Is California Circling The Drain?

It’s been sad, watching the decay of California over the past 40-plus years. What’s worse is that its decaying state was self-inflicted. What was once the Golden State has gone through radioactive decay to become the Pyrite State. The politics has shifted from a nominally conservative state to one that appears to be to the left of the old Soviet Union. I swear it is even beginning to look something like the old Soviet Union.

I’m not the only one who sees California’s continuing transformation into something from a dystopian ‘future history’ novel. Victor Davis Hanson sees how California’s paradise has become purgatory.

California has become a test case of the suicide of the West. Never before has such a state, so rich in natural resources and endowed with such a bountiful human inheritance, self-destructed so rapidly.

How and why did California so utterly consume its unmatched natural and ancestral inheritance and end up as a warning to Western civilization of what might be in store for anyone who followed its nihilism?

The symptoms of the state’s suicide are indisputable.

Governor Gavin Newsom enjoyed a recent $98 billion budget surplus—gifted from multibillion-dollar federal COVID-19 subsidies, the highest income and gas taxes in the nation, and among the country’s steepest sales and property taxes.

Yet in a year, he turned it into a growing $45 billion budget deficit.

At a time of an over-regulated, overtaxed, and sputtering economy, Newsom spent lavishly on new entitlements, illegal immigrants, and untried and inefficient green projects.

A once vibrant state, both economically and culturally, is becoming a hellhole where infrastructure is failing, either due to neglect or “green” initiatives. The homeless population is skyrocketing and have taking over increasing amounts of the streets, parks, and the areas below the overpasses. It’s gotten so bad in San Francisco that there is a “Poop Map” app to warn residents about where the homeless have been relieving themselves.

Businesses are fleeing the downtown areas of San Francisco leaving much of the storefronts and malls empty. Even tech companies are leaving, with Google recently announcing it was leaving its 300,000 square foot office tower on the waterfront in less than a year. Other corporations and their employees have been making the move out of California as the business environment has become so hostile due to increasingly heavy regulation and constantly rising taxes and fees.

Newsom’s California has spent billions on homeless relief and subsidizing millions of new illegal migrant arrivals across the state’s porous southern border.

The result was predictably even more homeless and more illegal immigrants, all front-loaded onto the state’s already overtaxed and broken healthcare, housing, and welfare entitlements.

Newsome raised the minimum wage for fast-food workers to $22 an hour. The result was wage inflation rippling out to all service areas, unaffordable food for the poor, and massive shut-downs and bankruptcies of fast food outlets.

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California’s universities are hotbeds of ethnic, religious, and racial chauvinism and infighting. State officials, however, did little as its campuses were plagued for months by rampant and violent anti-Semitism.

Almost nightly, the nation watches mass smash-and-grab attacks on California retail stores. Carjackers and thieves own the night. They are rarely caught, even more rarely arrested—and almost never convicted.

Currently, Newsom is fighting in the courts to stop the people’s constitutional right to place on the ballot initiatives to restore penalties for violent crime and theft.

Crime has been legalized, at least when it comes to theft, and as a result, crime has skyrocketed and the state’s government can seem to figure out why. I have no doubt that other crimes have increased as well, particularly in light of a number of communities defunding their police departments and DA’s refusing to indict or try miscreants.

It doesn’t help that California has dictated a wide number of environmental initiatives that have put increasing burdens on residents and businesses, increasingly restricted energy supplies which caused energy prices to skyrocket, adding an even bigger burden to those residences and businesses.

California is entering a “doom loop”, a “situation in which one negative economic condition creates a second negative condition, which in turn creates a third negative condition or reinforces the first, resulting in a downward spiral.” It seems everything the cities and the state is doing makes things worse. Businesses and residents leave and then the cities and the state double down which makes things even worse. More businesses and residents leave and the cycle continues.

One has to wonder how long this downward spiral will continue, how long it will be before the Pyrite State implodes. And when it does, we have to worry if it will take other states, or worse, the entire nation with it.