CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, AUGUST 5, 2025, OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“DESPITE TRUMP DIGS AND ATTACKS, CALIFORNIA IS MOSTLY FINE”
To hear the declinists, as
ex-Gov. Jerry Brown liked to call them, there’s plenty wrong with California
today: high taxes, lousy business climate, earthquakes, wildfires, expensive
insurance and much more.
All those things have
validity, discouraging some folks from living or staying here. But there’s so
much on the positive side to make up for all this that the vast majority of
Californians want to stick around.
As one resident of the canals
area of Marina del Rey put it the other day, “Yes, California is expensive, but
it’s worth it.”
What’s more, California works
on its problems. Not merely the state, but also cities and counties. You say
housing is too expensive, well, OK said the city of Berkeley fairly recently,
we’ll let you live in small housing units known as accessory units that have
not previously been permitted and were not built fully to permit standards.
That’s one way to increase housing supplies at low cost.
Utilities complain that it’s
expensive and time consuming for them to rebuild their facilities in wildfire
areas? OK, says Gov. Gavin Newsom, just go ahead and do it and never mind the
California Environmental Quality Act, which has been used by lawyers for many
years to hold up a variety of projects.
Even when President Trump
complains about California features like the Coastal Commission that have
sometimes held work back, there have been responses. One came from Newsom, who
after January’s Los Angeles firestorm also called off Coastal Commission rules
about which Trump has sometimes whined.
Lately, it has seemed that
for every complaint from California declinists like the President, there’s
usually a ready answer.
For one example, Trump griped
while campaigning here last fall that “California has the highest inflation” in
America. Never mind that Trump’s tariffs on things like cars and appliances are
ipso facto inflationary, he also ignored a major study from the WalletHub
website that found Californians have among the highest confidence in their own
financial futures, based upon their current spending levels.
In that study, Californians
ranked first in the nation, increasing their credit card debt by $4.5 billion
in the second quarter of last year. This was facilitated by the facts that
California has the largest population by far of any state and that those people
hold more credit cards than folks in any other state.
Trump, like others, has often
claimed California has the highest taxes in the nation, which is not true. Yes,
California has the highest sales tax, at 7.5 percent statewide, with add-ons in
many locales. But overall, the tax burden here ranks eighth, largely because
the 1978 Proposition 13 puts property taxes here in the bottom half nationally.
Trump’s own golf course on the Palos Verdes Peninsula benefits from that.
Trump also never mentions
that California ties Washington state as the best in the West for finding new
jobs, according to the CommercialCafe website’s rankings. The same site calls
San Francisco the best city in America for starting a post-college career.
Six California cities ranked
in the top ten in that category, including Sacramento, Stockton, San
Bernardino, Victorville and Menifee. The state also had four cities ranked in
the top 10 for working parents: San Francisco, Fremont, Irvine and Oakland.
Plus, California tops the
ranking for number of major corporations headquartered here, with 57, beating
the 52 in New York and 50 in Texas. That doesn’t even include those – like
Chevron and Tesla – who moved headquarters out of state, but left most operations
here intact.
Trump never mentions any of
this, nor do other declinists, some of whom operate moving services for
employees of corporations and others migrating among the states.
All of which means that when
evaluating news coverage of California, it can be important to remember that
social media and other news sources often stress the negatives while ignoring
positives, of which California has a surfeit – without even mentioning the
weather.
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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
