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Townhall…
There
is no California
By
Victor
Davis Hanson
Driving
across California is like going from Mississippi to Massachusetts
without ever
crossing a state line.
Consider
the disconnects: California's combined income and sales taxes are among
the
nation's highest, but the state's deficit is still about $16 billion.
It's
estimated that more than 2,000 upper-income Californians are leaving
per week
to flee high taxes and costly regulations, yet California wants to
raise taxes
even higher; its business climate already ranks near the bottom of most
surveys. Its teachers are among the highest paid on average in the
nation, but
its public school students consistently test near the bottom of the
nation in
both math and science.
The
state's public employees enjoy some of the nation's most generous
pensions and
benefits, but California's retirement systems are underfunded by about
$300
billion. The state's gas taxes -- at over 49 cents per gallon -- are
among the
highest in the nation, but its once unmatched freeways, like 101 and
99, for
long stretches have degenerated into potholed, clogged nightmares
unchanged
since the early 1960s.
The
state wishes to borrow billions of dollars to develop high-speed rail,
beginning with a little-traveled link between Fresno and Corcoran -- a
corridor
already served by money-losing Amtrak. Apparently, coastal residents
like the
idea of European high-speed rail -- as long as noisy and dirty
construction
does not begin in their backyards.
As
gasoline prices soar, California chooses not to develop millions of
barrels of
untapped oil and even more natural gas off its shores and beneath its
interior.
Home to bankrupt green companies like Solyndra, California has mandated
that a
third of all the energy provided by state utilities soon must come from
renewable energy sources -- largely wind and solar, which presently
provide
about 11 percent of its electricity and almost none of its
transportation fuel.
How
to explain the seemingly inexplicable? There is no California, which is
a
misnomer. There is no such state. Instead there are two radically
different
cultures and landscapes with little in common, each equally
dysfunctional in
quite different ways. Apart they are unworldly, together a disaster.
A
postmodern narrow coastal corridor runs from San Diego to Berkeley,
where the
weather is ideal, the gentrified affluent make good money, and values
are green
and left-wing. This Shangri-La is juxtaposed to a vast impoverished
interior,
from the southern desert to the northern Central Valley, where life is
becoming
premodern…
Read
the rest of the article at Townhall
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