[moomoo11]

Do you live in California?

I mean sure it might be wasteful (name one entity private or public that doesn’t suffer from assholes and corruption), but the quality of life here is far better than in Texas or any other state.

We have labor rights, environmental protection, hell even the ethical farming practices like how eggs are produced. Life here is objectively better for the people.

It’s obviously more expensive. There’s demand for people to live here. Even if some people leave more want to move here or wish they could. Shitting on California is 90% of the time some form of cope for many people. They know they could never make it here so the best they can do is complain about it from whatever **hole they’re in.

[epistasis]

The major reason California is expensive isn't because of the things that make it nice to live here, it's because a faux-environmentalist love of sprawl and protection of single family zoning from denser, more sensible housing options for those that want them.

Instead, Californians with high incomes, but not enough to pay the outrageous price for ownership, pay outrageous rents to landlords that repackage unupdated 1970s starter homes at extreme luxury prices.

Once we stop letting landlords exploit productive labor by removing the regulatory capture, the quality of life will increase, merely through allowing more people to experience the higher quality of life. However, reversing that trend is proving extremely difficult, despite fairly widespread support among the voting population.

[gamblor956]

Single family zoning was implemented back in the days when California was a red state. California is still a very red state; there are more Republicans in California than most of the U.S. South combined.

[SilverElfin]

I don’t disagree with what you are saying. But the rise in spending per capita, even if you adjust for inflation or population growth or other factors, doesn’t make sense.

I agree the demand drives up certain costs like housing. But those are in the private markets. But I don’t understand is what the state government and local governments are spending all of the money on. And there are certainly some prominent wasteful programs such as the high-speed rail project or various programs for homelessness. I expect there’s more of those kinds of waste.

In the end, I think simply giving people money is an effective way to make society better. I’m not against the taxation as much as the low return for the additional spending that has happened in the last few decades.

[epistasis]

It looks like the increase in spending has come from expansion of Medicaid, K-12 education, housing programs and homelessness programs.

I can't speak to the Medicaid expansion or K-12 funding that much, but I do know that the spending on housing programs have been a boondoggle, mostly to fund more first-time purchasers chasing after the same fixed supply of housing, driving up prices even more. And the homelessness problem is created by the refusal to allow housing to be built. Even the supposed successes, like SB 79, have been minor, and not allowed much more building at all. And in more conservative places like Southern LA, state laws attempting to force cities to permit more housing have been met with extreme resistance, even for the small gains that the state laws make.

For K-12 spending, that's been a disaster ever since Prop 13 gutted property tax systems and forced the state to step in to make up the difference. And Prop 13 is at the core of the housing problem as well, incentivizing underuse of land by giving such massive tax breaks to those who stay in a massive house after they have an empty nest (mostly fixed very recently), and inducing severe tax penalties to those who would like to stay in the same location but build a bunch more housing (like Greece's polykatoikias, which solved Athen's severe housing crunch...).

And high housing costs means that all labor is far more expensive than it would be otherwise, which makes building the housing expensive, which makes it difficult to expand the workforce to build housing, etc. etc. etc. Lack of housing is at the core of all rising costs in California, and the bad policies such as Libertarian Prop 13 and NIMBYs are most of it.

[gwbrooks]

Lived in California for 30 years -- it's an amazing place. But it's hubris to assume your definition of quality of life is objective or universal.

California has seen negative net domestic migration for over 20 years. So multiple things can be true:

* It's a desirable place to live and work, for some. * For others, the net quality of life is higher elsewhere.

Triumphalism ("They know they could never make it here...") isn't a good look whether you live in Silicon Valley or Dallas.