Victor Davis Hanson: California Is Stuck in a Doom Loop

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**Victor Davis Hanson** (2:30)
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. We've talked a lot about the crisis that California is in and what it may predict for the rest of the United States. Should they follow the California Blue Model? And many of them are. I guess we could sum it up as a doom loop, a doom loop. California is in a cycle where there's no chance, unless it makes radical change. It can get out of it as it heads toward what we would might call third world extinction. Now, we need to break it down from the symptoms to the cause. The Greeks had a word in the historian Thucydides, they said there was a, he said there was a prophosis, a superficial explanation or an apparent explanation or sometimes a disingenuous explanation. And then there was the idea, the real problem. And people don't really want to talk about the real problem. But here's the symptoms as we know it, the prophosis. We have the highest taxes in the United States, 13.3 income tax, highest gas taxes among the top 10 highest sales taxes.
We have the highest gas, gasoline prices. We have the highest electricity prices in the continental United States. We have some of the worst services. Reason Magazine said our roads are 49th in the nation. We know that our schools are in the bottom 10% based on test scores.
Half of all births are conducted through Medi-Cal, our state welfare system. 40% are on it. 25% don't or can't pay their power bills every month. We've got the largest fraud in the country. It may, over many years, have extended up until now $250 billion.
Okay, so those are the symptoms. And we know the manifestation of those symptoms. We have super majorities in the state legislature. Super majorities in the Senate and the House.
And we have only seven of 52 congressional seats are held by Republicans. Donald Trump won 38 percent. Most Republican presidents win 40 percent. That's 13 percent of our Congress people. And remember, that's considered too generous by the left. Given their new redistricting plan, we may go down to five Republicans. And because we've had no statewide offices, I mean governor, we haven't appointed a liberal, we haven't appointed anybody but a liberal judge, no conservatives, no Republican judge on the state superior court, appellate court, and supreme court in 15 years. And the federal system, the ninth district is already known to be quite liberal. So if you go to court in California, you're going to be facing a liberal judge. Just the truth. But here's the real problem. Those are symptoms. The real problem is 300,000 to 500,000 Californians are leaving the state. They can't put up with what I just discussed. They're sick of it. They're sick of it for a very strange reason that's not so apparent. Yes, they're sick of paying all that money in taxes, in power, and getting terrible services, terrible roads, not very good health care, terrible schools, but they're being insulted. They're saying, go, go. We don't want you. That's the message from California. Elon Musk is worth a trillion dollars. Can you imagine had he stayed? He wanted to stay in California. We're losing a lot of the Google people, and Mark Zuckerberg are leaving. They're leaving because not just do they pay a lot, and they get very little, but they're being insulted by this government. They're, it's truly a socialist government, that government in the whitest sense of the word, state, local offices. But people do not like wealthy, successful people. They feel they cheated, or as Elizabeth Warren said, you didn't build that.