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What Went Wrong With California?

angeia1101 mins

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Since the gold rush, California has been the go-to state for start-up companies. In recent years the Golden State has been losing the competition with neighboring states. More than 500 businesses have left California since 2005. Among these businesses were Fortune 500 companies and the economic impact from these departing companies is likely to be severe.

California’s tax laws and prohibitive regulations are the leading causes of the massive corporate exodus. The business-friendly conditions, opportunities to save costs, and home-ownership options for employees in other states are a few reasons companies have decided to leave California. These factors led to the first three-year decline in population in Californias history. In today's video we ask, what went wrong with California?

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110 thoughts on “What Went Wrong With California?”

    2. Would really like some better quality of data on these crime claims, Pat. I’ve lived here my whole life and none of that tracks with anything I’ve heard from people who actually live here regardless of politics. The only crime I’ve suffered my entire life here was the theft of my Warhammer minis.

    3. @@PBoyle the fact that individuals have to pay to clean up their information but banks pay nothing for data breaches is yet another clue that the rot is conplete in the US

    5. @@Crembaw I am glad that criminality can be explained singlehandedly by toughness on crime, no other factors envolved. It makes life simpler.

    1. ​@@rogermoore8977it got too blue. So he’ll go to a red state and trying to turn then little blue.

      Stay where you are. Stay at the place you effed up and don’t eff up our place.

    2. @@rogermoore8977 What’s a zombie in this context? Fentheads? Tranqwanks?

    4. @@banditkeithkingofduelmonsters The joke may have been that zombies eat brains and that – if the zombies are moving out – the average Californian lacks this organ.

    5. @@banditkeithkingofduelmonsters I’m talking about old school zombies not woke zombies.

    5. @@Rudini5 He he was a kid they called him the juice box. But, now he’s the drink.

  5. OOf that apple taxed in ireland gag is gonna win you a letter from a lawyer written in helvetica

    2. ​@martian8987 Windings is Windows dingbats, I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s illegal in the infinite loop

    3. I think Helvetica has been deprecated in favor of San Francisco and San Francisco Pro. Say what you will, but at least it’s not grotesque. 😉

    4. @@MarcosElMalo2 I’ve been handing my stuff over in Bahnschrift lately. I’m really a blue collar guy, it’s less nerdy/easy to read and nobody’s complained yet.
      Not that anyone works in ‘complaints’

  6. Hearing that California singlehandedly has a larger economy than all of India is insane, and puts some things in perspective…

    3. “Growing over half of America’s vegetables, fruits and nuts.”

      The dry humour is off the charts!

    4. One of my friends living in San Diego pays $2700/month for a 1BR and pays for a car because he has to drive to work. My other friend in Bangalore pays $130/month for a very similar apartment, and is driven to work by her employer, because that is common practice.

      Even GDP PPP is a pretty inaccurate tool for measuring the purchasing power of economies, except for imported goods that most people don’t actually need to get by.

    1. You’re not suppose to measure “art”, the same way you do other things. That said, a photo of a dog turd is more artistic, than almost all NFTs I’ve ever seen.

    5. @@HarryPujols If he had said immigrants who came illegally, he could have shown a photo of Melanie.

  8. My family went to Las Vegas from LA in the early 2000s shortly after 911. We had no future in CA, but in NV my mom was able to buy a house on her income alone after my dad passed when before the two together couldnt afford anything in CA.

    Social costs existed too, they had 2hr plus commutes to work each way. I was literally raised by my nanny, and knew more spanish than english and thought she was my mom because I never saw my real parents.

    NV was not perfect, I eventually moved on, but it gave two and then one professional a better shake than CA did, and put me through college virtually debt free (10k only) with state scholarships and other support.

    I hope California turns it around, there isnt a more beautiful place in the country, but things have to change.

    2. This in CA are changing and will continue to change, to the WORSE like they have been for 30+ years.

    3. @@dutchybag i live in south California, near LA. the worst geography in the country where we see people on the streets living in tents is the only view I’m getting while driving on the freeway and on my way home

    4. All the cali migrants unfortunately has made vegas an unreasonably expensive place to live, from rent to groceries. Yall might be used to exorbitant prices for everything but you dont *have* to pay 8 dollars for a half gallon of OJ everywhere in the country yall

  9. 24:22
    “Designed in California
    Assembled in China
    Taxed in Ireland” 😂😂😂

    1. Applies only to large multinationals. If you’re a business headquartered in California, you’re fucked.

    3. “Double Irish with a Dutch Sandwich” – A tool used mainly by United States multinationals since the late 1980s to avoid corporate taxation on non-U.S. profits.

    4. Yet California real estate prices continue to be in the stratosphere. It’s always hard to reconcile the notion that a place is screwed or f*cked or whatever when the place you’re talking about also has massively high real estate prices. It’s like the Yogi Berra saying – no one goes there anymore, it’s too crowded. And a ton of pepple have been talking about how it’s unsustainable – for at least 30 years. So yeah, might be unsustainable, but might also stay afloat longer than most of us stay alive.

  10. I’m not homeless, so I can’t speak from experience on the matter, but I do want to offer one possible reason why half the homeless are in the Golden state. If I were homeless, it’s possible to live year-round on the streets of the metropolitan sections California. It wouldn’t be pleasant, but survival is possible. The same cannot be said for, say…Maine or Wyoming. You’d die from the bitter cold. That fact alone would pay a large part of where I’d want to migrate to, if possible.

    1. Given that such a natural incentive exists, CA would be smart to create a disincentive to counter an influx from other states.

    2. @@jacqdanieles For decades CA’s response to this was tough on crime, where homeless people would end up in prison, but then budget issues happened and it turned out CA was spending over 200k a year per prisoner, so the response was to reduce sentencing for non-violent offenders.

    3. ​@@jacqdanielesman. You’re saying you’d rather want them to die elsewhere… That’s messed up.

  11. A couple other pressure’s on California’s water problems is their staggeringly wasteful approach to irrigation and their rotting water infrastructure. Not that many years ago, nearly 40% of the treated water in LA was lost to leakage and *nobody* was making any serious effort to fix that.

    1. The problem is that no politician wants to take water rights away from farmers, even though they use and waste most of the water due to the stupid regulations from hundreds of years ago.

    2. Sounds like you probably have, but if you haven’t read Cadillac Desert, the best book on CA water

    3. Don’t forget the homelessness making the place looks like a post apocalyptic wasteland

    4. Did you notice Texas was number 5? They don’t pay income tax but how much you want to bet they will soon?

  13. I moved from CA to MI, losing 10% salary, but has housing cost slashed by half, gasoline cost slashed by half, general living expenses down by 20%,, and is much happier with life in general. The schools are better with longer hours more suitable to working parents too.

    2. And winter for four months of the year. Snow pants rather than board shorts in January.

  14. the water shortage doesn’t just hurt agriculture. it directly impacts residents with obscene water bills. i left the state ten years ago, but back then my water bill was more than my electric, internet, and recycling combined.
    also it’s hard to overemphasize how wild the housing market is.

    1. the Chinese suitcase money left about ten years ago when dad passed in the San Gabriel Valley. In our safe community in north El Monte there is NO rentals and few sales, but house prices are steadily up. The elephant in the room is the underwater homes (the list is public on a map) that date back to the credit crunch almost 20 years ago. rather than leave and screw their credit rating, families and extended members stayed, but the BANKS have owned the places for those years (i.e. the people pay a mortgage so on paper they “own@ but not really, so what is happening?? No MAINTENANCE. Those homes are becoming “droppers”, lot value. A couple I’ve known since HS have just had their house marked uninhabitable by the city, they’re OUT. A few months later, Richard died and it’s all feral cats now. surprised squatters have’t found it, but it’s on our quiet cul-de-sac!!! this isn’t going to end well, and it ain’t over until it’s over.

    2. They have HOA’s that will not allow zero scapes. In other words, you can’t grow what naturally grows in the state. You need lawns, and plants that need water to survive.

    3. I live in California and the water bill was never higher than electric. Maybe you had a farm or an Olympic size swimming pool. Sounds like a BS.

    4. @@lesp315 how wonderful for you. and no, i lived in a tiny apartment with 3 roommates in san fran. we made a house effort to take short showers. i don’t have receipts to prove it in a random comments section, but it was the case; my water bill was nuts.

  15. I remember california when i was a kid… Seemed like a mythical place full of synth wave music, hot babes and eddie murphy

    3. Growing up San Francisco was able to me as a 90s kid as the mythical American dream. Lovely homes, safe, clean, stunning views, friendly neighbors. No one ever mentioned the street poop.

    4. @@zackaryfrancisco2795 poop wasn’t there in the 1990s. I was there a lot then with a girlfriend whose mom lived there. Beautiful city then.

  16. As an economic refugee from California I can really agree with all of this! It was a great place to live 30 to 50 years ago, but, sadly, it has changed for the worse. I miss it, but I am never going back.

    One thing that you didn’t go into is the number of houses that were bought by investors, rather than residents. Over 20% of houses bought in many California cities are bought by investors who have no intention of ever living in those houses. As a financial market California Real Estate is a much more attractive investment than the stock market or other options!

    4. Very much agree on the impact of real estate speculators. They’re why building new luxury housing isn’t creating vacant housing. There are perverse incentives that reward corporate landlords for squatting on vacant property that can’t be rented at their asking price.

  17. Not sure if people remember or Patrick heard the story but 7-12 years ago, city of San Francisco was trying to build a public toilet in a park for the homeless, it paid over 1.2 million dollars to have a single toilet built, I believe like 3 different consulting companies were brought in, 2 architectural companies worked on it, it had to clear 5-7 different commissions including environmental impact, there were lawyer fees at almost every step, I believe the actual construction of the toilet was the smallest of the expenses to build the actual public toilet. California is a poster child for doing what sounds good instead of doing what works.

    1. Patrick Boyle cites the Economist, which recently endorsed Kamala Harris. Focus onhe politics. The plethora of dirty politicians who enrich themselves manipulating laws .

    3. That’s nothing. You should hear our committee argue over where the new Coke machine should go.

    4. This isn’t a new problem. Years ago SF was trying to put in a half dozen public toilets. There was a French company that had a successful design installed all over the world. It was too small to sleep in, and the doors opened automatically after a set period of time, so it wasn’t a good place to do drugs either. It cleaned itself between uses, and seemed like the perfect solution.

      But it wasn’t wheelchair accessible, so the city paid the manufacturer millions of dollars for a larger version. Unfortunately the junkies figured out how to jam the doors shut, and it was big enough to stretch out in, so they moved in. IIRC, the city ended up tearing them out after less than a year.

  18. I am 71 years old and have lived in So Cal all my life.

    What helped my wife and I afford to live a comfortable life in So Cal is that we got on the real estate merry-go-round very early in our marriage (like less than 6 months). We traded up twice from our first home (a 3 bedroom townhouse) and used the equity in our first 2 houses to trade up. We now live in Ventura County (right next to LA County) and we own our house outright with no mortgage debt.

    Bottom line, in order to live the ‘California Dream’ you better have a lot of money. It’s very hard for a middle income family to get a financial foothold in California today compared to past generations like mine (I’m a Boomer). I know lots of people who have moved out of California in the past 10 years to live in more affordable locations.

    California’s two biggest financial hurdles are housing costs and taxes. We pay $19K a year for property taxes and are in the 9.0% marginal state tax rate. Our homeowner’s insurance is almost $5K a year.

    1. It’s not only California that house prices are beyond what most young people can afford. Houses have shot up in price while most wages have barely budged for 20yrs. Adults still living with their parents in their 40’s have skyrocketed.

    2. One of the happiest days of my life was when my daughter moved back from CA to MO. She made an excellent salary but struggled to stay afloat. It is a beautiful place but a one party state makes it difficult to get ahead.

    3. I’ve also been in Southern California my whole life, though I’m 30 years younger than you. My own experience has been that most of my friends who have started families have moved out, California is too expensive to raise kids. Most of the people I know who are left are either boomers who bought houses when the market was more affordable, or people my age or younger who have no plans on having kids and have the disposable income to actually live here.

      I think housing prices in California will stay awful until the boomers start dying off in droves (no offense). They’ll leave their houses to their kids, many of which have moved out of state and will just want to sell. The market is suddenly flooded with homes and prices begin to go down. Unfortunately though I think California is so expensive it won’t ever get competitive to middle class families again. You either need to be rich enough to afford the taxes, or poor enough to qualify for government support.

  19. The California dream ended in the 1970s when housing costs began to shoot up. In the San Fernando Valley, back then you could buy a home for 30 to 40 thousand dollars. Try doing that today.

    1. Ok I’ll try, I’ll get back to you.

      Edit: They laughed at me and called me poor then said something about a bababoodee rizzler gyat? 😢

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