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Does anyone else find it odd that the top five slots are dominated by four blue states and a state that has been blue until very recently?
No. Blue states/cities are NOTORIOUS for being NIMBY racists. Middle class and poor liberals/Dems are just too ignorant and/or ill-informed to see what's going on.
Historically, California has not been a state with a disproportionately large unskilled population, like Appalachia or parts of the South. As a result of immigration, however, by 2008 California had the least-educated labor force in the nation in terms of the share its workers without a high school education. This change has important implications for the state.
In 1970, California had the 7th most educated work force of the 50 states in terms of the share of its workers who had completed high school. By 2008 it ranked 50th, making it the least educated state.
The large share of California adults who have very little education is likely to strain social services and make it challenging for the state to generate sufficient tax revenue to cover the demands for services made by its large unskilled population.
California is home to the high-tech and entertainment industries, has one of the nation’s largest tourism industries, and has the most productive agricultural land in the country. Historically it was not a state with a disproportionately large unskilled population, unlike Appalachia, parts of the American South, or the Rio Grande valley. Over the last four decades, however, immigration has significantly increased the size of the unskilled population in the state relative to the rest of the country. California now has one of the most skewed income distributions of any state and has relatively high rates of welfare use and lack of health insurance.
Is this why we had to pass health care without seeing what was in the documents?
It may "appear" as if California is prospering if you look only at the size of its economy, but it has the highest poverty rate in the country. And one of the highest unfunded public employee pension obligation liabilities.
Indeed. California has high population growth relative to the other developed economies, which is entirely due to the high natural growth rate of the Hispanic population (momentum from higher Hispanic fertility pre-2008) and some foreign immigration from places like Central America and Asia (California is the closest state to those areas). Were it not for that California's population would be rapidly shrinking, and with it its total GDP*. Total GDP equals your GDP per capita multiplied by your population, so your total GDP can increase by a respectable amount while the GDP growth per capita is in the gutter along with your living standards.
We should also take into account that the country we're comparing California to is France; they've long had a per capita GDP well behind the US average, their growth has been even deeper in the gutter than California's recently, and the French economy is pretty much the opposite of "business-friendly". A better comparison would be Texas, which is a state in the same country at a similar latitude, with similar size and demographics; as it happens California's per capita GDP growth was above the US average in 2014, but only half of Texas's figure (source). California's GDP is also quite a bit greater than Texas's, but again this is due to larger population; GDP per capita is $62000 in California compared to $60000 in Texas, which would seem to give an advantage to California, but given the significant difference in cost of living, at purchasing power parity Texas is significantly more productive ($60000 buys more in Texas than $62000 does in California). California also has the highest poverty rate of any state in the country after you adjust for cost of living and that rate isn't coming down much over time - that's certainly not indicative of a prosperous state. If you want an example of a prosperous blue state Minnesota would be your best candidate - they do at least as well as California on all these metrics (often much better) except for 2014's per capita GDP growth (where it was below the national average).
*As we see in Japan in the past 10-20 years; since 2000 Japan and the US have had about the same per capita GDP growth (i.e. deep in the gutter) but Japan's total GDP has barely grown at all because the population slightly shrunk, while the US's GDP has been inflated by its population growth.
As someone who relocated to Tn. I have to agree.
Low cost of living does not a utopia make.
True; however, low cost of living can allow many in the middle class live in ways the middle class in California can not.
As an example, I live about 18 miles from the center of a major city. My house is good sized at 3,600 sq ft and sits on the water allowing me to go jet skiing or wakesurfing after work on any given day. The lot is large enough for me to have a good sized pool with an outdoor kitchen and plenty of leftover yard.
In California, I'd have to be rich to have such a setup.
Well, we could have copied Kansas' success story, right? The Koch's favorite governor turning the state into a laboratory for the wettest of wet free-market dreams. Drastic cuts to business and income taxes, that should make for a nice zoom along the Laffer curve to prosperity and full coffers and... Oh.
I'll take governor Moonbeam any day of the week, thanks. Now, if he could fix the 405/101...
Yep, Governor Moonbeam is a forward thinking Democrat, while the "business friendly" types like Scott Walker and Sam Brownback are imploding their economies while gutting their working class. But slashing the tax rate has made many select business leaders very wealthy while 99% of their state starves.
Yet poor whites still line up in droves to vote for their own self destruction.
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