Capitol Ideas / Bearish on California
Bethell, Tom
Bearish on California by Tom Bethell T he old cliché that national trends begin in California and move on to the rest of the country is thought to be no longer true. Probably with good reason....
...The same applies to Silicon Valley today...
...He sees a workaholic environment, unaffordable housing, "and if he's representative, we haven't seen the bad effects yet...
...Congress, which amended the relief package to exclude illegals...
...187 neatly exposes the collectivist faith of those who oppose it...
...It's all too reminiscent of New York...
...I gather it managed to stay in business...
...Before that, of course, Ronald Reagan and George Deukmejian governed the state far more conservatively than Wilson, and both were easily re-elected...
...0 ne thing is clear: government agencies want as many clients as they can get, without bothering about the legal niceties...
...Most strikingly, the U.S...
...One ruse is to count as revenue a phantom sum of money, now over $3 billion a year, that state officials pretend the federal government will soon fork over in return for imposing illegal-immigrant costs on the state...
...If the manufacturing becomes people-intensive it has to move out of Silicon Valley...
...You have to wonder, when they went into politics, what drew them to one party rather than the other...
...Perhaps I'm too pessimistic...
...Congress has no intention of paying the money...
...classrooms...
...And this shows how destructive and divisive the welfare state has become...
...But his much younger brother is not nearly so infatuated...
...But they can't be deported if their country of origin refuses to take them...
...Its state and local government debt now exceeds $130 billion, dwarfing that of any other state, and it has been downgraded by Moody's and Standard and Poor's...
...The Department of Finance estimates that the taxes of 700,000 working Californians are required to cover the costs of services to illegals in the state...
...Simpson trial will preempt all the airtime, anyway...
...Apple is at a disadvantage compared with Compaq in Houston or Dell in Austin," he added...
...Although Wilson can hardly be blamed for capitalizing on liberal disdain for the law, Kathleen Brown is surely right in one key respect—illegal immigrants are not in fact the cause of California's problems...
...Prop...
...But President Clinton just may be unpopular enough to save him...
...This issue speaks to meanness, it speaks to immigrant bashing," said Rep...
...Federal bureaucrats thereby threaten reprisals on voters who seek liberation from central edicts...
...After the Los Angeles earthquake in January, the Federal Emergency Management Agency immediately mailed out checks to people who hadn't even requested them, and bureaucrats boldly declared that they didn't care whether the recipients were "legal" or not...
...The old phrase "voter apathy" has begun reappearing in the press...
...The high estimates of the heavy burden imposed on the state by illegal immigrants—$18 billion, according to the economist Donald Huddle—are totally unreliable...
...If it starts on schedule, the O.J...
...Most immigrants really do come here to work, and most illegals have jobs that Americans refuse to take...
...Kathleen Brown opposes the proposition, which seems to be popular...
...The GOP candidates were Wilson's hand-picked successor, a nonentity called John Seymour...
...Karlgaard has this gut feeling, with no real data to back it up: "California may be pretty well shot as a dream for young people...
...There's also a Senate race between Congressman Michael Huffington and Sen...
...In March, nonetheless, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly defeated (329-79) a proposal merely to document the number of illegal immigrants in U.S...
...Not only has it undermined and demoralized many native-born Americans...
...Business start-ups are the capitalist version of such experiments, and they have become an expensive proposition on the West Coast...
...Los Angeles school officials have denounced attempts to defund undocumented students, the Department of Motor Vehicles resisted asking clients to prove their legal statuswhen seeking a driver's license, county registrars grumbled about toughening up voter registration, even after it came out that the accused Mexican assassin of presidential candidate Luis Colosio had twice illegally registered to vote in Los Angeles County...
...Neither of the Democratic women is a radical, exactly, and Wilson and Huffington are Republicans of decidedly "moderate" hue...
...Slowly but surely, they are getting their way...
...A decade ago, believing that greedy unions were on the verge of dispersing the movie industry, I wrote a premature obituary of Hollywood...
...He supports a proposition on the ballot this fall (Prop...
...so it is with Silicon Valley...
...It is also having the unfortunate effect of undermining support for all immigration...
...Wilson's race is now considered close...
...Other regions, whether in Arizona, Utah, or North Carolina, have lower taxes, the Mormon work ethic, and science graduates, and some of these strange places even appreciate economic growth...
...Jose Serrano, chairman of the congressional Hispanic Caucus...
...Proposition 187 is of course bitterly opposed by the major news media in the state...
...When government officials throw taxpayers' money out of the window, it makes no sense to blame those who gather beneath to retrieve it...
...Sacramento has been trying to cut back on the state's high welfare payments, for example, but judges state and federal, thirsting for admiration, block all cuts with cant about "extreme hardship...
...The San Francisco Chronicle says that it "threatens the health and prospects of the Golden State by allowing only emergency medical treatment," thereby exposing everyone to "the risk of infectious diseases going untreated and hordes of youngsters loitering on state streets with nothing to do and little hope for the future...
...Last fall, Kathleen Brown said that illegal immigrants—the Census Bureau estimates there are 1.3 million of them in the state—are "wrongly seen as a cause" of the state's problems, and Wilson promptly attacked her for that...
...This illustrates the great political asymmetry of our time: liberals see no enemies to the left, conservatives no friends to the right...
...Every week in California one reads of some new judge who has found a pretext to take the law into his own hands, thereby winning praise from the editorial writers...
...and its banks who know how to deal with start-ups," Karlgaard said...
...California is not quite what it was...
...So the debts increase, and are covered each year by rising short-term borrowing...
...That was too much even for the U.S...
...Immoral," said another Hispanic Caucusian...
...The coast-dwellers up and down the state—the real divide is not between northern and southern California but between coast-dwellers and inlanders—have long wanted California to resemble nothing so much as a European welfare state...
...Politically, the big event this fall is the gubernatorial contest between Gov...
...187 does go into effect, California school districts will lose $2.3 billion in federal aid...
...Pete Wilson and State Treasurer Kathleen Brown...
...and an undisguisedly conservative talk-show host, Bruce Herschensohn...
...But the fictitious revenue means that officials in Sacramento see no need to cut spending...
...California is now a high-tax state, with an unemployment rate to match (8.3 percent, compared to 6 percent nationally...
...Wilson seems to feel that if only the Republicans weren't so hobbled by their allies on the right, most Californians of good will would vote Republican...
...California is supposed to balance its budget, but doesn't...
...He made the mistake, early in his term, of raising taxes by an amount equal to half the deficit, imagining that the Democrats would do the decent thing and make up the other half with spending cuts...
...The population is still slowly growing—but purely as a result of foreign immigration...
...When he came to Stanford from North Dakota in the mid-1970s it was like going from black-andwhite to color...
...Both 18 The American Spectator October 1994 lost, but Herschensohn received half a million votes and five percentage points more than Seymour...
...Dianne Feinstein, but it's hard to summon up much enthusiasm about either race...
...M ore people now move from California to other states than vice-versa...
...187, if it passes...
...It still has this density of talent, ambition and activity, its venture capitalists Tom Bethell, The American Spectator's Washington correspondent, is a visiting media fellow at the Hoover Institution...
...By the same token, of course, Herschensohn was very unlucky to have run against Barbara Boxer in the Bush-battered year of 1992...
...Rich Karlgaard, the editor of Forbes ASAP (a bimonthly hi-tech supplement to Forbes), compares Silicon Valley to Manhattan, which, despite its many disadvantages, survives as a center of finance...
...and San Francisco's Social Services Commission will just plain say no to implementing Prop...
...The insistence by liberals that taxpayer-provided benefits should be made available to anyone who makes it across the border shows what a bizarre and extreme movement liberalism has become...
...The authorities are reluctant to expel them, because they know the liberated cons will be back across the border in no time...
...About 18,000 illegal aliens are incarcerated in California prisons-15 percent of the prison population...
...If one region is to lead, it must be a place where experiments can be launched with relative ease...
...They are behaving just like judges...
...Only taxpayer-provided benefits can give people hope for the future, evidently...
...Like President Bush before him, Wilson has spent more capital distancing himself from conservatives in his own party than challenging the principles of the opposition...
...Still, land prices are taking their toll...
...Department of Education has issued a "legal opinion" stating that if Prop...
...CI 20 The American Spectator October 1994...
...He badly underestimated their ideological fervor—an error comparable to Bush's repudiation of his "no new taxes" pledge in 1990...
...Both faced the same electorate on the same day...
...School districts would have to determine the legal status of students, "in order to ensure the enrollment or attendance only of citizens," or of people in the country legally...
...I agree with John Kurzweil, the publisher of California Political Review, who thinks that such external considerations dominate state politics when there isn't a great deal to choose between the candidates anyway...
...187) that would require the state to provide only emergency medical care to illegals and to close welfare loopholes...
...Local investors will nonetheless gobble up the tax-exempt municipal bonds, thanks to what the Wall Street Journal calls "the state's very high tax rates...
...These inmates have the right to criminal counsel at public expense, to judicial appeals, including the appeal of deportation...
...it is now providing a pretext for nativists to sound like budget balancers when what they really want is to keep out foreigners...
...Wilson's tax increase seemed at first to have been a fatal error, dooming him to a single term...
...This notion was put to the test in 1992, when both California Senate seats were open...
...Pete Wilson has been derided as an "immigrant basher," but he pinpoints an absurdity that is hard to defend: "We say you may not enter the country illegally, but if you do, the following benefits are available to you...
...One reason may well be that there is not a great deal to distinguish the candidates...
...The Los Angeles Times interviewed one Mexican who "promised to return to the San Fernando Valley and resume his career of crime" following deportation, and even allowed himself to be photographed for the article...
...That's what California no longer enjoys...
...T he one important issue that does separate the candidates is immigration...
...Government has become a heavy burden...
...Despite high land costs, it still seems to be humming along...
...The risk of failure is always so great that a competitive advantage in the form of low taxation and minimal legal restrictions is an essential prerequisite...
...The state spends over $500 million a year to lock up illegals, and the number of deportable felons in federal prisons more than doubled between 1988 and 1993...
...It turns out that high labor costs are more than offset by the benefits of geographical concentration...
Vol. 27 • October 1994 • No. 10
