Chevron became just the latest employer to announce its exit from California last week, and while it is tempting to blame the state’s war against fossil fuels as the cause for the departure, energy firms are far from the only companies fleeing the state as fast as they can.
In just the last four years, rocket manufacturer SpaceX, financial servicer Charles Schwab, and software creator Oracle have all left California and moved to Texas. And major corporations aren’t the only ones leaving. California has led the United States in outstate migration for a generation now, with most residents following employers to Texas.
On the energy front, California has done plenty to target fossil fuel companies like Chevron. The state charges cap-and-trade taxes on energy producers, imposes costly environmental mandates on refiners, and, on top of all that, charges oil companies an “excessive profits” tax to add insult to injury.
“We believe California has a number of policies that raise costs, that hurt consumers, that discourage investment, and ultimately, we think that’s not good for the economy in California or for consumers,” Chevron CEO Mike Wirth said as his company announced its move to Houston.
But as much as California’s energy policies have raised costs, hurt consumers, and discouraged investment, so have its policies in every other sector. The nation’s strictest environmental laws make it prohibitively expensive to build housing, factories, and infrastructure. As a result, California now has the nation’s highest gas prices, the nation’s highest energy costs, and the nation’s most unaffordable housing.
One might hope that while the Democratic Party is inflicting all of these high costs on consumers across all sectors of the economy, it would at least be able to deliver good public services as a result. Unfortunately not. Despite a 14.4% top income tax rate and an 8.8% corporate tax rate, the state is still $46.8 billion in debt, the homeless population is the nation’s highest, the schools are among the nation’s worst, and so are the state’s roads and highways. The Democratic Party is so enamored with the myth of a green new economy that it has poured more than $10 billion into a high-speed train to nowhere that has constructed barely a mile of track while still needing over $100 billion to complete the project.
No wonder California has the nation’s highest unemployment rate to boot.
As bad as is the Democratic Party’s malfeasance in running California into the ground, the lone bright spot is that middle-class families still have the freedom to escape Democratic Party tyranny and flee to Republican-controlled states such as Utah, Texas, and Florida.
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But that is what makes Vice President Kamala Harris’s candidacy such a danger. Harris wants to take the far-left extreme policies that have destroyed California and inflict them on the rest of the nation. Despite her flip-flopping on mandatory gun buybacks, fracking bans, and a ban on private health insurance, positions on which she will surely flip right back if elected, she still supports decriminalizing illegal border crossings, free healthcare for illegal immigrants, as California already provides, and the elimination of cash bail.
If Harris wins and the Democratic Party continues to do to the U.S. what it did to California, making it an unaffordable debt and homeless-ridden dump, to where will the rest of us flee?
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