California v Texas: America's future

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13990207&source=hptextfeature

by newacc • 17 years ago

31 56 17 years ago

SamAtt• 17 years ago

So the opposite of "Brainy and Sexy" is a Conservative Christian? I find that a bit offensive and I'm a Californian and an Agnostic.

The article itself is an undeserved defense of California. I love California and I do believe we have some of the most inventive people in the world but when you add the projected shortfall over the next couple years to our current debt you get a number that's getting close to Google's total market cap.

I don't know how you invent yourself out of a mess like that

skushch• 17 years ago

California is certainly at the end of the road here. There's no way around a reform at this point. I think in the next few years it will be interesting to see if we chose well when asking for deep cuts in spending.

Retric• 17 years ago

It's completely an issue of bad governance. Per capita income 2008: (http://www.taxfoundation.org/research/show/290.html#income_b...)

  California: 47,706
  USA: 44,254
  Texas: 42,796

PS: A 26billion deficit = ~700$ per person.

dkarl3• 17 years ago

Texas is not any better, for the simple reason that Austin is the only place any sane person wants to live, and most of the money is in Houston or Dallas. Austin is full of brainy people distracted by culture and working service jobs just to stay; Houston and Dallas are full of people with an appetite for money and nothing holding them back, not sophistication and not vision either (except visions of themselves driving expensive cars and screwing hot blondes.) Austin will continue to produce a modest amount of innovation, and Houston and Dallas will continue to produce an immodest number of millionaires. It's like having a beautiful pig and an elephant with a great personality and hoping they'll have perfect offspring -- the cities are hundreds of miles apart, the people don't like each other, and the DNA definitely doesn't splice.

gort5• 17 years ago

"So the opposite of "Brainy and Sexy" is a Conservative Christian?"

Belief in a perfectly good being that tortures people forever if they don't believe in it: not brainy.

As for sexy, well, I dunno.

[ETA: Hmm, started a horribly off-topic side-thread. Sorry.]

DanielBMarkham9• 17 years ago

"Belief in a perfectly good being that tortures people forever if they don't believe in it: not brainy."

Playing devil's advocate here (or perhaps the better term is God's advocate), if I understand you correctly you are saying that all beings of higher intelligence and wisdom should conform to your definition of goodness.

Does that seem very brainy? Would you like your dog creating a sense of what is right or wrong and then holding you to account for it? How about an ant? When I take my 3-year old for shots, he definitely views the entire process as decidedly immoral. But he's not seeing it from my viewpoint now, is he?

I believe the notion is that goodness as God understands it is beyond my ability to understand it. The greater good when dealing with a universe is so far beyond a petty 100-year lifespan (or a 10K year civilization) that comparisons are kind of silly. We wouldn't even understand the moral questions, much less the answers

I'm not saying I buy into it, I'm simply pointing out that you're taking a cheap shot at religion.

I believe the best response to this is: all I've got is this brain and I have to use it to make judgments. That's cool, but all it really means is the point is undecidable.

jdfreefly• 17 years ago

(take this with a grain of salt...I'm one of the "earners")

You can't invent yourself out of a system of entitlements that has long since divorced itself from reality.

You have a (comparatively) small group of people making a large portion of the income with a much larger group of people making little to no income and demanding more and more help from the earners to support their philanthropic causes.

What makes it hard to swallow is that we see loads of money being thrown at things like education and helping the homeless but we see no improvement.

I'm all for helping educate people, and lending a hand to the less fortunate, but I expect a return on my investment. When you take this much from me and my return is children who can't read turning into violent criminals and the wonderful view of a homeless man crapping in a doorway on the way to work...I want a refund.

lutorm2• 17 years ago

"loads of money being thrown at things like education"?

State funding for the University of California has decreased from 7% of the state of California's general fund in 1970 to 3.2% in 2008. Between 1990 and 2008, inflation-adjusted state support per UC student fell by 40%. As a result, the total inflation-adjusted education expenditure per UC student (including student fees and contributions from UC General Funds) decreased by 19%, while student costs rose by 138%.

That doesn't sound like money's being thrown at education, at least not higher ed.

(text lifted from this letter: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/08/...)

dflock• 17 years ago

I'm from the UK and have traveled fairly widely - and I have to say that San Francisco has the highest number of homeless people I've seen anywhere in the developed world. Maybe it's the weather. Anyway, whatever's being done about it, it's either not working, or not enough.

DanielBMarkham9• 17 years ago

Chief Executive magazine, to take just one example, has ranked California the very worst state to do business in for each of the past four years.

Not the rosy picture of California and the Bay Area that is usually talked about on this board.

sachinag• 17 years ago

The interests of people on this board are exceptionally low beta to general business conditions. People here aren't looking at corporate tax rates and support costs (which is pretty much the entirety of that list).

wheels• 17 years ago

It's sampling something pretty different. Silicon Valley would almost certainly be a horrible location for a steel factory.

fatdog7892• 17 years ago

Until you factor in education level of the populace, better-maintained roads, better electrical grid, better communications grid, and the population density (which makes deliveries cheaper by reducing fuel costs and delivery times). Also...Chief Executive magazine believed that Carly Fiona was a good executive. It supported the guys at Enron. It lauded the bank executives that played a large role in causing the current global mess. Take anything that mag says with a large ton of salt.

lutorm2• 17 years ago

Ok, I love the Bay Area, but better electrical grid? Seriously?

I hope you have it better on the peninsula than we do in Santa Cruz, because here it's roughly equivalent to a 3rd world developing country. In Sweden, I ran my computer for years and never lost anything to a power glitch. Here, I won't even plug in a computer without a ups because MTBF due to power issues is about a week.

timdoug• 17 years ago

"California and Texas, the nation’s two biggest states, ..."

Alaska? cough

The two most populous states, sure, but who uses that adjective to describe population instead of area?

access_denied• 17 years ago

The default for "big" is population, not area, when one talks about countrys. That's the convention.

nostrademons• 17 years ago

Wasn't it just a couple years ago that people here were saying California provided the model for the rest of the country, and that more people should adopt the Silicon Valley startup system?

I think the real issue is differing cultural attitudes toward risk. Californians embrace it, which probably results from the selection bias of having a state where the largest population centers are all centered on an active fault-line. Texans do their best to avoid it.

When times are good, people who take risks flourish, because most risks turn out well. But when times are bad, they get hurt much worse than people who play it safe. That's almost by definition: "good times" are those when most risks pan out, while "bad times" are those when most risks fail miserably. It's not surprising that California is doing worse than Texas now - they took on far more risk during the boom years.

People have short memories. I remember that at the first Startup School, one venture capitalist summed up the history of business in four words: "Boom. Bust. Boom. Bust." I think that was probably the truest thing said at the whole event.

tumult2• 17 years ago

You're overthinking it. Silicon Valley provides good models for building businesses. The state and local governments are masters of burning money and getting nothing from it.

As a taxpayer in California, I cannot track where most of my money goes. I can't ask my representative or either senator where it goes and get a straight answer. (Disclaimer: I still like Boxer.)

It's a little unfair to compare states, though. Texas, for instance, has lots of natural gas resources, oil production and refinement (especially along the gulf coast) among other things.

Take a look at these:

http://img.skitch.com/20090710-x3sceq4i2pq4hwaemawtd5afrd.re...

http://img.skitch.com/20090710-nsuaeu7ch7ayhci6fp5yemeb5x.re...

A lot of California land is reserved by the federal government. I think it's somewhere around 45%. In Texas, very little is reserved.

jpcx01• 17 years ago

California has tons of oil offshore. We just decided as a state we dont want to drill it for environmental reasons.

fatdog7892• 17 years ago

California gets back only 80% of the tax money it pays to the federal government. That amounts to several 10s of billions of dollars, given the population and wealth of the state.

Put another way, California would not have a deficit right now if it received its fair share of federal taxes.

defen• 17 years ago

The article concludes by saying California should adopt Texas's "more welcoming attitude toward Mexico", even while admitting that there is "a “lost generation” of mostly Hispanic Texans with insufficient skills for the demands of the knowledge economy" and "Latinos [in Texas] may justly demand a bigger, more “Californian” state to educate them and provide them with decent health care." I really don't understand why right-libertarians turn their brains off when it comes to race and culture.

sown• 17 years ago

As a minor aside, I wonder how long it will be before certain counties in Cali start to talk about leaving the state.

dirtae• 17 years ago

Some counties in California have been talking about leaving the state for a long time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_Jefferson

cmars232• 17 years ago

Texas is full. Please don't move here.

randallsquared• 17 years ago

This carries more weight than the article. In the same direction. ;)

aresant• 17 years ago

Has the author ever spent time in both states? Why California?

A) Proximity to the beach / ocean / in-and-out. B) If you've ever spent a long weekend in texas you are probably qualified to be a Entomologist. I picked up a car in Dallas two years ago and discovered that June Bugs and Praying Mantises were not just illustrations in national geographic! C) California girls.

Most of the so-called "worst places to do business" polls are built on financial models, how the !%!@% does that translate!

California v Texas: America's future

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