Businesses And Wealthy People Flooding Out Of Liberal California. The Only People Pouring IN Are Lobbyists. And Why Is That?

As a native Californian, I laughed when I first came across Murphy’s Laws and saw the one that said, “Everything east of the San Andreas fault will eventually plunge into the Atlantic Ocean.”

It’s not so damn funny now in the age of Obama when everything east of the San Andreas fault IS pretty much plunging into the Atlantic Ocean.  Especially given the fact that liberals dominate California and are plunging that state into its own special form of hell.

Then again, Murphy – never much for looking at the bright side – predicted Obama would become president in one of his darker moods.

Things were not going well for California.  People and businesses were flooding out of California.

It was 2009 when I cited an article which stated an amazing fact regarding the competition for businesses between liberal California and conservative Texas:

Don’t look now, but there’s a new War Between the States under way, and the south is winning. The most dramatic winner is Texas. The cover story of a recent (July 9) issue of The Economist compared California with Texas and implied that the Golden State is falling apart, while the Lone Star State is leading the nation out of the recession.  Then, in a mid-July issue of National Review, Kevin D. Williamson said the nation is “Going Alamo,” with new jobs and businesses tipping southward, draining California, the Midwest, and Northeast of their former economic glory.

One indicator of the trend, according to Williamson, is the cost of renting a U-Haul truck for a one-way move.  From Austin, Texas to San Francisco, California, the cost is $900, while a one-way rental from San Francisco to Austin is $3,000, due to the exodus of trucks from California.

All this makes sense.  We are a mobile nation.  People can move easily enough (especially if they rent), and capital can move even faster.  Capital, jobs, and businesses will go where they are most welcome, while capital leaves places where it is punished by higher taxes and over-regulation.

Why was it 233 percent more expensive to go from Texas to California than it was to go from California to Texas in a U-Haul truck?  Because rats were fleeing the sinking liberal ship of Statism, that’s why.

We found that the most liberal states with the highest tax rates were not only seeing by far and away the most flight as people poured out of states that simply were dead-ends for anybody wanting a damn JOB, but that it was these same liberal states that also had the highest budget deficits.  While states that were run by conservatives had the budget surpluses.

Well, of course, it got even worse for California.  In the 2010 election, California was pretty much the only state to defy the massive and historic Republican landslide as people across the nation voted against liberalism.  California actually gained power for Democrats that year.

Now where are we?

Well, we elected liberal Democrat Jerry Brown.  Jerry Brown hiked taxes.  And businesses increased their rate of flooding out of the state.

I was in a Burke’s Outlet store today.  The store in my town was almost completely empty of merchandise.  I asked the manager what was going on and he said that Burke’s – which has more than 500 stores nationwide – was leaving California entirely.

I asked him why that was and he was brutally honest: because of the new tax hikes.  There were other states that didn’t piss on their businesses the way California pisses on their businesses via the Democrat Party.

Well, I’m sure all of those Burke’s Outlet employees are thrilled to be out of their jobs.  I’m sure those tax hikes on the rich are working out just swell for those poor workers.

You don’t hear this very often, but the Los Angeles Times – in one of their incredibly few honest moments – published the fact that California has a $500 billion deficit because of their giveaways to liberal labor unions:

California’s $500-billion pension time bomb
April 06, 2010|By David Crane

The staggering amount of unfunded debt stands to crowd out funding for many popular programs. Reform will take something sadly lacking in the Legislature: political courage.

The state of California’s real unfunded pension debt clocks in at more than $500 billion, nearly eight times greater than officially reported.

That’s the finding from a study released Monday by Stanford University’s public policy program, confirming a recent report with similar, stunning findings from Northwestern University and the University of Chicago.

We’re doomed in California.  And we deserve to be doomed.  Plunging into the ocean would be about the best outcome we could dream of compared to the economic collapse we’re eventually going to be unable to keep papering over with insanely bogus “math.”

And of course, other liberal states like Illinois (see also here) are just as evil and face just as awful a pension time bomb.

Liberalism is pure evil, and anybody who has a clue knows that.

Fortunately for liberals, most Americans are stunningly ignorant and depraved people.  So it’s working out great for the Democrat Party machine which has succeeded by lying to the most ignorant and stupid populations (such as young people who pretty much are the definition of “stupid”).

Do you want to know who IS flooding in to bankrupt California right now?

Lobbyists, that’s who.  Contrary to Democrats’ lies, we’re seeing a massive increase in lobbying to the tune of a 50% increase over the evil Bush years:

SACRAMENTO — Although many of California’s cities and counties have been struggling financially, putting off road repairs, cutting back library hours and reducing police patrols, there is one way in which they have not held back: hiring Sacramento lobbyists.

Local governments’ spending on advocacy in the Capitol has surged in recent years, topping $96 million during the two-year legislative session that ended last fall — an increase of nearly 50% from a decade ago.

The sum dwarfs the lobbying bills of the state’s largest labor unions, big oil companies and other energy interests combined, according to the California secretary of state’soffice. No sector spends nearly as much trying to influence government in California as government.

And, of course, after all of his lies and slander and demagoguery and bogus promises, Obama turns out to be the worst whore for lobbyists’ money in the history of the republic as he sells out this nation like no one has ever even thought of selling it out before.

Barack Hussein Obama is the Whore-in-Chief.

It’s actually pretty easy to explain what’s happening and why: liberalism is the worship of the State.  God is dead.  The State is God.  And in liberal theology, the State as God sovereignly chooses as our God who wins and who loses, who gets Marxist redistribution and who is forced to pay higher and higher and higher taxes to pay for that Marxist redistribution.  And under ObamaCare, the State even gets to decide who lives and who dies as the death panels Sarah Palin predicted turn out to be all to damn real.

And, of course, there too, the State gets to decide who wins and who loses, as liberals grant waivers to the unions and the big corporations that most helped Obama pass his socialist takeover of what used to be the finest medical system on planet earth.

After Black Friday in 1929, just as shortly after the Titanic hit that iceberg, there was a period when things didn’t seem that bad.  As an example, after that infamous Black Friday in September of 1929, “In early 1930, credit was ample and available at low rates.”  Things were looking up.  Everything seemed swell.

Just like now.

Mind you, during the Great Depression, which FDR prolonged by seven years according to economists, we had plenty of lobbyists whoring for more government influence and government money, too.  When the government is running everything on the one hand and spending money it doesn’t have on the other, there are always dishonest whores waiting to suck it out of corrupt politicians.

All you have to do is worship Obama and take the mark of the beast, and you too can have a fancy job as a lobbyist.  But otherwise, just give up because things are a lot worse than they seem for decent people.

The way of California is the way of Cain.  And Cain is burning in hell for his wickedness just like every liberal will soon be.

Update, 3/20/13: What Democrats are doing in California and everywhere else is a firehose of evil that just keeps pouring out of the left.  I wrote this article the evening of the 18th and published it so it would come out the 19th.  When I woke up the morning of the 19th, what did I learn?  That Democrats are doing in California what socialists were trying to do in Cypruss: steal their citizens’ money by any vile means possible.

In California, Democrats actually tried to retroactively tax small businesses five years back.  California had provided a tax break for small businesses and other entrepreneurs and Democrats are whores who suck other people’s money.  Democrats not only wanted to end the tax break, but they demanded that businesses pay the socialist State BACK every single penny they had received in those tax break – complete with interest and even penalties:

California’s top-end taxpayers — already steamed over a recent hike in the  nation’s highest state income tax — are now fuming over a new $120 million  retroactive tax grab on small business owners.

In December, the state’s tax authority determined that a tax break claimed  over the past few years by 2,500 entrepreneurs and stockholders of  California-based small businesses is no longer valid and sent out notices of  payment.

“How would you feel if you made a decision, which was made four years ago,  (and) you absolutely knew was legally correct and four years later a governing  body came in and said, ‘no, it’s not correct, now you owe us a bunch more money.  And we’re going to charge you interest on money you didn’t even know you owed’,”  Brian Overstreet told Fox News from his office north of San Francisco.

Last year, Overstreet and his fellow investors sold Sagient Research Systems  and immediately reported the sale to the California Franchise Tax Board, the  state’s version of the IRS. “It was good for the shareholders, it was good for  the employees and good for those of us who founded it,” Overstreet said about  the sale of the data mining company. “We paid the tax based on the law at the  time.”

Here’s the question: how would YOU feel, not that you liberals are capable of mustering up that kind of actual empathy or anything.

The vileness of the left simply has no limits and knows no boundaries.

Note To The Party That Is Pathologically Incapable Of Comprehending Simple Reality: High Tax Rates ‘Failing To Boost Revenues’

Somewhere in heaven, Warren Harding and Andrew Mellon are laughing themselves into tears over how pathologically stupid liberals are. 

Keep in mind, for most of our nation’s history we didn’t even HAVE federal income taxes.  Harding and Mellon were the first pair to try lowering tax rates in the belief that rewarding success and investment would stimulate more success and investment – as opposed to the liberal thinking that if you just keep punishing the producers, they will surely produce more.  The bottom line is that Tax Cuts INCREASE Revenues; They Have ALWAYS Increased Revenues every single time we have ever done it.  And the bottom line is that every single time we have allowed liberals to try their Marxist class warfare punish the success of the rich meme, it has backfired.

The federalist papers called the states the laboratories for democracy; the idea was that the states under a relatively weak federal government could try different things; and to the degree those attempts worked or failed, people could vote with their feet.

The only thing that keeps democracy from working, in the federalist sense, is a federal government that usurps power.  Which is of course what we’ve got such that failing states get propped up while successful ones get undermined.

Still, look at what has happened in states like Maryland or New York or California and realize that high-tax liberalism has failed over and over again.  But Democrats are determined to remain stupid.

The quintessential example of this determination to remain pathologically stupid and to ignore reality whenever it gets in the way of liberalism is the infamous yacht tax that taxed the purchase of luxury items.  A central tenet of economic liberalism is that rich people are incapable of changing their behavior, such that Democrats can raise their taxes by a given percentage and thus obtain that same given percentage in higher revenue.  So they imposed a tax on luxury items such as yachts that only rich people tend to buy, figuring that they would thereby increase revenues and punish the rich at the same time.  But guess what happened?  Rich people quit buying those yachts; Democrats gutted entire industries.  And the only people were hurt were the small businesses that built and maintained yachts and other luxury items and the employees who worked in those industries who lost their jobs.

Democrats keep making the exact same mistake over and over and over again.

Democrats cannot learn; to put it in theological terms, they despise the truth and want to believe lies.  They are immune to reality.

And the states with the highest tax rates invariably also have the highest debts.  And high tax Europe – the model Obama is pursuing – is going down the drain.  Which add to further proofs that the economic policies of liberalism are the economic equivalent of a circular firing squad.

And liberals are pathologically stupid wherever you go:

50p tax rate ‘failing to boost revenues’
The amount of income tax paid fell sharply last month in the first formal indication that the new 50p higher rate is not raising the expected amount of revenue.
By Robert Winnett, and James Kirkup
10:58PM GMT 21 Feb 2012

The Treasury received £10.35 billion in income tax payments from those paying by self-assessment last month, a drop of £509 million compared with January 2011. Most other taxes produced higher revenues over the same period.

Senior sources said that the first official figures indicated that there had been “manoeuvring” by well-off Britons to avoid the new higher rate. The figures will add to pressure on the Coalition to drop the levy amid fears it is forcing entrepreneurs to relocate abroad.

The self-assessment returns from January, when most income tax is paid by the better-off, have been eagerly awaited by the Treasury and government ministers as they provide the first evidence of the success, or failure, of the 50p rate. It is the first year following the introduction of the 50p rate which had been expected to boost tax revenues from self-assessment by more than £1 billion.

Although the official statistics do not disclose how much money was paid at the 50p rate of tax, the figures indicate that it is falling short of the money the levy was expected to raise.

A Treasury source said the relatively poor revenues from self-assessment returns was partly down to highly-paid individuals arranging their affairs to avoid paying the 50p rate.

“It’s true that SA revenues are a bit disappointing — it’s still early, but it looks like there’s been quite a lot of forestalling and other manoeuvring to avoid the top rate,” said the source.
 
However, another Treasury source added that the tax deadline had been extended by two days because of industrial action at HM Revenue and Customs. Therefore, it was too early to begin assessing the revenues raised from the 50p rate of tax because about 20 per cent of self-assessment tax is paid in the hours before the deadline.
 
Francesca Lagerberg, head of tax at Grant Thornton, an accountancy firm, said: “My guess is that because the 50 per cent rate was flagged up in advance many taxpayers, particularly those with their own businesses, decided to extract dividends ahead of the change. It highlights the fact that high tax rates don’t always deliver high tax revenues.”
 
George Osborne, the Chancellor, is expected to receive a definitive analysis from the revenue on the 50p rate before next month’s Budget. The Liberal Democrats have insisted that it must stay because it is important to demonstrate that the rich are paying their fair share.
 
David Laws, a Lib Dem MP, has also suggested reducing tax relief on pensions for top earners.
 
The prospect of higher taxation on pensions comes as savers complain that low interest rates and quantitative easing have pushed down returns on savings and pensions.
 
Charlie Bean, the deputy governor of the Bank of England, last night insisted that those people should accept the pain as the price of restoring the wider economy to health.
 
The Confederation of British Industry, in its Budget submission today, urges ministers not introduce new levies on the rich, warning that the UK “will become a less attractive location for entrepreneurs and key employees”.

Wealthy people, confronted by excessively high tax rates, have several options: they can move, they can move their money somewhere else, they can hide or shelter their money.  In our system, they can also take advantage of so many loopholes that the IRS ends up playing a losing game of Whackamole.

Meanwhile, the very premise of liberals is also deeply flawed: even assuming that high taxes would raise more in revenue – which it factually does NOT do – you still have the dilemma that taking more money out of the private economy and putting more money into the pockets of government is counterproductive and frankly immoral.

Conservative principles lack in demagogic power.  They rule in actually WORKING.  As one example of that success, Texas created 38% of ALL the jobs created in America in 2010.