaching Hoover-Institution style reform to a sclerotic France. (Heck it’s been so popular in Europe that the US is falling behind in deregulation and privatization, such as with the Post Office.) Meanwhile, we are entering the fourth decade of the “New Democrat” party in the United States, which had to wholesale adopt small government ideas from Republicans in order to remain electorally relevant.
It’s traditionally left wing economic ideas that have been soundly repudiated over the last five decades. A return to left-wing economics was just soundly rejected again in the US (Sanders) and the U.K. (Corbyn).
That’s an interesting way to look at the world, especially in terms of economic policy. I would surmise though that not a single person making those policies you mention from the countries you mentioned hold up unfettered supply side / unrestricted free market as an ideal endpoint.
None of the countries or politicians you mentioned have the same policies. Sanders doesn’t want government control of means of production (traditional left wing economics). All the European countries have universal healthcare and will never take it away.
That last statement is a bit weird. What do you mean by "universal healthcare"? Quite a few have what is basically Obamacare, i.e. mandatory health insurance purchases with subsidies for the poor.
Sure, think tanks often take a more purist ideological view than is actually implemented in the real world. But if you look at the direction the developed world has headed since the 1980s, Hoover Institution and similar organizations have been tremendously successful in moving things in the directions they espouse.
In the 1960s, you had governments owning entire industries (state-owned enterprises), and micro-managing private businesses to the point where regulators were telling airlines and bus lines what fares they could charge. In Western Europe and Canada in particular, even though you didn't have "government control over the means of production" you had several countries (such as Canada) with more than 50% of the economy being the government or government-owned enterprises. That has been the "traditional left-wing" approach during the 20th century. Almost everyone moved away from those approaches starting in the 1970s and 1980s. From 1990 to 2000, Canada's government expenditures as a percentage of GDP dropped from over 50% to well under 40%. An entire tenth of the economy was returned to the private sector in just a decade. In Sweden, government spending peaked at almost 70% of the entire economy in 1995. A decade later, it was under 50%. One sixth of the economy was returned to the private sector.
To give a concrete example, licenses to use radio waves used to be awarded by bureaucrats based on their assessment of what was "in the public interest." They would evaluate applications from different companies for different uses for spectrum and decide who should get a license. (That sort of sweeping grant of regulatory authority was common in New Deal-era legislation.) Today, we and most European countries have replaced that with market-based approaches such as spectrum auctions. This has happened world-wide: the EU has issued directives requiring privatization of post offices and railroads. Macron has floated the idea of privatizing SNCF (which would be like privatizing Amtrak here). Denmark's post office is owned by a Swedish company and Stockholm's subway is operated by a Hong Kong company. These are all the kinds of policies advocated by Hoover Institution and other outfits.
You're also arguing to a degree against a straw man. Hoover Institution isn't some anarcho-capitalist outfit that advocates getting rid of the government. To use your universal healthcare example: Hoover Institution isn't suggesting to eliminate universal healthcare. But there are many different ways to implement universal healthcare. At one end you have the UK system, where the government employs the doctors and runs the hospitals. At the other end, you have systems like Switzerland's, based on mandatory private insurance.
Hoover Institution does not propose eliminating universal healthcare. Their focus has been on the cost inefficiencies created by using insurance to pay for routine medical care. Since at least the early 2000s, they have been advocating an approach that provides universal insurance coverage from the government for catastrophic medical care. But routine medical care would be paid for through health savings accounts (HSAs), where costs could be subject to market competition. Even if you don't fully agree with that approach, there is something to it. It's hard to ignore the fact that procedures that aren't covered by insurance are vastly cheaper: you can get laser eye surgery for a couple of thousand dollars per eye, while simply putting a broken arm in a cast costs insurance $2,500 on average. You don't even have to go Galt with that approach--the government could deposit money into the HSAs of low-income people to pay for routine healthcare. That would still preserve the benefits of market competition for those services.
No European country is going take away "universal healthcare." But, especially as social welfare systems get strained by aging populations, I can totally see countries adopting some of these...
> Sweden recently partially privatized its social security system
70% in Sweden is against this change to for-profit social security companies, but the parties in power doesn't prioritise it.
And for whatever propaganda reason you keep using Sweden as some sort of objective evidence of free market utopia when the facts on the ground are just a vast increase in inequality due to aggressive neo-liberal policies for the last ~30 years.
I'm not using Sweden as an example of "utopia." I'm using it as an example of a formerly left-wing country, where more than two thirds of the economy was the government, that has, as you put it, "aggressively" embraced "neo-liberal policies for the last ~30 years." Apparently, people have been satisfied enough with the resulting increased growth and competitiveness that they keep voting in "the parties in power."
One can reasonably disagree on whether all the consequences of these policies have been good ones. But if a whole bunch of countries tried "A" and then for the last 30 years have shifted away from "A" to "B" that is powerful evidence that there must be something to "B".
The collapse of the Soviet Union has left the world with "only one way" and the drift into privatization have accelerated since.
But even the people in the US have been in favour of some sort of universal health care since well before USSR collapsed but still haven't been able to "vote in" people supporting that. So it's a pretty strange argument to make.
"People" in the U.S. support lots of things in the abstract, until you force them to think about the trade-offs involved in actual policies. People might support universal healthcare, but nobody wants to pay the taxes to pay for it. Which is why Sanders promises not to raise taxes on people making below $250,000 (!). Biden beat Sanders because a large number of Democrats are actually quite conservative (especially people of color, who are often in the Democratic Party for reasons unrelated to economic policies). Biden, who doesn't support Medicare for All, and promises not to raise taxes on people making below $400,000 (!!). It is literally impossible to keep both promises (and people know it).
There's a lot of things included in western Europe's high taxes. Not just universal health care. The US sets a very low bar overall. At the same time, however, the US somehow always affords to fund massive wars and armies through its taxes.
Barely a single news media in both the UK and the US lobbied for Sander/Corbyn. Still they got a very decent results. So one could ask; repudiated by whom?
You don't think that being both shunned and actively worked against by almost the entire main stream media doesn't have an effect? The so-called establishment are seemingly very united when it comes to stopping left-wing deviants.
It's a right-wing ideological propaganda mill; it's “non-partisan” in the trivial sense that, like most “think tanks”, it has no formal control by a political party, and in the slightly more substantive (but also directly opposed to what most people try to communicate by “non-partisan” in terms of political bias) sense that, also like most ideological propaganda mills, it is devoted to an ideology much narrower than the big-tent views of either of the US’s major parties, which are both somewhat opportunistically shifting coalitions.
By your metric, nearly every newspaper is a “left-wing ideological propaganda mill.” (My litmus test for that is whether the publication will credulously print the demonstrable untruth that “schools are underfunded” or “teachers are underpaid”).
But, I and most people I've talked to have been waiting years for this prediction to materialize. We'd all love it here if we could enjoy all that California has to offer with fewer transplants around.
And I'll add, if you've extracted your wealth off the back of California and it's people, it's only fair you pay back some of that to the state if you do decide to just take the money and run.
>We'd all love it here if we could enjoy all that California has to offer with fewer transplants around.
This sentiment has been around for decades. My family moved to Southern California from Illinois in the 1970s and there were bumper stickers that said, "Welcome to California, now go back home."
There is a story that Elisha Stephens, for whom Stevens Creek is named, awoke one morning in the early 1860s in the Cupertino area, spotted the smoke of someone else's cooking fire somewhere in the distance, and decided that the area was getting too crowded for his taste.
I can't really be surprised that a place with high cost of living and a focus on helping people over businesses is going to have high taxes for both those people and those businesses.
While some businesses aren't tied the are and will leave, most of them are making money from people in that area and need to stay there. If enough of those businesses leave, I'm sure the government will start to cater to them again, balancing things out again.
This is such a misleading essay. AB 2088 (to tax net worth over $30 million at 0.4%) was a gut-and-replace two weeks before the end of the session which never even got a vote in committee.[1] It hardly reflects the will of the Assembly, much less a serious attempt to change California law.
The other parts of the essay do a bait-and-switch between noting that some businesses are leaving and implying that it’s the over-regulated business environment —- but if you drill down it’s really motivated by the state income tax. Which, yes, is high and can be significant especially on the sorts of people that are successful at running their own business, which is to say high earners.
And still, how many businesses did California lose in 2018 and 2019? Less than 800 total. So out of the 40 million people that live here, 0.001% chose to leave every year. Even if that’s a net number (which the author doesn’t clarify) it doesn’t rise to the level of something policy makers should care about.
One would think economists writing at the Hoover Institute would be more rigorous about their facts and argument, and not just whine in print and get it published.
And still, how many businesses did California lose in 2018 and 2019? Less than 800 total. So out of the 40 million people that live here, 0.001% chose to leave every year.
I assume a business would have more than 1 employee?
There have been a few very large companies who have moved their headquarters out of state. From what I can remember, McKesson (top 3 drug distributor), Schwab.
Of course they are headquarters, not the entire companies, so it's still only a few thousand.
Regardless, I don't think California is hurting for companies. At least not right now.
The fact that the "gut-and-replace" wealth tax happened in the first place is a problem. Rob Bonta then gets on TV and justifies it ensuring no one with substantial assets will come here.
Income tax at 13% is enough to encourage some founders not to come here. 16% will be worse.
If your point is that at least a dozen or so elected pols thought it worth doing this as a “virtue signaling” exercise, then yes I agree. Not sure it has all that much chance of dissuading rich folks from coming. I honestly don’t know who in their right mind with the geographic option would ever choose to make their permanent residency in a state with income tax. Buy a condo in Las Vegas, register to vote there, and spend all your time in San Diego.
As to your second point, I sincerely doubt California’s greatest problem is too few wannabe founders. ::smiley face emoji::
He moved to Puerto Rico to avoid taxes. He is an outlier but his sentiment is correct.
This is a spectrum. If California raised it's taxes to 100% no one would live in the state. If they dropped the taxes to near zero lots of people would move in given everything wasn't chaos. The higher the taxes go the more likely someone is to not move here.
> Buy a condo in Las Vegas, register to vote there, and spend all your time in San Diego.
California will charge you income tax for the time you spent in San Diego. California will even charge you income tax if you never set foot in the state if your income is earned from the state: https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2019/10/22/now-calif...
> I sincerely doubt California’s greatest problem is too few wannabe founders
You underestimate the influence of the rich. People mimic what they perceive to work. If rich people don't move here, people who aspire to become rich will not move here.
Freedom is an illusion, and having a 100% tax doesn't technically restrict freedom. Any policy that arose would itself need to be measured against the tolerance of the people, but if that 100% tax came with guarantees of the things that actually restrict our freedom, there might be a lot of people who would tolerate it.
I'm always curious in these things how they will cherry pick the data to achieve their narrative.
In 2018 California had 954,000 businesses[1] according to the Census bureau. If we take the "13,000 have left between 2009 and 2016" (why stop there?) that would represent nearly 1.4%. However the Hoover Institute doesn't actually tell you if they were "small business" or "regular businesses".
That can be important because there are nearly 4 million small businesses in the state[2] and a departure is a departure, small, medium, or large. If use 3.9 million as the total number of businesses that is just .3%.
Every year people argue "California taxes too much, businesses are leaving in droves" but that isn't supported by actual business license data nor employment data. Over the last 10 years California consistently has the largest economy of all 50 states.
Nobody likes taxes, and I personally don't like misleading articles.
Most Hollywood movies are already being filmed on the Vancouvers and Alabamas of the world, so in a sense they have already fled the burden of California's regulations and taxes. But of course the hypocrisy is strong on this field, and the people involved in this business are the first to demand more and more taxes. In the end, they can avoid it. The mere mortals that run a mom and pop business can't.
That's my beef with this report too. Business leave and come all the time. It's important to clarify how many are created in the same period, and what types of business left/prospered.
As much as I wish California had a better check and balance in its government and particularly policies, the report does not necessarily show that California has lost its way.
Those are all excellent points. Furthermore, the article does not mention any business moving INTO California. Surely there must have been some. What would be interesting is NET migration statistics.
Furthermore, between 2009 and 2016, 1,250,000 businesses were started in California [1] (and more than a million went out of business).
But at least wingnut welfare still seems to be a thriving business in California.
...to conclude, California's a big economy. But it's not (at least superficially) outsized relative to other parts of the United States that contain similar populations.
Looking at the census information, the first number is for establishments with employees. They apparently don't include single person businesses in that number. The census data also lists "total non-employer establishments" at 3.4 million.
One-sided drivel. "The bill would impose a tax of 0.4% of a state resident’s worldwide net worth in excess of $30 million" becomes "tax wealth at 0.4%".
So for huge numbers of people in California who really don't have significant net worth, 0.4% of very little is still...very little.
Income tax seems like an overall success to me. It's not a uniform rate; it's a progressive system. So if the net worth tax ends up being applied more universally and progressively, it seem like that vast majority of people not holding on to huge fortunes really have very little to worry about.
Here's the thing about California -- people living there have gotten net-worth-wealthy from real estate, and they have been able to capture huge increases without paying appropriate property taxes (because it's such a bear to attempt to increase property taxes). This has shifted paying for state services to use-based taxes, which are as far from progressive as you get (well, not as far as social security contributions, but not far off either).
What should probably happen: Figure out a revenue neutral approach that blends a net worth tax with a reduction in sales taxes. That puts money back in the pockets of people who most need it.
Interesting experiment: What would the social security tax rate be if you didn't cap the maximum income it applies to? It's currently around 15% (individual and employer contributions combined). I have a vague memory of calculating that it would be around 4%, if you eliminated the cap (maybe that is individual-only, can't remember).
In any case, social security is a poll tax, and the money flows straight into the general fund.
> people living there have gotten net-worth-wealthy from real estate
1. NIMBY's, excessive regulation, limits on building all drive costs up.
2. Scared money from over seas looking for safe haven in gateway cities.
You're starting to see people flee CA in droves. Housing prices here will crash worse than the rest of the country. If the politicians don't reform laws and cut spending the state will turn into Detroit.
> This has shifted paying for state services to use-based taxes
Kicking fixed income grandma out of her house is immoral. People constantly moving due to property tax spikes is destabilizing.
CA's is not lacking in taxes. CA is spending way too much. Other states are doing fine collecting a fraction of what we do adjusted for any kind of metric you can think of.
> What would the social security tax rate be if you didn't cap the maximum income it applies to?
You incur more liabilities. The contract is I pay more in, I get more out later. It's a safety net. We cap it so people have a minimum and don't die in destitution.
> What should probably happen: Figure out a revenue neutral approach that blends a net worth tax with a reduction in sales taxes. That puts money back in the pockets of people who most need it.
A wealth tax is opening a pandora box. Enjoy paying more accountants. You don't know how much something is worth until you sell it. Who get's to decide how much my paintings or my stock is worth? A politician? Why is it ok to tax someone on income they've already paid taxes every year for the rest of their lives. People will flee and no one will move here. Detroit.
As a non-Californian I marvel at the constant stream of articles about what a hostile Soviet environment California is for private enterprise and yet over the past few decades it has been one of the greatest centers of innovation and wealth creation in global history. The rebuttable presumption when you here about some emerging world conquering company is that it is coming out of CA. Something right must be happening there!
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 280 ms ] threadThrow in Hollywood, Silicon Valley, piggy-backing off the US as a whole, and having a beautiful coastline and great social culture. What do you expect?
I do everything I can to minimize my involvement with California for my businesses.
The US as a whole net extracts from California; the piggy-backing goes the other way.
Kansas, et al, owe their continued solvency to California's continued generosity.
If by that you mean a combination of soil and climate suitable for some of the most productive agriculture in North America, that's true.
Otherwise it's more a series of other industries, starting with extractive (1849 wasn't known for a “nice weather rush”) but more recently mostly creative & technological.
> Now that that's gone, well...
It wasn't gone during the long drought, and it's not now.
Dumb hypocrisy. I’m sick of these false narratives and bullshit causes. If we’re going to tackle problems in this state we need to actually do it. Not pretend we did and glorify the attempt then brag to others about how great we are. What a joke.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wildfires-sibera-russia-burned-...
But even now, California's population is stagnant [0], and most likely currently shrinking. So, no, it likely cannot continue and be just fine.
[0] https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/population-shrinks-in-cal...
> It depends on what you mean by "just fine." If you mean "maintain its population,"
If you mean something else, you should say what you mean.
It depends on whether you consider ethical behavior important.
States bordering just east of California should be taxing California for their monopolistic taxation of economic activity between them and Pacific trade.
1. The largest public university system in the country (Cal State - 3rd largest on the planet)
2. The absolutely massive UC research machine
3. An established, inexpensive feeder system with the California Community Colleges (hello social mobility)
4. Plenty of world-class private universities (Cal Tech, Stanford, Claremont Colleges, Deep Springs)
5. Access to the Cali-Baja industrial cluster (California has a LOT of manufacturing, it's just in the other California)
6. Some insane levels of cultural diversity (many folks from different cultures can feel at home here - more so than say, Oklahoma)
7. Over 7 medical schools
8. Relatively cheap land in the fast-growing Inland Empire and the Antelope Valley (all it needs is a dash of HSR)
9. Massive agriculture in the San Fernando Valley
10. A massive aerospace industry (Antelope Valley - Skunkworks, etc.)
11. The port of Los Angeles is the largest port in the country followed by the second largest port in the country ....Long Beach, 9th largest is Oakland.
12. The San Diego biotech cluster with its ties to UCSD (Celera, which produced the first draft sequence of the human genome was up north in Alameda, California)
California is an economic machine with infrastructure no other state in the country can come close to.
Welcome to California.
Housing is actually very available and inexpensive in the inland areas, which are fast-growing (Inland Empire, Antelope Valley, etc.). Cheap housing in places like Palm Springs, plus the influx of coastal money has put a LOT of children of landscapers and restaurant workers, and hotel workers, etc. through the California public university system.
California is a sanctuary state with an excellent community college system, so the children of those disadvantaged minorities have a definite shot of transferring to a school like Berkeley, or even a Cal State, which offers an excellent education at a reasonable (in a relative sense) price.
The economy in the mountains is BOOMING right now, as that coastal wealth funnels into a myriad of small businesses.
Business can and will move.
Sure the port is nice. I'm not sure how many jobs are tied to that thou?
California Community Colleges already enroll over 2.1 million students. That's more than the population of the state of Idaho.
Port infrastructure is widely documented as a key driver of economic growth.
https://jshippingandtrade.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/...
The port of Los Angeles alone offers direct employment to 1.6 million people worldwide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_of_Los_Angeles
That's over double the population of the state of Wyoming.
How many of the 1.6 million need to live here in LA?
> University attendance may dip, but with the rock-bottom prices
You can't compete with online prices if you have brick and mortar, hence Amazon. I would argue some disciplines still need shared spaces like medicine but even then, a lot of the learning could be done online.
Uni's competitive advantage has been certification. There are now better ways to track a candidates fit for employment that also don't require deviations into non-career focused learning like art, literature or history. These classes are not meritless, they just don't help employment.
I don't believe rock bottom prices will save the onslaught to come.
I suppose neither of us has a crystal ball. We'll just have to see what happens in 20 years.
How do you think a model would operate for university-level instruction that would both prepare kids for employment, offer a competitive level of socialization, collaborative problem-solving experience in multiple fields, and generalized knowledge so they don't turn into pigeon-holed hyperspecialists?
How do you expose kids to a wide-enough variety of things that they are able to discover something they truly want to do for the rest of their life?
How will you ensure that a university-degree doesn't remain a symbol of status?
Basically, how do you go from University of Phoenix, to what you are describing?
Fair enough
> How do you think a model would operate for university-level instruction that would both prepare kids for employment
Not sure, but Uni level instruction is probably sub-optimal for a large portion of the population. You are also still tethered to the pace set by the professor/instructor. Online would allow for students to move at their own pace.
> offer a competitive level of socialization
I don't think there's much MORE benefit to College socialization. I think this is a normal time period in everyone's life of being free of parents and responsible for yourself that Uni's use as evidence of benefit. EDIT This time period involves socializing with new people.
> collaborative problem-solving experience in multiple fields
I don't think this requires physical presence.
> generalized knowledge so they don't turn into pigeon-holed hyperspecialists
I don't know the numbers but I'm guessing the overwhelming majority of jobs never get much outside of hyperspecialization. This is a benefit of modern economies. Specialization allows for more productivity. But like with any job, people who want to can branch out. It would be easier if you didn't have to adhere to a college schedule.
> How do you expose kids to a wide-enough variety of things that they are able to discover something they truly want to do for the rest of their life?
The friction and overhead in Uni's to try different things is way higher than clicking a link online. Spending the remainder of 16 weeks studying something you hate, then changing majors is infinitely more cumbersome than just bailing and learning something else.
If you want to force a broad subject matter on students, well that model will die out due to inefficiencies.
> How will you ensure that a university-degree doesn't remain a symbol of status?
It totally will. But it will be for the rich. Everyone else doesn't need to blow $200k to do software engineering, operate a camera, make art or pursue mathematics research. Google is already working on a program that will certify job applicants sans a college education.
>Basically, how do you go from University of Phoenix, to what you are describing?
Not sure. Online stuff evolves unlike Uni's which have been essentially the same for the last 50 years. Go to class/lab, listen to a lecture, take a test. Prices skyrocket.
Online, things get better and cheaper faster.
The $200k figure is something you arrive at when you start sending your kids to schools like USC. Their tuition is $58,000/year.
Assuming you could pony up $3,600/year, what would be an argument for not sending your kids to college in favor of them doing an online thing?
If they can't keep up with the material, they can enroll in fewer classes. If they're bored, they can take more, or take graduate-level classes.
Online education will be cheaper. With state subsides it'll probably be free.
khanacademy is already free. Check out this lecture on cellular energetics: https://www.khanacademy.org/science/ap-biology/cellular-ener...
If you want to know why college will be disrupted this is the best essay ever: https://a16z.com/2011/08/20/why-software-is-eating-the-world...
It's no different than what's happening to every other industry.
> If they can't keep up with the material, they can enroll in fewer classes. If they're bored, they can take more, or take graduate-level classes.
It's still rigid compared to online. Still have to study things that might not be necessary for your job or you don't care about. Taking more or less classes doesn't mean at your own pace, it means a rigid schedule you can handle. What if I can complete a course in 6 weeks instead of 16? What if I only want to concentrate on one course at a time for a smaller period of time? What if I'm 9 weeks in, hate it and want to change majors? What if I want to sit at my computer instead of commuting to school or physically going to class? What if the professor talks too slow and I would rather have them go 1.5x speed because It holds my attention? What if I want to rewind them because I missed something they said? What if I can't understand the professor?
That lack of physical space and material allows for greater flexibility.
This stuck with me, I guess because it also implies a lack of social space as well.
For this to work, the majority of people thinking of attending college would need to have an aversion to sharing physical space with others. Otherwise they would derive some utility from sharing physical space with others, which could then be assigned a dollar value.
The dollar value is tuition.
I would concede that there is a nonzero percentage of college students for whom the utility of sharing physical space with others is a net negative. I would also argue that this percentage is in the minority, and although they may not, their parents might derive positive utility from increased socialization of their child.
For the vast majority, the opportunity to share physical space with others engaged in the same pursuit generates positive utility, and can therefore be assigned a dollar value.
As long as there is a dollar value there, tuition will be collected.
There is also the motivational aspect. Due to fundamental adaptations in human nature, external structure is often needed to motivate productivity. Although there are those who are outliers, and are truly motivated by intrinsic interests, these seem to be in the minority. Therefore, having external structure to motivate also generates positive utility and willingness to pay.
You can do all of what you described in your room with a textbook and practice problems, but why doesn't anyone just do that for four years, and then go out and get a job? Sure, it happens in software, but that's unique in that in software you can literally go from NAND gates to DOOM in a sandbox-like environment, but the rest of the world doesn't have that ability to manipulate their field of study from first principles in an interactive environment.
Or it's cheaper and more convenient. Like online shopping.
> their parents might derive positive utility from increased socialization of their child
I think college is less necessary for this. I have friends who didn't go to college. They're fine.
> external structure is often needed to motivate productivity
I think for most getting a job is enough of a motivating factor.
> but why doesn't anyone just do that for four years, and then go out and get a job?
Eventually the necessity for credentials will morph into assessments or accepted online credentials.
> but the rest of the world doesn't have that ability to manipulate their field of study from first principles in an interactive environment.
I would argue that "rest of the world" get's smaller every day. If you're a doctor their are probably a ton of classes that could be done all online.
If someone can cook up a way to deliver remote higher education of complex subjects in an interactive environment with dynamic, real-time feedback in a way that is comparable to in-person education in fields other than software, for your average person of average motivation, with no negative impacts on socialization cheaper than $1,600/year, I really can't argue with that.
Whoever figures out a mechanism for this, they will make a whole wheelbarrow full of cash, and I would be the first to sign up for that program.
I'm a native Californian but I've never understood the odd "fifth largest economy!" flag waving given that it is a product of population size. The "doing something right" may not be the thing you are trying to imply.
Per capita its still the 5th(6th if you include DC) highest and 30% more than the median state.
I think people reference the fifth largest economy factoid because it also speaks to how Californian has several large industries from tech to agriculture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
I'm also a native California, born, bred and educated, and I've seen this U-Haul trucks headed for the border tripe every few years, this one from Stanford's (notoriously conservative) Hoover Institute. It's the usual right wing nonsense.
It's #5 among states, a little over 7% behind #1 Massachusetts, and over 20% ahead of the US as a whole, and over double #50 Mississippi.
> Having a large economy is a function of having a large population, it doesn't imply an exceptionally productive economy.
California has both a large population and, on a per capita basis, an exceptionally productive economy among US states. It's true it's abstractly possible for the former to substitute for the latter in aggregate output measures, but that's not really the case for CA.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/248063/per-capita-us-rea...
It makes California a true melting-pot, and the externalities of the wealthy areas serve as an engine to bring people up out of poverty in those other areas. You can grow up as the child of a dirt-poor undocumented farmworker, attend a California Community College, and transfer to a world-class public university.
Not exactly that sequence of events, but this congressman is kind of an illustration of that arc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raul_Ruiz_(politician)
Holy smokes, politicians are trying to extract a state wealth tax on individuals after they leave the state? Am I reading this correctly?
California is already able to levy the bank accounts of people who have never set foot in the state if they deem that you owe them tax money.
I see no reason that any state would stick it's neck out to protect any individual transplants.
I don't know how such a tax would be written that it didn't somehow overlap though. Perhaps imposing a yearly tax that is "0.4% of wealth each year over the next 10 years" but capping the total applicable wealth tax payable each year to "0.4%"? This would be a really weird looking law...
But as I note in another comment, AB 2088 didn’t even get a vote in committee so it’s hardly a serious policy proposal at this point. The author is building straw men and knocking them down at a furious rate.
Not that I'm aware of. We hired a big fancy consulting company to figure out the tax laws when we moved from Canada to the US. We found that it does exist for US Citizens though. If a US citizen leaves the US, they will (basically) never get a lower tax rate because they will always owe the difference back to the US government. This is to prevent people from pretending to move to tax haven countries while still basically living in the US.
I'm not up on the current law, but this is how the IRS used to treat people over a certain net worth who renounced their US citizenship. The IRS would assume these individuals did it for tax evasion purposes and continue to tax them for 10 years afterwards.
https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/us-c...
https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/us-c...
Welcome to California. While we have plenty of problems, fundamentally, if your company can’t cut it here and decides to relocate to Texas, that’s not an indictment of California. It’s weak companies fleeing to a place where the government is more willing to subsidize their operations at the expense of their residents.
You don't think that the housing policy of California has any impact on companies struggling to hire because of housing costs? Because it definitely impacts the Bay Area company I work for.
Housing here is a legitimate problem but the companies that flee to Texas because of lower taxes aren’t worth keeping.
Famous last words.
Saying "I don't care if businesses leave" seems like taking for granted that they'll always be there (or want to come to your state).
It took the skyscrapers downtown being at rock bottom prices (and generous state and local incentives) to get businesses to move back.
It seems like people in Texas on average are doing better than California.
I think using Detroit as a scare tactic to encourage desperate policies to retain companies in a state that’s lousy with them is a pretty far cry from reality.
> It seems like people in Texas on average are doing better than California.
How do you figure?
They'll even take losses like shutting down factories.
> ~700 or so commercial entities leaving CA
It will get worse. It's a trend.
> Texas
Cheaper housing, less homelessness, less expenses.
They’ve been saying that for 30 years and the numbers have not significantly changed.
> That or a company from somewhere else will use less taxes and regulations as a competitive advantage. > They'll even take losses like shutting down factories.
Companies based here are some of the most profitable in the world. Your statements are pure fantasy unanchored to any facts.
> Cheaper housing, less homelessness, less expenses.
If as many people wanted to live in California as want to live in Texas, it would be cheaper to live here too.
In addition, the average California household also makes more, by a not insignificant percentage.
"How did you lose all the money?" "Slow at first, then very quickly."
> Companies based here are some of the most profitable in the world.
Cat's out of the bag. Most of the tools needed to form companies that are ridiculously profitable are online for anyone in the world to use (AWS). If they're not, the cloud providers are working tirelessly to put them there.
California was the hotbed of innovation due to concentrations of learning from higher institutions in tech. That's all distributed now.
> If as many people wanted to live in California as want to live in Texas, it would be cheaper to live here too.
Don't underestimate the crippling effects of powerful NIMBY's, over burdensome regulations and the CCC to dramatically increase cost. http://coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2013/03/another-california...
Also, Texas' population is increasing faster than California. https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevore/2018/05/22/texas-la...
2045 is when California loses it's title: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/07/texas-could-have-a-hig...
> the average California household also makes more
And get less: https://taxfoundation.org/real-value-100-each-state-2016
Which is why you now see a huge migration of middle class leaving.
FWIW, I’m pretty much entirely for bulldozing local zoning law and control over a lot of housing and have been delighted by our recent progress there and often vote accordingly. I think this is our major issue, not asking people and companies to pay for advancing our communities.
> As long as we don’t descend to full on fascism next year I think I’ll buy a house here.
I would not recommend buying a house for the next couple years at least. Prices are about to crash everywhere.
> I like California. I stay here because of it.
More power to you.
> Maybe if enough people who think that Texas is a good idea leave people then who want to be in California can replace them and we can build more housing stock together!
Seems the opposite is happening. Texas has very lax building regulations. Part of this is due to not being on a fault line but most of this is just bureaucrats justifying their jobs and costing everyone money.
> I think this is our major issue, not asking people and companies to pay for advancing our communities.
Seems like it's had the opposite effect. Some of the highest taxes in the nation with the worst results.
Good luck with your housing purchase. I wish you the best.
Lol.
I would love it if the people who move to this state and complain about it would just leave. Please go find someplace else instead of moving here for our prosperity and then attacking everything that built it when you arrive.
If you think Texas is better, go there.
Feel free to scroll through yourself: https://www.tesla.com/careers/search#/?country=-1&city=-1
Not only are most of the US based jobs on Tesla’s site still located in CA, most of the better paid higher qualification jobs are too.
(Their headquarters remains in CA too.)
A major problem of large public sectors and large tax burdens is citizenry that thinks a government not taking more than it needs to operate is "subsidizing businesses at the expense of residents". Consider the alternative where representative governments intentionally take less at the behest of their citizens. Granted it's not always that way, but much more so than assuming the residents and business interests don't ever align and the government is always against the residents.
This especially doesn't apply in Texas where many of these relocations, while abatements exist, are often in relatively small/growing suburbs and are often encouraged by their residents. If anything, companies are moving from away state level impositions to more local ones where representation is often clearer and it's easier to leave/avoid if you disagree both as a citizen and a business.
That’s why so many companies chose to be here and have their highest paid positions here too.
Other communities in other states are welcome to bend over backwards to enthusiastically attract our tablescraps and feel like it’s a win to their communities to have them. But they don’t get to expect to be taken seriously if they tell us to change how we run our state to be more like them.
Looks like Texas has California beat on that metric: https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/public-scho...
One of the largest school districts, LA public schools, is notoriously bad.
Maybe, it's Texas throwing us scraps.
Not really surprising.
This article is from the Hoover Institution[1], which has:
- Condoleezza Rice as its director
- John Yoo (torture apologist for the Bush Jr administration) as a Visiting Fellow
- Henry Kissinger and Donald Rumsfeld as Distinguished Visiting Fellows
and which bought its Policy Review publication from The Heritage Foundation[2].
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover.org
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heritage_Foundation
California has many issues between tax policy and regulation by mob approval, but this is a very weak argument.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrEK5hgr3vY
The figure they give is 766 for 2018-2019, far from “thousands” (which comes from their figure of 13,000 between 2009-2016). The sources they cite don’t even agree with these numbers. Everything after the first sentence is just an unsubstantiated rant.
Now I need to wash my brain.
The rest of the article is some cherry-picked facts about how much it costs to start a business. But no explanation as to why that's unreasonable other than that it's more than any other US state.
The only article about "Regulations" is a Cato Institute ranking. The Cato Institute works tirelessly to eliminate anything that they see as impeding businesses. But some regulations are good. Just because California ranks highest in regulation doesn't mean anything. It's just a smoke screen to convince us there's a problem.
I'm left to conclude the author has no idea what they're talking about.
I believe that lots of people wish they could move their business out of state. I also believe many don’t because they actually like it here, it’s access to a ton of well off customers with cash to burn, and while they grumble about the regulatory burden it also creates quite a nicer place to live. I’m sure the latter comment will get lots of attention as there’s innumerable people who are sick of California. I’m looking at moving back after 6 years away.
The example of the day is Scott Atlas, Trump’s new darling “anti-Fauci” who (without any particular expertise in epidemiology or public health, and without any kind of convincing evidence or reasoning) has concluded that we should just give up against Covid19, and disclaim any responsibility for the results.
> Dr. Scott Atlas is the Robert Wesson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, an accomplished physician, and a scholar of public health. For several weeks, Dr. Atlas has been making the case in print and in other media that we as a society have overreacted in imposing draconian restrictions on movement, gatherings, schools, sports, and other activities. He is not a COVID-19 denier—he believes the virus is a real threat and should be managed as such. But, as Dr. Atlas argues, there are some age groups and activities that are subject to very low risk. The one-size-fits-all approach we are currently using is overly authoritarian, inefficient, and not based in science. Dr. Atlas’s prescription includes more protection for people in nursing homes, two weeks of strict self-isolation for those with mild symptoms, and most importantly, the opening of all K–12 schools.
Other countries had relatively brief shut downs, and had targeted reopenings based on risk profile. Schools have been reopened in Europe since May: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/10/world/europe/reopen-schoo...
His view is probably the correct one, at least if anybody was competent enough to implement it. We should isolate high risk patients, quarantine the sick (real quarantine, like they do in Asia, not just “go home and infect your family” we do here), and let everyone else get herd immunity.
And if the US had actually ever done a shutdown right (or, on a smaller scale, if the few states that did do that on a state level had the legal and practical ability to impose the kind of travel restrictions against the rest of the US that almost every country in the world has against the US because of COVID), it (or those states, in the smaller scale case) might have started to recover after a relatively brief shutdown.
Many schools are in session. Many are not. Some types of businesses are shit down and other types are not.
As for heard immunity, the high r value of this virus indicates that we would need as much as 50-60% of the population to get infected before heard immunity starts working.
Of the people who work for CAP, Brookings, or the like, which ones do you think are hack pseudo-scholars?
I could go into how I feel about the whole cult of NPR news-announcers going after their enemies day in and day out, but you probably wouldn’t want to hear it.
https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with...
And that doesn't include the various grievance studies, nor, epidemiology, which turns out to be absolutely full of hack papers that cherry pick their sources, abuse citations, make absurd assumptions and then bury them in appendices, etc etc. If Dr Fauci has been replaced (didn't know that) then that's certainly just fine given the overall level of intellectual rigour and integrity in the field. You could use a bunch of laymen and get more trustworthy output.
The problem you're decrying is the proliferation of pseudo-science in general, it's not a political problem.
Seems like a complete non sequitur to me. We were talking about poorly researched and argued advocacy/opinion, not nominally peer-reviewed scholarly papers.
Your link specifically points out that political activism is not directly related to the problems of studies that won’t replicate: “Limited Political Hackery: Some of the most highly publicized social science controversies of the last decade happened at the intersection between political activism and low scientific standards: the implicit association test, stereotype threat, racial resentment, etc. I thought these were representative of a wider phenomenon, but in reality they are exceptions. The vast majority of work is done in good faith.”
But I won’t disagree that there are many problems with academic publishing and the for-profit journal industry; the publish-or-perish career system; the exploitation of grad students, postdocs, and untenured teachers; people throughout academia using statistical tools who lack basic training/competence in data analysis and statistical inference; etc.
Many bad papers are bad because they're actually political papers dressed up to look like science, thus (ab)using a university's reputation to lend credibility to abject bullshit. I know that link claims most of them aren't. I think that's good news. But note, that's because many of the papers that replicate, only replicate because they're making vacuous observations. Of the papers that get attention because they make surprising claims, many of them are politically or ideologically motivated.
Partly this depends on how widely you define politically motivated. For instance it's common for supposedly scientific papers to run a model, and then advocate for certain government policies based on the output predictions. This is political activity. It's also often not scientific because the models haven't been validated, and in fact if/when the political recommendations are acted upon it renders their predictions unfalsifiable, which a disinterested scientist should not want.
This problem is much larger than grad students. Bad papers are routinely being written by career academics, professors, large groups of them.
The current "strategies" have only been sustainable because our economies had grown enough to sustain the blow, for now. Many countries don't have that luxury and eventually the West will feel it as well.
The strategies are based on a hope that a meaningful vaccine can be found in a timely fashion, and that is no where near guaranteed. So no matter which way you slice it it's all gambling with our lives.
You start with your hypothesis, then, after your research and study, you formulate your conclusion as to whether your hypothesis was correct or not.
If you start with the conclusion that your hypothesis is correct and only look for supporting evidence, that's bias.
What does that mean? They’re a non-partisan think tank. They certainly have a free market point of view, but every source has a point of view.
Non-partisan? Come on.
A somewhat old (2000) Hoover Institution article notes that 1/4 of its Fellows are Democrats. I would be shocked if 1/4 of the Times editorial Board was Republicans. Or really if even one person on the Times editorial Board was a Republican.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/opinion/editorialbo...
I'm not trying to move the goal posts on you, just pointing out what I think was the original intent of the comment that - that left or right you should always follow the money.
They’re a mix of people from the journalism industry and people who had senior management roles in other kinds of businesses: some lawyers, some finance people, etc.
https://www.nytco.com/board-of-directors/
I certainly have problems with the NYT. It is generally pro-corporate and pro-establishment. It is under strong pressure to accept bullshit at face value, and often succumbs (e.g. in the run up to the Iraq War). It tends far too strongly towards nonsensical “bothsidesism”
There are also a lot of excellent journalists working there, and they do a lot of important work. So it’s a mixed bag.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_W._Rogers_Jr.
For example, Brian McAndrews (also on the NYT board of directors) maxed out his campaign contributions to the RNC, Mitt Romney, GOP PACs, etc. But he also isn’t a political operative.
If we're going to play the "this source is biased" with every article published on HN, then we're going to see a lot of "people should know this paper has a Democratic bias".
[1]https://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2014/05/survey-7-percen...
But circling back, this is a theme. Conservative organizations and think tanks (Federalist Society is another example) have more Democrats than putatively objective professions (journalism, academia) have Republicans. That’s bad.
https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/record-lgbt-support-...
> Nearly nine million LGBT adults are registered and eligible to vote in the 2020 general election. Half of registered LGBT voters (50%) are Democrats, 15% are Republicans, 22% are Independent
You're also comparing the 2014 party identification data posted above to 2018 voting data, during the midterm election under perhaps the least popular Republican President in generations. Your own source shows that in 2014, LGBT votes favored Democrats 3:1, similar to the party identification data.
Moreover, many journalists register as independent to avoid perceptions of bias even if they identify strongly with one party. I haven't see data breaking down voting by party, but during the Trump era journalists donated to Clinton by a more than 20:1 margin: https://publicintegrity.org/politics/journalists-shower-hill...
(For those who need a refresher, Hoover's policies nearly destroyed America during the Great Depression and he spent the rest of his life trying to convince the world that unrestrained free markets and supply side economics was the cure all for everything.
Perhaps you should do some research before defending an ideological propaganda organization that has spent decades promoting economic theories that have been shown not to work.
For this particular opinion piece, they're including data from two economic downturns while excluding the growth period between them.
It’s traditionally left wing economic ideas that have been soundly repudiated over the last five decades. A return to left-wing economics was just soundly rejected again in the US (Sanders) and the U.K. (Corbyn).
None of the countries or politicians you mentioned have the same policies. Sanders doesn’t want government control of means of production (traditional left wing economics). All the European countries have universal healthcare and will never take it away.
In the 1960s, you had governments owning entire industries (state-owned enterprises), and micro-managing private businesses to the point where regulators were telling airlines and bus lines what fares they could charge. In Western Europe and Canada in particular, even though you didn't have "government control over the means of production" you had several countries (such as Canada) with more than 50% of the economy being the government or government-owned enterprises. That has been the "traditional left-wing" approach during the 20th century. Almost everyone moved away from those approaches starting in the 1970s and 1980s. From 1990 to 2000, Canada's government expenditures as a percentage of GDP dropped from over 50% to well under 40%. An entire tenth of the economy was returned to the private sector in just a decade. In Sweden, government spending peaked at almost 70% of the entire economy in 1995. A decade later, it was under 50%. One sixth of the economy was returned to the private sector.
To give a concrete example, licenses to use radio waves used to be awarded by bureaucrats based on their assessment of what was "in the public interest." They would evaluate applications from different companies for different uses for spectrum and decide who should get a license. (That sort of sweeping grant of regulatory authority was common in New Deal-era legislation.) Today, we and most European countries have replaced that with market-based approaches such as spectrum auctions. This has happened world-wide: the EU has issued directives requiring privatization of post offices and railroads. Macron has floated the idea of privatizing SNCF (which would be like privatizing Amtrak here). Denmark's post office is owned by a Swedish company and Stockholm's subway is operated by a Hong Kong company. These are all the kinds of policies advocated by Hoover Institution and other outfits.
You're also arguing to a degree against a straw man. Hoover Institution isn't some anarcho-capitalist outfit that advocates getting rid of the government. To use your universal healthcare example: Hoover Institution isn't suggesting to eliminate universal healthcare. But there are many different ways to implement universal healthcare. At one end you have the UK system, where the government employs the doctors and runs the hospitals. At the other end, you have systems like Switzerland's, based on mandatory private insurance.
Hoover Institution does not propose eliminating universal healthcare. Their focus has been on the cost inefficiencies created by using insurance to pay for routine medical care. Since at least the early 2000s, they have been advocating an approach that provides universal insurance coverage from the government for catastrophic medical care. But routine medical care would be paid for through health savings accounts (HSAs), where costs could be subject to market competition. Even if you don't fully agree with that approach, there is something to it. It's hard to ignore the fact that procedures that aren't covered by insurance are vastly cheaper: you can get laser eye surgery for a couple of thousand dollars per eye, while simply putting a broken arm in a cast costs insurance $2,500 on average. You don't even have to go Galt with that approach--the government could deposit money into the HSAs of low-income people to pay for routine healthcare. That would still preserve the benefits of market competition for those services.
No European country is going take away "universal healthcare." But, especially as social welfare systems get strained by aging populations, I can totally see countries adopting some of these...
70% in Sweden is against this change to for-profit social security companies, but the parties in power doesn't prioritise it.
And for whatever propaganda reason you keep using Sweden as some sort of objective evidence of free market utopia when the facts on the ground are just a vast increase in inequality due to aggressive neo-liberal policies for the last ~30 years.
One can reasonably disagree on whether all the consequences of these policies have been good ones. But if a whole bunch of countries tried "A" and then for the last 30 years have shifted away from "A" to "B" that is powerful evidence that there must be something to "B".
But even the people in the US have been in favour of some sort of universal health care since well before USSR collapsed but still haven't been able to "vote in" people supporting that. So it's a pretty strange argument to make.
No, my metric is whether pushing an ideology is the overt mission, which it is for ideological “think tanks”, including Hoover.
Parents are supposed to provide their children school supplies. And many teachers are reimbursed for that.
Probably a better metric is dollars spent per student.
But, I and most people I've talked to have been waiting years for this prediction to materialize. We'd all love it here if we could enjoy all that California has to offer with fewer transplants around.
And I'll add, if you've extracted your wealth off the back of California and it's people, it's only fair you pay back some of that to the state if you do decide to just take the money and run.
This sentiment has been around for decades. My family moved to Southern California from Illinois in the 1970s and there were bumper stickers that said, "Welcome to California, now go back home."
I think what is new are these tireless and never ending threats of leaving. It's like, ok, go already - sheesh.
So merely having wealth implies that you immorally "extracted it on the backs" of others?
Are you writing this from your 10th grade recess period?
> Are you writing this from your 10th grade recess period?
These types of comments don't belong here.
While some businesses aren't tied the are and will leave, most of them are making money from people in that area and need to stay there. If enough of those businesses leave, I'm sure the government will start to cater to them again, balancing things out again.
edit: VMware Cuts Pay for Remote Workers Fleeing Silicon Valley https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-11/vmware-tw...
The other parts of the essay do a bait-and-switch between noting that some businesses are leaving and implying that it’s the over-regulated business environment —- but if you drill down it’s really motivated by the state income tax. Which, yes, is high and can be significant especially on the sorts of people that are successful at running their own business, which is to say high earners.
And still, how many businesses did California lose in 2018 and 2019? Less than 800 total. So out of the 40 million people that live here, 0.001% chose to leave every year. Even if that’s a net number (which the author doesn’t clarify) it doesn’t rise to the level of something policy makers should care about.
One would think economists writing at the Hoover Institute would be more rigorous about their facts and argument, and not just whine in print and get it published.
[1]https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billHistoryClient.x...
I assume a business would have more than 1 employee?
In other words, I can't imagine very many businesses with lots of employees moving at all.
Of course they are headquarters, not the entire companies, so it's still only a few thousand.
Regardless, I don't think California is hurting for companies. At least not right now.
Income tax at 13% is enough to encourage some founders not to come here. 16% will be worse.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrEK5hgr3vY
As to your second point, I sincerely doubt California’s greatest problem is too few wannabe founders. ::smiley face emoji::
He moved to Puerto Rico to avoid taxes. He is an outlier but his sentiment is correct.
This is a spectrum. If California raised it's taxes to 100% no one would live in the state. If they dropped the taxes to near zero lots of people would move in given everything wasn't chaos. The higher the taxes go the more likely someone is to not move here.
> Buy a condo in Las Vegas, register to vote there, and spend all your time in San Diego.
California will charge you income tax for the time you spent in San Diego. California will even charge you income tax if you never set foot in the state if your income is earned from the state: https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2019/10/22/now-calif...
> I sincerely doubt California’s greatest problem is too few wannabe founders
You underestimate the influence of the rich. People mimic what they perceive to work. If rich people don't move here, people who aspire to become rich will not move here.
That would obviously depend on the services provided.
In 2018 California had 954,000 businesses[1] according to the Census bureau. If we take the "13,000 have left between 2009 and 2016" (why stop there?) that would represent nearly 1.4%. However the Hoover Institute doesn't actually tell you if they were "small business" or "regular businesses".
That can be important because there are nearly 4 million small businesses in the state[2] and a departure is a departure, small, medium, or large. If use 3.9 million as the total number of businesses that is just .3%.
Every year people argue "California taxes too much, businesses are leaving in droves" but that isn't supported by actual business license data nor employment data. Over the last 10 years California consistently has the largest economy of all 50 states.
Nobody likes taxes, and I personally don't like misleading articles.
[1] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/CA
[2] https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/advocacy/2018-Small-...
As much as I wish California had a better check and balance in its government and particularly policies, the report does not necessarily show that California has lost its way.
Furthermore, between 2009 and 2016, 1,250,000 businesses were started in California [1] (and more than a million went out of business).
But at least wingnut welfare still seems to be a thriving business in California.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/web/cewbd/ca_table9.txt
haha... that's not even a very good statistic... it has the 5th largest economy of all nations in the world.
https://github.com/RhysU/states
> there are nearly 4 million small businesses in the state
I only glanced through the references but I didn't notice anything which would show me why there's such a large discrepancy there. What am I missing?
It's not high enough to get me to move, but still. At the very least it should be waived if your profits are less than $800.
If this does pass expect it to effect most people with some assets in the state in a decade.
Income tax seems like an overall success to me. It's not a uniform rate; it's a progressive system. So if the net worth tax ends up being applied more universally and progressively, it seem like that vast majority of people not holding on to huge fortunes really have very little to worry about.
Here's the thing about California -- people living there have gotten net-worth-wealthy from real estate, and they have been able to capture huge increases without paying appropriate property taxes (because it's such a bear to attempt to increase property taxes). This has shifted paying for state services to use-based taxes, which are as far from progressive as you get (well, not as far as social security contributions, but not far off either).
What should probably happen: Figure out a revenue neutral approach that blends a net worth tax with a reduction in sales taxes. That puts money back in the pockets of people who most need it.
Interesting experiment: What would the social security tax rate be if you didn't cap the maximum income it applies to? It's currently around 15% (individual and employer contributions combined). I have a vague memory of calculating that it would be around 4%, if you eliminated the cap (maybe that is individual-only, can't remember).
In any case, social security is a poll tax, and the money flows straight into the general fund.
How would you quantify this?
> people living there have gotten net-worth-wealthy from real estate
1. NIMBY's, excessive regulation, limits on building all drive costs up. 2. Scared money from over seas looking for safe haven in gateway cities.
You're starting to see people flee CA in droves. Housing prices here will crash worse than the rest of the country. If the politicians don't reform laws and cut spending the state will turn into Detroit.
> This has shifted paying for state services to use-based taxes
Kicking fixed income grandma out of her house is immoral. People constantly moving due to property tax spikes is destabilizing.
CA's is not lacking in taxes. CA is spending way too much. Other states are doing fine collecting a fraction of what we do adjusted for any kind of metric you can think of.
> What would the social security tax rate be if you didn't cap the maximum income it applies to?
You incur more liabilities. The contract is I pay more in, I get more out later. It's a safety net. We cap it so people have a minimum and don't die in destitution.
> What should probably happen: Figure out a revenue neutral approach that blends a net worth tax with a reduction in sales taxes. That puts money back in the pockets of people who most need it.
A wealth tax is opening a pandora box. Enjoy paying more accountants. You don't know how much something is worth until you sell it. Who get's to decide how much my paintings or my stock is worth? A politician? Why is it ok to tax someone on income they've already paid taxes every year for the rest of their lives. People will flee and no one will move here. Detroit.
> social security is a poll tax
No. A poll tax is something much much different.