Monday, April 16, 2018

California’s crazy one-party liberal politics is why I had to finally leave the state -- and I’m not alone



Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, infamously tweeted a link in early April to a story calling for a bloodless civil war to solve America’s problems. The piece, “The Great Lesson of California in America’s New Civil War: Why there’s no bipartisan way forward at this juncture in our history — one side must win” was authored by Peter Leyden and Ruy Teixeira.

The duo assert that this new civil war will follow a path blazed by California 15 years ago, namely, the crushing of the Republican Party. “The Democrats won; the Republicans lost,” they intone, “California is the future…”

Living and working in places like Washington and San Francisco as Teixeira and Twitter’s Dorsey do, tends to distort the view of the real world....

In 2011, after spending my adult life in California, working in the once-thriving aerospace industry there, serving 19 years in the state’s National Guard and six years in the legislature, I picked up my family and moved to Texas.

The first benefit of moving was buying a home that was close to twice as large as our old home in California for $110,000 less—providing needed room to care for two ailing parents.

That home prices and rents in California average 55 percent higher than in Texas isn’t just due to the former’s good weather—the Golden State’s high taxes, capricious regulations, onerous lawsuit climate, and powerful unions all contribute to constraining the supply of new housing while jacking up the price of existing housing....