So if you have a segment of engineers who believe living in SV is "smart" financially... do you really want them to make opinions on government spending? I'm not saying that "people not living in Cali" are instantly money smart. But, you don't quickly take financial advice from a friend that's gone bankrupt twice, is always in crippling debt due to overspending and throws money at ideas largely based on keywords.
I guess my long drawn out rant is just the problem where lots of folks consider SV "smart". Thus they're allowed to have an affecting opinion on things they're truly not "smart" about.
A lot of these arguments could be made about New York, specifically Manhattan. There are people there that can genuinely afford it, and there are people that struggle financially because they want to be there (for whatever reason).
There are obviously lots of people in the Bay Area struggling to make ends meet, including some software engineers. But the reality is most talented people here are so well-paid it's not an issue. You're talking about $120k salaries, I'm talking about $100k signing bonuses. Of course the average engineer here isn't swimming in money, but there are plenty of people who make so much more money here that it's a wise financial decision to stay. Personally I ran the numbers and I put more money in my savings every year here than I would anywhere else.
I completely agree with the general sentiment that software engineers in particular suffer from the Dunning-Kruger effect and I regularly have to explain to engineers that the world outside of software is not so neatly contained. But the notion that most software engineers here are not smart because they choose to live somewhere expensive is irrelevant if you aren't also talking about how much more money they make to live here.