It’s in, the 2020 Census Report, that is. California is set to lose its first House seat since . . . ever. Each census has resulted in California gaining seats since it entered the union in 1850. It’s a momentum that is slowly beginning to recede, as all shifts in population tend to be. Big shifts don’t happen overnight but start with a gradual decline in the advance and eventually end in a grudging reversal. It’s happening to California as it happened in prior decades to New York and the upper Midwest.
In the prior demographic momentum that accelerated in the 1950’s, it was opportunity and climate that propelled California’s growth. California benefitted from the post-war economy and its pleasant coastal climate. It grew, grew, and grew. Then it all came to a grinding halt.
The astonishing aspect of the state’s current decline in status is its conscious decision to squander its inheritance. People aren’t leaving the state because the climate is better elsewhere. They leave because of willful decisions by its electorate to choose people to run the state into the ground.
The state’s leaders in the 1950’s to 1960’s bequeathed an infrastructure of cheap power, water projects, and roads that worked to make life easier for its residents and businesses.
Then, off the rails it went. It became a one-party state run by lefty nincompoops. Term limits only intensified the lunacy by adding “inexperienced” to “lefty” and “nincompoop” to the résumé of state legislator.
Taxes and regulations went through the roof. It seemed as if there was an umbilical cord between the crazies in the faculty lounges and the legislative chamber and governor’s mansion. Nearly every crackpot fantasy generated from the minds of people in tenure-secured positions was turned into law and policy. Resources shifted from the simple and necessary things to trendy and lefty fascinations such as trying to make solar and wind work and drives to see how fast they can go in destroying western civilization, the nuclear family, and the state’s economy. All that the state’s people got for it was raging wildfires, power rates through the roof, regulations that turned business activity into Sisyphean torture, urban environments littered with needles/feces/homeless encampments, and the privilege of paying the highest taxes in the nation. If there is such a thing as anthropocentric climate change, California invented anthropocentric social and economic ruination.
The Census report paints a dire picture for the state. It gained population but not as fast as other states added. Rarely do states lose population unless the Black Death returns with a vengeance or left-wing monsters ascend the throne like Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot. If nothing else, people still procreate.
California did the trick by pushing people out. People started leaving the state long before but the numbers were obscured by the influx of the foreign-born, legal and illegal. Even that has started to wane. The fertility rate cratered and domestic out-migration accelerated. 1.3 million more people left for other states than entered. The most precipitous decline occurred in the category of native Californian.
The heavy train of demography has ground to a halt for California and is beginning to back up. How far will it go in reverse? That’s hard to say. It all depends on how long the crazies remain in power. After all, the devastation was man-caused, so the solution will have to be man-caused. I’m not betting the bank on the lunatics in Sacramento suddenly experiencing a road-to-Damascus moment.
As for me – a native Californian – I’m not going back to that asylum.
RogerG