How California Destroyed Its Middle Class

The decline of California under one-party Democrat rule has been one of the long-running themes of this blog. Today Victor Davis Hanson discusses how California’s wealthy destroyed the middle class with policies whose baleful effects they knew wouldn’t fall on them.

  • “The irony is that, as we created more wealth and more leisure, because of the very success of the middle class citizen, the middle class citizen and his central role in western government was forgotten.”
  • “California in the 1960s had the largest middle class in the United States. California had the finest educational system. California invented the idea of a modern freeway and a modern airport.”
  • “California had a state where two-thirds of the people lived with one-third of the precipitation, and yet they built the greatest transference of water with reservoirs and aqueducts the world had ever seen.”
  • “California had the most successful oil, timber and mineral industries in the world. They had some of the finest universities…Again this was a product of, both democratic governors and Republican governors.”
  • “However, today when we look at California, it’s got the highest number of homeless people in the United States. Half of all of America’s homeless live in California.”
  • “One-third of all the welfare recipients in the United States live in California. One-fifth of all Californians live below the poverty line.”
  • “California yet has the highest taxes in the country in the aggregate, the highest property taxes because of the enormous assessed evaluations…highest sales tax at over 10 to 11%, highest income tax at up to 13.2%.”
  • “The result of all of that that is is the middle class finds itself unable to pay and be competitive with other businesses in other states.”
  • “They look at all of these higher taxes, and they say themselves ‘I’m willing to pay it if I’m economically viable,’ but the regulations that the state creates fall heavily on the small farmer, the hardware store owner, the tire [store?] owner, but not necessarily on the Silicon Valley corporation that has an array of lawyers, or legal teams, or analysts, or economists, that find ways not to pay it.
  • “And so the middle class leaves, they vote with their feet they go to places where it’s more conducive for middle class livelihoods. We’ve lost somewhere between 8 and 12 million people of the middle class.”
  • At the same time, America has allowed in 20 million illegal aliens, half of which have ended up in California.
  • “We have not built an aqueduct in California in about 40 years. The schools that were rated in the top 10 percent of comparative state rankings are now in the bottom 10 percent. The airports are decrepit.”
  • “That the more taxes I pay, the worse schools I get.”
  • “In this period, there was about five trillion dollars in market capitalization that grew out of Silicon Valley alone. And we created sort of a medieval caste, a wealthy caste of Barons and Lords that were not subject to the consequences of their own ideology. So they had so much wealth they felt they were exempt from worries about taxation.”
  • “We created a very, very wealthy elite that was not subject to the consequences of their own ideology.”
  • Whether out of virtue signaling and guilt, or whether out of contrived political necessity, they made a political alliance with the very poor of California. And the poor said “Give us more entitlements, tax the middle class, transfer that money to us we need it.” And the wealthy said “Yes, we will open the borders. We’ll transfer money, but you have to vote for issues that we’re in favor of. And we’re in favor of them precisely because they don’t affect us.”

  • And of course, the left’s disdain for the middle class shows up in their language: They’re the “bitter clingers,” the “deplorables,” the “chumps and dregs of society.”
  • “Muscular labor was no longer essential to the American experiment. In other words, you could make have things made overseas in China or southeast Asia or Mexico. And the great middle class territory of the middle west of the United States—Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana—started to become hollowed out.”
  • “We’ve taken the middle class, the backbone of citizenship, and we’ve eroded it and destroyed it.”
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    11 Responses to “How California Destroyed Its Middle Class”

    1. […] BattleSwarm- Yes, Marxifornia is nothing like California […]

    2. […] MALICE AFORETHOUGHT: How California Destroyed Its Middle Class. “We have not built an aqueduct in California in about 40 years. The schools that were rated […]

    3. JorgXMcKie says:

      To the extent it has existed over the past few centuries, the “elite” (however defined, but those with some sort of power over most others, have hated, despised, and, especially, feared any “middle class. They would rather have much less of everything that others not be compared to them.
      Not all of the elite, of course, but any system over time shows the “elites” becoming more and more inferior to their progenitors. Every time.
      Then some sort of upheaval occurs and we start over, mostly.

    4. Mike K says:

      Yup. I left California after 60 years. Some of my children are still there but most plan to leave.

    5. Gregg says:

      Grew up in CA, left in76, moved to Texas. Parents lived in CA till they passed, sisters still there. Back to visit from time to time, I will never return to live in the failed state of my birth. So sad.

    6. Jackosan10 says:

      20 million illegals?!?! Try 40 million.

    7. Subotai Bahadur says:

      Most Californians remaining are TWANLOC.

      We just have to realize it.

      Subotai Bahadur

    8. MALTHUS says:

      Victor Davis Hanson used to bemoan the immigration policies that led to his irrigation pumps being stolen for the scrap value of their copper windings.

      He now sees that something more foreboding lurches our way—an assault on middle class (aka bourgeois) living standards. It took a long time for him to connect with “muscular labor”. Can this rump force regroup and reclaim their lost heritage or will it continue to be stripped of value, like a Mexican thief unwinding the copper wiring from an electric motor?

    9. […] Baldilocks: Obsession, The Scattered (Part One), and The Scattered (Part Two) BattleSwarm: How California Destroyed Its Middle Class, also, China’s Targeted Espionage Continues Apace Behind The Black: Intuitive Machines’ first […]

    10. […] Cali.  Lawrence Person’s BattleSwarm Blog summarized a VDH video discussing how California destroyed its middle class, returning it to a fundamentally feudal system […]

    11. […] the poor they hit the Middle Class as well, as Victor David Hanson describes in the embedded video, How California Destroyed Its Middle Class, which lists the by-now-standard problems but with the key […]

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