CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, APRIL 27, 2021, OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“THE MYTH OF A GREAT CALIFORNIA
EXODUS"
Rarely
has the “big lie” technique been used against an American state as effectively
and persistently as with the myth of a great and unique California exodus over
the last few years.
The
Economist, a London-based magazine whose reportage on California almost always
contains errors, reported last fall that California lost population between
2018 and 2019. False. The recently departed president, who detested California
for its solid and repeated vote margins against him, tweeted disparagingly
about California more than 600 times over his four-year term, most of his
“information” false. Even the Los Angeles Times titled a recent story
“California in the rearview mirror.”
It’s part
of a pattern reminiscent of the “big lie” technique outlined in the 1930s by
Nazi German propaganda minister Josef Goebbels, who observed that “The bigger
the lie and the louder and more often it is told, the more people will believe
it.”
But lies only survive until
facts emerge. And the facts don’t support the myth of a great California
exodus. One magazine reported last fall that California lost more than 3
percent of its populace to other states over the last year. Not so. In fact,
about 175,000 California residents moved to other states in 2020. That’s about
four-tenths of one percent.
The departures were more than
made up for in new births and legal foreign immigration, which created a 21,200
person population increase from July 1, 2019 to July 1, 2020, reports the state
Department of Finance.
One reason the population
increase wasn’t much: the coronavirus pandemic, which caused job losses pretty
much preventing anyone who moved here from finding employment. So in-migration
from other states all but stopped and will not fully resume until the plague
fully ends, or at least until enough folks are vaccinated to end the deadly
threat of the virus.
Then
there’s the notion that net out-migration to other states never before matched
the numbers of the last decade. Not so. The non-partisan state Legislative
Analyst’s office (LAO) issued charts in 2018 showing domestic outmigration in
the 1990-’95 period far exceeded anything in the last five years. In 1993
alone, about 600,000 persons left California, while only about 300,00 came
here. The difference was vastly exceeded by the foreign immigration tide of
that time, giving California substantial net growth.
Take a
look at who has been most active in perpetrating the ongoing big lie about
California. Business relocation agents were the first to promote it, writing
op-ed after op-ed about the “vast advantages” for businesses that move elsewhere.
A Texas state agency has also produced numerous commentaries touting that
state’s tax breaks for incoming businesses, which famously induced the likes of
Oracle Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (cq) to move headquarters there
from Silicon Valley. The last previous move of similar magnitude involved
Toyota Motor Corp.’s American headquarters, which in 2014 went from the Los
Angeles suburb of Torrance to Plano, Tex., near Dallas.
Then
there’s the L.A.Times narrative, which depicted numerous recent California
arrivals unable to afford comfortable housing here and leaving for cheaper
hunting grounds. That’s partially correct, and is largely because even as rents
dropped over the last year in California’s big cities during the pandemic, with
white collar employees shifting to working at home, rents and home prices in
exurbs of Los Angeles and San Francisco rose steeply.
In fact,
statewide average real estate prices gained about 8 percent over the last year,
at the same time governments were impelling the creation of thousands of
“affordable” apartments, condominiums and single-family homes.
Yes,
California has problems, including often-clumsy government (recent example: the
slow start of the COVID-19 vaccine rollout) and high income taxes (often made
up for by lower-than-average property taxes). But that has not stopped start-up
companies from proliferating, nor does it lessen the state’s attraction for
higher-income, better educated workers. The LAO charts demonstrated that
California has actually gained ground over most other states in those
categories in the last decade.
So not to
worry too much, Californians. This state has a long history of solving its
problems and chances are it will again as new Googles and Facebooks and Hulus
and eBays keep arising.
-30-
Email Thomas Elias at
tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising
Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It" is now
available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net
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