In Sunday's column, George Will analyzed the fiscal grease fire that is the Republic of California. Early on, he makes this point:
We can't assume that in-migration will continue to float us forever. In fact, during the 2003-2004 period, our net migration turned negative by a couple of thousand. We can also expect our in-migration to drop substantially for 2009, as people generally move less during economic downturns, and this one has the amplifying factor of making it more difficult for people to sell or rent out their homes in order to move.
There's little doubt that TABOR saved us from a similar fate as Nevada and Arizona, over-spending and over-taxing being bipartisan pathologies, but it's also clear which party now wants to remove those safeguards.
Under Arnold Schwarzenegger, the best governor the states contiguous to California have ever had, people and businesses have been relocating to those states. For four consecutive years, more Americans have moved out of California than have moved in. California's business costs are more than 20 percent higher than the average state's. In the past decade, net out-migration of Americans has been 1.4 million. California is exporting talent while importing Mexico's poverty. The latter is not California's fault; the former is."Those states" include, notably, Nevada and Arizona, which have used their windfall to subsidize ever-expanding government of their own. Now, City Journal's Nicole Gelinas writes that their time is running out, too:
But during the boom times, elected officials in Arizona, Florida, and Nevada took a page out of the old states' playbook, driving up spending at an unsustainable pace. Now that the growth of the low-tax states has hit a wall, shattering revenues, they face a tough choice: they can raise taxes to fund permanently higher costs, or they can aggressively cut spending. So far, it's proving surprisingly easy for them to choose Option One, taking a small step toward transforming themselves into the high-tax states that so many of their own residents have fled."Those states" also include Colorado, which had a net domestic in-migration of about 162,000 from 1995-2000, and again from 2000-2008 (all these numbers are from the US Census), about a third of that total coming from California.
We can't assume that in-migration will continue to float us forever. In fact, during the 2003-2004 period, our net migration turned negative by a couple of thousand. We can also expect our in-migration to drop substantially for 2009, as people generally move less during economic downturns, and this one has the amplifying factor of making it more difficult for people to sell or rent out their homes in order to move.
There's little doubt that TABOR saved us from a similar fate as Nevada and Arizona, over-spending and over-taxing being bipartisan pathologies, but it's also clear which party now wants to remove those safeguards.
