Is the California Dream Dead?

Joel Kotkin has some thoughts:

For decades, California has epitomized America's economic strengths: technological excellence, artistic creativity, agricultural fecundity and an intrepid entrepreneurial spirit. Yet lately California has projected a grimmer vision of a politically divided, economically stagnant state. Last week its legislature cut a deal to close its $42 billion budget deficit, but its larger problems remain.

California has returned from the dead before, most recently in the mid-1990s. But the odds that the Golden State can reinvent itself again seem long. The buffoonish current governor and a legislature divided between hysterical greens, public-employee lackeys and Neanderthal Republicans have turned the state into a fiscal laughingstock. Meanwhile, more of its middle class migrates out while a large and undereducated underclass (much of it Latino) faces dim prospects. It sometimes seems the people running the state have little feel for the very things that constitute its essence — and could allow California to reinvent itself, and the American future, once again.

The facts at hand are pretty dreary. California entered the recession early last year, according to the Forecast Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is expected to lag behind the nation well into 2011. Unemployment stands at roughly 10 percent, ahead only of Rust Belt basket cases like Michigan and East Coast calamity Rhode Island. Not surprisingly, people are fleeing this mounting disaster. Net outmigration has been growing every year since about 2003 and should reach well over 200,000 by 2011. This outflow would be far greater, notes demographer Wendell Cox, if not for the fact that many residents can't sell their homes and are essentially held prisoner by their mortgages.

I added the emphasis above because that's the heart of the problem. I don't think we have a collection of "Neanderthal" Republicans, but we certainly do have a bunch of far lefties who are so desperate to "save the planet" that they're willing to destroy the state in the process.

We have millions of barrels of oil and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas just off our coast waiting to be exploited, and could in fact go get those supplies without drilling a single new well, and yet the greenies won't let us. California could pick up something like $50 billion in royalties off of that stuff with no effort required by the state other than to approve it. Like much of what comes out of Sacramento, it's madness.

You can read the rest of Kotkin's analysis here.