tl;dnr
It's so crowded, nobody goes there anymore (after Yogi Berra)
The great California Exodus
31–40 of 69 posts
Re: The great California Exodus
#32At the high end of moving out (rich people), California is unappealing because it's budgetfucked. Education, transportation, public services, and everything else will suffer for a long time. This leads to their crazy high state income tax and crazy high sales taxes and municipalities doing insane additional taxes for businesses on top of everything else. The Bay Area may be the best place to create Show Me Your Food…
"In other words, the highest-income Californians were less likely to leave the state after the millionaire tax was passed." http://www.stanford.edu/group/scspi/_media/working_papers/Va... By the way, the reason the state is "budgetfucked" as you eloquently put it is because of low taxes, not high taxes. You may be interested in reading about Proposition 13, a scheme under which people who are sitting on massively val…
People refer to Prop 13 as if it's going to be the budget-savior, but don't forget that property taxes are distributed to municipalities (counties and cities), so if Prop 13 was dropped, wealthy cities would get even more revenues, while ghettos would remain the same, as there's more turnover at low-end of the real estate market (so constant reassessment of property values that more or less follows the boom and bust cycle).
City of Mountain View ran at a profit for a few years, from what I recall, so having more money from Google might result in couple of additional parks or extra lanes on Shoreline, but not going to be the game changer for South Central LA.
Re: The great California Exodus
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with the great California Exodus is the people leaving CA end up trying to re-create CA wherever they move. Just look at the Californication of Seattle, Hawaii and Denver.
Anecdote: Walking around Seattle, I stumbled into an olive oil/butter shop (think: wine shop, but not). In this shop was an 8 year old girl. She, in the shop without a parent or guardian, asked the attendant, "Which one of these is the organic butter? I only eat organic." Who knew the insanity started so young?
Expensive/organic/artisanal food is a native Northwest thing, though -- it's not just a California import.
Re: The great California Exodus
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
"In other words, the highest-income Californians were less likely to leave the state after the millionaire tax was passed." http://www.stanford.edu/group/scspi/_media/working_papers/Va... By the way, the reason the state is "budgetfucked" as you eloquently put it is because of low taxes, not high taxes. You may be interested in reading about Proposition 13, a scheme under which people who are sitting on massively val…
Quite true. Prop 13 is an abomination. Instead of only homeowners paying reasonable real estate tax, they've essentially made everybody in california subsidize low-tax-locked real estate owners. Now you get to have the fun of paying virtual real estate tax without owning property. It turns out, we have the ability to not live there! It's not quite sane to take a multimillion dollar exit in California when Seattle has…
>>> they've essentially made everybody in california subsidize low-tax-locked real estate
That's not true - your tax base is set at the time of the purchase. And California real estate market is quite vibrant compared to other states.
Re: The great California Exodus
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it obviously does matter. The conclusion of the paper was clearly written before the rest of it. Gems totally unsupported by the preceding evidence include "California has cut taxes in the past, most dramatically with 1978’s Proposition 13, and when it has done so, prosperity has followed. Ballot propositions this November aim to do the reverse, raising taxes on business owners while the state is still strugg…
The point is taxes are second order. Locally (st.city) are based on either property values and incomes. (1) if incomes cannot support paying the housing costs, they cannot support higher taxes, because there is no excess earning power; (2) if people cant pay the rent, then they are likely to move away to "somewhere more affordable". Most people spend ~30 pc of their income on tax and another ~30pc income on housing.…
The funny thing is the counties where people weren't leaving (SF) had the highest housing prices.
Re: The great California Exodus
#36The Manhattan Institute is an explicitly conservative political organisation. That doesn't inherently invalidate any of the conclusions they draw, but readers should be aware that they have been made with a pro-free market, anti-big government mindset. Others may draw quite different conclusions from the same facts.
> The Manhattan Institute is an explicitly conservative political organisation.
Are we going to do this for all submissions? Newspapers' leanings, political donations of blog authors...?
And if so, would it be reasonable to expect examples of actual bias? Or at least credible sources for that kind of information?
Re: The great California Exodus
#37It seems like there are several additional ways one could spin the data in this report. From a selfish standpoint, should I, as a Californian in a booming industry that looks like it will remain a central part of the economy for the forseeable future, be too broken up about a lot of people moving elsewhere for jobs? Should I want the metro area I live in to be seeing double-digit-percentages population growth over de…
It's perfectly fine to live in California as a salaried employee, you're likely not to get screwed.
For an entrepreneur, where you might subside 7 years on Ramen noodles to (maybe) have a large windfall during the 8th year, California places an unreasonable penalty on that once-in-a-lifetime event.
Therefore from selfish standpoint, if you start a business, grow it fast somewhere else, and then, when growth plateaus, bring it to California (let's face it, it's still a large consumer market).
http://allthingsd.com/20121204/what-proposition-30-means-for...
Re: The great California Exodus
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quite true. Prop 13 is an abomination. Instead of only homeowners paying reasonable real estate tax, they've essentially made everybody in california subsidize low-tax-locked real estate owners. Now you get to have the fun of paying virtual real estate tax without owning property. It turns out, we have the ability to not live there! It's not quite sane to take a multimillion dollar exit in California when Seattle has…
It's California's stupid fault for picking that tax system. It's not like residence-based income taxes were decreed by God as the only way to fund a government.
residence based taxation is a stealth wealth tax. us is illegal wealth tax directly. problem was in 1970s, people bought 10k house on 3k/ye wages. 10 yes later, it was million dollar house. 3k/wages cannot pay taxes on million dollar house. so that is why they passed such a law. otherwise, people would have all had to sell house for capital gains and move out of california in 1970s.
This is not justifying system, but explaining how these thnings come about. Again, it has to do with people not being able to afford the either the real-estate (at market values) or the taxes based on their incomes. taxes just second order effect though.
Re: The great California Exodus
#39So that's why my rent here in the SF Bay Area is decreasing! (Not). I admit it was kind of nice after the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989 and the dot-com bust in 2001 to have some breathing room. Alarms about hordes leaving California have the opposite effect on me, as I look forward to uncrowded hiking trails and affordable real estate.
Yeah, that's the joke. It's a place where nobody wants to live, where all the houses cost a fortune and there's a waiting list for every apartment.
The funny thing is there's a big generational shift underway right now. People born around 1980 and later are much more likely to express a desire for a real urban environment, like that found in San Francisco, New York, and throughout Europe, instead of the suburban environment favored by their parents. Now, far be it from me to judge anyone, but it seems to me that anyone leaving California for Nevada is clearly expressing their preference for the suburban or even rural lifestyle. That lifestyle, being extremely energy intensive, is the definition of non-sustainable. If other states are attracting residents because they have lots of that unsustainable development, I think they can pretty much have as many of those people as they want. I far prefer to see California investing in real cities, attracting the kinds of people who prefer to live in those real cities, and building a future that actually has a future.
It won't be very long (certainly within fifty years) before non-places like Las Vegas and Phoenix are viewed as bizarre, obvious mistakes of our past.
Re: The great California Exodus
#40Seems odd to try and focus only on domestic migrations. In 1990 the population of California was 29.9M, in July 2011 it was 37.6M. The total population has continued to climb - https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=kf7tgg1uo9ude_&...
The net draw to California still seems to be in place.
I moved from California to Utah in 2007. The reason? My wife wanted to be closer to her family there and my job didn't care where I lived.