Why live in California?
The weather is nice. And if you’re in the film industry or the tech industry, the odds are good that you need to be there to find work. But what happens when Democrats take over the state and not only wreck it, but also lock it down? A lot of people end up permanently out of work, but a lot of Silicon Valley starts working remotely.
And once that happens, there’s no real reason to stay.
Fed-up Californians have been trading their cramped, pricey apartments for affordable living in cheaper states for decades. Now, California’s businesses are making similar calculations after a monthslong remote work experiment triggered by the pandemic…
Oracle and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, an IT company that spun off from HP during a 2015 corporate split… announced in December they would move their headquarters to Texas while maintaining a presence in California and allowing many employees to remain there.
Also this month, the Bay Area cybersecurity firm Tanium announced it was moving to the Seattle area while allowing employees to “live where they want, and work from there.” Palantir, a data analytics company co-founded by billionaire investor Peter Thiel, shifted its headquarters to Denver before going public this fall. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has also said he is moving to Texas, where he is building a new factory; Tesla’s headquarters remains in Palo Alto.
That’s going to be a problem because California Democrat have been spending money like crackhead sailors, and a lot of that money comes from the top down.
Nearly half of the state’s personal income tax revenue — 46 percent in 2018 — comes from California’s top 1 percent of earners, according to data from the state Franchise Tax Board. And about two-thirds of those dollars come from the top 5 percent.
California can always raise taxes. It’s done so repeatedly, but there are only so many ways to do that. The push has been on to raise property taxes by ending caps, financed by Big Tech donors like Mark Zuckerberg, who want taxes to fall on the middle class, instead of on Facebook, but that push has failed.
And if it were to succeed, the results would lead to an even bigger exodus and major problems with property values.
Then there’s Hollywood. Much of the actual filming takes place outside the country or outside the state where it’s cheapest and the tax credits are the biggest. This is still where the networking and a lot of the technical work takes place, but a lot of that can easily be shifted to remote work or pushed into outsourced hubs.
Conservatives shouldn’t cheer too loudly. The exodus of major Silicon Valley firms is likely to further ‘californicate’ Texas. And that goes triple for Hollywood.
What’s happening is a familiar phenomenon in which a ruling class wrecks its own area by inviting in a lot of cheap labor and then moves on. New York’s demographic geography has been defined by these moves. But California is doing it on a national scale with disastrous results.
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