By any measure, California is a failed state — and a national embarrassment. Taxes? It has the highest income and gas taxes in the nation. Roads? A Reason Foundation survey ranks it 49th among the states. Mass flight? Between 250,000 and 350,000 more Californians leave the state than move in each year. Housing, gas, insurance and electricity prices? The highest in the continental United States. --- Illegal aliens, the poor, the homeless, the foreign-born and welfare recipients? The largest numbers in the United States. Public K-12 schools? Test scores in the bottom quartile. Poverty? Twenty percent live below the poverty line. --- So what happened to the nation’s most richly naturally endowed — and once best governed — state? - The left took total control — after millions of the embattled middle class fled. Millions more impoverished immigrants, legal and illegal, took their place. Left-wing Silicon Valley spawned some of the wealthiest elite liberal enclaves in the world. The result was a neo-feudal society that was hardly democratic. -- Millions of subsidized poor compose the bottom. A beleaguered middle continues to shrink. An ultra-rich apparat of left-wing coastal professionals and investors rules from the top. -- As upper-bracket taxpayers fled, taxes rose on those who remained to fund expanding entitlements for newly arrived poor would-be residents. In turn, even more of the middle class left. The remaining pyramidal economic structure ensured a Democratic monopoly — further entrenched by changing balloting laws, gerrymandering voting districts, vote harvesting, fueling public employee unions and ignoring or undermining popular referenda. --- In 2014, Californians voted for Proposition 1, a $7.5 billion water bond designed to solve the state’s chronic water storage deficit. Included was $2.7 billion specifically designated for new reservoirs, as the last major reservoir had been built in 1980, when California had roughly half its current population. Despite the people’s vote, bureaucracies, elected officials and green activists blocked all new reservoir construction. ---- Read more of what the corrupt DemocRATs have done to California here --- https://www.reviewjournal.com/opinion/opinion-columns/victor-davis-hanson/victor-davis-hanson-is-california-reaching-critical-mass-3841009/?utm_rs=IL_jzaTRVe1Tk2G6XeerUYUnA&utm_campaign=widget&utm_medium=most_read
