Businesses Are Fleeing California. Blame Bad Government
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Another big contributor is ridiculous property taxes where two adjacent identical homes might pay 4x different rates because of when they bought the house. Making it harder for cities to have predictable taxes and requires higher property taxes (but only for those that have bought recently), which makes home owners less mobile and the real estate market less efficient. Just seems insane that when house prices spike (see problem #1) that cities are often on the verge of bankruptcy.
It seems like no small coincidence that all the restrictive construction/environmental policies date to the 1960s and 1970s. This is in the state that once passed a State Constitution amendment to undo a fair housing act:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_California_Proposition_14
But property taxes for homeowners are very predictable
My concern is government always wants more money - prop 13 put a hard limit on that.
Prop tax money should be vey predictable for cities - assume no houses are sold, yearly increases around 2%, work with that
> Just seems insane that when house prices spike (see problem #1) that cities are often on the verge of bankruptcy.
What’s the correlation here? Don’t get it
California high-speed rail was pitched as a solution to address housing costs at the estimated cost of $80.3 bln https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-02-12/californ...
The problems you mentioned are are only becoming obvious since the high-speed rail project been so mismanaged.
Today, I'm of two minds about it. Maybe my state would benefit from an influx of jobs. And we've got plenty of land that isn't being used for anything but farming, which is becoming an increasingly extractive and polluting industry.
On the other hand, whatever we've got to offer right now is apparently not enough, so I would wonder what further concessions my state would offer. We already have lower wages, non-competes, crumbling roads, and a gutted education system. Why isn't that enough?
I think we'd all be better off if we could reduce the ability of state governments to pit the common people against one another.
My state has been doing those things, and has just been digging itself deeper onto the hole. It's hard to imagine them trying any harder.
Most importantly, we've been waiving environmental regulations, either overtly or through lack of enforcement. Our courts have already forbidden the government from implementing statewide public health policy during the COVID crisis. Our state motto is "Open for Business." Bars and restaurants are in full swing throughout a large portion of the state.
If our drinking water becomes toxic, we're kind of screwed.
The two biggies are wages and taxes because those things affect the bottom line in an immediate and measurable way. Everything else is a smoke screen.
Regulations need to concentrate on basics that keep you safe and the infrastructure running, however most of local (and central) government these days is to micro-manage everything and produce statistics for how good they are doing.
The prosperity of any smaller city in the US Midwest depends to a large extent on what industries it's lucky enough to attract, most importantly hospitals and universities. Mine also happens to be the seat of state government.
The government of the county that I live in has been exemplary in managing the public health response to the COVID in the face of a total leadership vacuum at both the state and federal level.
We're one of the most prosperous counties in the state, yet we are believed to be the county that is suffering the most under activist government.
As Britain leaves the EU tonight it's worth reflecting on the differential between the states in the US and whether / how the feds would enforce a level playing field...
Do you not see why that fed strategy would backfire given that Britain LEFT THE EU? One of the major goals of the EU was to iron out county favoring quirks in the law and it's become such a meddlesome entity that one of it's major participants is leaving.
I'm not sure what those exact doomsday scenarios that you're referring to are, but for practical purposes my understanding nothing has actually changed yet, and those changes that will happen are still a few hours away. It really is too early to tell what kind of consequences there will be for the UK. It might eventually end up as a little English rump state, for instance.
That's not correct.
First, over the course of the pandemic so far, California total deaths per capita are around 40th lowest among the states.
Second, if we just look at recent deaths rather than over the whole pandemic, they are also not anywhere near the top per capita.
They do have the worst or second worst new cases currently, which looks like it is peaking. That peak looks like it is going to be quite a bit lower than several other states had, though. California's third wave is higher than theirs now because they had their peaks 30-60 days ago.
The record holder in the US for new cases 1 week average per capita remains North Dakota, followed by South Dakota, Wyoming, Iowa, Tennessee, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Nebraska, Wisconsin, and then California.
Customizable graphs to explore this stuff here [1], along with downloads of the underlying data.
If that's such a problem, why has the California Republican party chosen to remain so uncompetitive there?
In America, you only have single party rule if the other party either chooses not to compete or competes incompetently (e.g. runs candidates who are out of step with the electorate they need to appeal to, or doesn't run candidates at all).
given this is not a single legislature issue.
It's a repeating voting pattern.
Hell, we are at the point where corporations just throw out they are going to move somewhere and states throw tax breaks at them for the promise of X number of jobs - which never ends up happening.