Before 2020, Los Angeles was a pretty good place to run a resteurant. If you didn’t mind the homeless or the high taxes. Last month, resteurant owners threw their resources into outdoor dining only be stamped on with an escalating series of shutdowns that killed their investments before, in some cases, they could even use them.
Now that Democrats are taking LA County back into the worst days of the lockdown again, they’re also offering payouts to resteurants and resteurant workers.
The money they’re offering isn’t enough and it’s not being drawn from anywhere. When you shut down the economy, you can’t just try subsidizing a piece of it. Taking out resteurants has a ripple effect on suppliers and every industry that feeds into it, from agriculture to web services to manufacturing. It’s not an isolated piece of the puzzle.
And there isn’t an economy left. As Los Angeles toys with police layoffs (though there’s still plenty of cash for homeless services that never actually reach the homeless), it’s killing the goose that laid all the golden eggs. The scale of the exodus at the ground level is staggering. People who don’t need to be in Los Angeles are leaving in droves. And those people, most often couples in their thirties, are the people who would form the homeowner class of tomorrow, are a major loss.
Los Angeles is shedding its future middle class at an unsustainable rate.
The people staying on need to be in Los Angeles for business reasons, but the industries they work in depend on a supply of young cheap talent, easily disposable, and move when they need to, like the film industry, subsidized by a massive amount of tax credits, or a chunk of the tech industry.
Lockdowns have devastated New York City. They’ve also devastated Los Angeles and a host of big blue cities. Their real effect will be felt decades down the road.
The nineties saw the recovery of the big city with a new generation choosing it as their base. Television overflowed with sitcoms about young urbanites in New York City, many of them coming from the suburbs. The twenties are likely to see a reversal with an exodus from failing cities that closely duplicates the seventies.
To some degree this was happening before the pandemic hit.
The black exodus from New York City to Atlanta changed the demographics of Georgia, making it more vulnerable to a Democrat takeover. The larger pandemic moves are going to have major demographic and political effects going forward.
They are likely to make the map more challenging for Republicans.
Democrats destroy cities, releasing populations like spores that then spread their destructive effects farther afield, then draw in more people in the next generation, and repeat the process. That’s one way to look at a political and demographic map of the country in the last three generations. Cities die, then corrupt what’s around them, are reborn, and repeat the process again.
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