Dude hasn’t done the math and realized his proposal would hurt the rest of the country a lot more than it would hurt us.  If Dude wants to try to get all of his product in to the US through the port in Seattle he can try, but when that fails California will be glad to import for him at a hefty price.

Beyond being empty blow-hard words, I wonder if these people realize how little most Californians care about the opinion of people outside the state regarding our domestic issues.  We’d like to have slightly cleaner air and a sustainable environment.  Suck it, Glenn.

Remember, kids, right-thinking Americans love smog, and generally prefer Thneeds to trees.

This is so crazy.  He wants to kick out a state because they don’t pollute enough?  It seems like this guy actually wants to destroy the environment and force others to.  How is clean air and a healthy environment bad for ‘family values’?

Hollywood projecting their family values and politics on the U.S.

What a hypocrite!  When ultra-conservative fundies try to force their values and politics on us through laws, apparently it’s ok, but when liberal people do it using (gasp!) the free media which people can choose not participate in, it’s bad.  I’m not a big fan of Hollywood, but they’re not nearly as bad some religious groups.

Considering we Californians only get back about $0.80 of each dollar we send to Washington, it seems like Mr. Beck has hit on a fantastic idea!

Most of us would take our 13% of the US GDP, our ranking as somewhere between the 8th to 11th-largest economy on earth, our technological innovation, our huge farming industry, and yes, our leadership in entertainment, among many other things, and happily exit the US, knowing full well this would answer every state budget problem forever and allow us to resume our proper position in the world without having to prop up all those red states who hate us as Beck does.  And we could have our air as clean as we want, and our beaches as clean as we want, without some dick like Beck deciding we’re not Americans because we don’t want to live in our own filth.

It’s really too bad it won’t happen, ‘cause I would pay cash money to watch large (Republican) areas of the US starve to death without California’s money, farms, and industry…

And Mr. Beck, from the bottom of my heart, please eat shit and die, you ignorant, pompous, poisonous, waste of good protein and oxygen…

So, do people watch this rage-monkey because they agree with him or because his rage-monkeying entertains them, like some of Homer Simpson’s moments?

Libertarian, funny how the highest concentration of Blue is also the home of the most major cities, ports, and financial centers. But good luck with The Heartland.

Just…wow. I didn’t think that Beck copuld reach a new level, but apparently moving to Faux yanked the cork out of a whole new magnum of crazy!

“Libertarian, funny how the highest concentration of Blue is also the home of the most major cities, ports, and financial centers. But good luck with The Heartland.”

...since Confederate States of America is no longer being used, perhaps the red states can reuse it.  They’ve even got a flag already designed and everything.

And as long as they have plenty of guns and religion to cling onto, they can all be happier together than pigs in shit…

@MikeEss, annejumps - you got it !

I think it would be a great idea for the Blue states to secede, even just for a year.
As a NJ taxpayer, I’m tired of being #50 on list in terms on return on taxes paid to the federal government.  And the funny thing is the crackerbarrel states like MS, AR, LA and the rest of the old confederacy and Bleck’s supporters are always at the top of the list in terms of federal welfare dollars.

Without California America would starve. No more green vegetables in winter, no more fruit.

Without California’s contribution to the GDP America might not be the world’s largest economy and we would certainly end up getting our butt kicked by the EU.

I imagine Oregon and Washington would want to join California so America would be left with virtually no domestic computer industry.

You folks in the heartland have fun eating milo.

If this does happen do any of you Californians know how easy it might be for non-right wing idiots to immigrate?

Colorado Dave, I don’t think immigration would be a problem, as long as they don’t piss all over California and Californians while holding out their hands for our cash.

***

Any of you red states who wish to sever your ties with California are welcome to do so — just reimburse us our portion of the federal spending you receive in excess of what you pay into the system, and we’ll call it even…

(BTW, red-staters, most porn comes from California too.  Those nights are going to be mighty long and cold without us…)

Bosworth,

Do you think maybe if the Red States stopped leaching Federal Welfare from California the conditions in California would improve. Imagine if all that federal tax revenue collected in California was spent in California and not Alabama?

Let Alabama, Mississippi, Nebraska, Wyoming and all the other Red States build their highways and water treatment plants without Federal dollars.

Just so you know, Colorado, when it was Red, was one of the only (if not the only) Red State that spent more money on Federal Taxes than the Federal Revenue it received.

Alaska, Alabama, Wyoming, et. al. are just a bunch of Socialist Moochers.

The sad thing is California is its own worst enemy. The budget mess will not be fixed, ever.

Unless taxes are raised, you’re absolutely correct.  Unfortunately California was one of the first states to buy into the whole “tax rebellion” bullshit and our tax code is absolutely ridiculous.  Why are corporations paying the same property tax that they did in 1978?  Why do we need a 2/3rds majority for any tax or bond, but a simple 50%+1 majority to rewrite the state Constitution?

Basically, Californians thought they could get something for nothing and that schools, roads and bridges would magically build themselves without needing any, you know, money.  Now we have a crumbling infrastructure and the public university system that was once the best in the nation is begging for cash.

Assuming Beck is right (big assumption there) and they dont allow drilling on land or offshore - thats ridiculous. Decreasing our dependence on foreign oil is imperative, and that head in the sand NIMBY attitude isnt helping at all.

Dude hasn’t done the math and realized his proposal would hurt the rest of the country a lot more than it would hurt us.

I’m sure Beck’s plans include kicking CA out of the union, and then invading CA to bring democracy to it…

I’m no expert, but it seems, ah, stupid to insult vast swathes of your potential audience based solely on their geographical location. I’m sure there are plenty of otherwise sympathetic people in Madison who don’t necessarily want to watch some TV personality douchily telling them their home town “tastes like garbage.” But whatever, I hope many more of these people pursue this Palinesque “shit on every place that’s not majority Republican” attitude.

“and they dont allow drilling on land or offshore - thats ridiculous.”

They don’t allow it because the amount of oil gotten isn’t that much and the enviromental damage as well as cleanup costs far more then you would get from the oil. A number of states that allowed offshore drilling for a while quickly banned it when they saw the crap that got on their shores from the drilling and lost tens of billons of dollars in tourist revenue for starters.

Here is the thing there are hundreds of millions of acres of land that could be drilled legally by the oil companies right now and there wouldn’t be objections from goverment agencies or private agencies because that land is designated as oil land and was used in the past to extract oil. The amount of oil from these several hundred million acres is far more then in ANWR and wouldn’t take a decade to get out. It could be gotten out in a week or a month once the old equipment is surveryed and new equipment as needed is put in. Reason the oil companies don’t want to get oil from these several hundred million acres is because there profit margin would be minimal or neglible yet gas costs to consumers would drastically drop and the importation of foreign oil would also drastically drop.

The reason oil companies want off shore drilling is not to become foreign oil indepedant or to get more oil because there isn’t any to get in the US it’s because it will make hundreds of billions for the oil companies while the oil that they can already get in the US will not make them hundreds of billions because of the cost to get it out of the old oil fields and wells that would have to be reopened.

As the oceans rise, both the east and west coasts (where the highest concentration of Blue is) will submierge, hopefully killing off as many liberals as possible, leaving “the heartland.”

You joke, but this is just a variety of conservative fantasies. Most of them involve some scenario in which the blue state heathens “get theirs” in the end, leaving those in the Heartland to get the last laugh. It could be rising sea levels, it could be a nuclear attack survived by heartlanders, or it could be the rapture where the righteous look down from heaven at the suffering of the sinners on earth during the tribulation.

I’m no expert, but it seems, ah, stupid to insult vast swathes of your potential audience based solely on their geographical location. I’m sure there are plenty of otherwise sympathetic people in Madison who don’t necessarily want to watch some TV personality douchily telling them their home town “tastes like garbage.”

Being from NJ, I can tell you that there is in fact plenty money to be made in making jokes about garbage and how it relates to one’s home state.

It’s all a matter of choosing the right enemies.

Basically, Californians thought they could get something for nothing and that schools, roads and bridges would magically build themselves without needing any, you know, money.  Now we have a crumbling infrastructure and the public university system that was once the best in the nation is begging for cash.

Though the UC system is still considered one of the best public university systems…if not the best….they could easily go the way of the California K-12 public if the tax policies and the antipathy of the right to continue supporting that system for political reasons continues. 

What’s more sad is that among California relatives who are upper-middle/upper-class and their neighbors, the notion that all private schools are automatically superior to their public counterparts is very strong.  That isn’t going to help, especially when this very mentality is one critical reason why Hawaiian public schools have not had adequate support from most politicians in the state legislature and government for decades.

Being from NJ, I can tell you that there is in fact plenty money to be made in making jokes about garbage and how it relates to one’s home state.

It’s all a matter of choosing the right enemies.

Out of curiosity, where in NJ?

We NYC residents love making jokes about garbage…especially in reference to a certain borough on the south side of New York Bay.  The fact it tends to be the most conservative borough politically is an added bonus, especially considering how a Republican congressman representing one of its districts has recently been scandalized by driving drunk on his way to visiting his “second family” in the Washington D.C. area.

The only downsides I can see to Beck’s proposal are that we’d be abandoning the sane folks forced to remain in the remaining 49, and that we’d probably need to arm ourselves against our large, aggressive neighbor.

To be fair, during the election I saw a number of comments - presumably facetious - about kicking Alaska out of the USA, from left-wingers rather than the right.  So I take this kind of overblown rhetoric as just that: not clever, not even remotely helpful, but the way American political discourse, both left and right, is these days.  Alas!

As the oceans rise, both the east and west coasts (where the highest concentration of Blue is) will submierge, hopefully killing off as many liberals as possible, leaving “the heartland.”

And all the rich people who live on the coasts will buy up the midwest, leaving the Republican rank and file refugees. 

Not to mention that, considering that, aside from the Rockies, the east and west coasts are on some of the highest ground in the country where mountains are plentiful, I doubt global warming would achieve your desired effect.  If anything, the deep south and midwest are probably going to be the first to go.  My home state of Louisiana, where I’ve heard people ridiculing California’s environmental policies in the exact same way Beck does here, is already being submerged.

Decreasing our dependence on foreign oil is imperative, and that head in the sand NIMBY attitude isnt helping at all.

You have no idea how international markets work, do you?

Tyro:

In fact, now that I think of it, wasn’t there a certain element of that in the old miniseries Amerika, where the midwest seceded from the Soviet-controlled US as “Heartland” and threw the rest of the country to the wolves?

Glen Beck can go fuck himself. California has the best weather (ever notice how it’s always sunny during the Rose parade and every other backwards ass “real America” town is under 5 feet of snow?) and the smartest people (no offense Colorado Dave). We can charge a “Fox news” fee for all the wingnuts who want to stay. That should help w/the tax problem.

Fix the Prop 13 problem with commercial real estate, and more business will relocate. Raise the taxes on those who can pay, and they will relocate.

You know, I keep hearing about these runaway companies that relocate only because their taxes go up, and no one has been able to name one for me.  I’ve seen companies like Boeing relocate because their industry collapsed and they had to cut back, but they didn’t go anywhere because of taxes.

Where is all of Silicon Valley going to relocate to—Kansas?  How about the movie industry?  Are they going to pick up and move everything to Mississippi because their property tax rate is lower?

Sorry, but that’s one of the biggest conservative myths out there.  No large company picks up and moves solely because of taxes.  And I’ve never heard of an entire industry—in fact, two entire industries—who move because of taxes.

I imagine Oregon and Washington would want to join California so America would be left with virtually no domestic computer industry.

Yes, despite a probable uptick in the “Washington Native” bumper stickers and jokes about “California Drivers” up here in Cascadia- we would join up with that.

” Not a conservative myth. Many more places on the planet have become high tech competitive.
“

Which has less to do with taxes and rather more that they have the educated workers at the entry level position.

A lot of these companies in foreign countries are legally required to by the native goverment to pay their workers full health insurance for them and their families as well as fewer working hours.

Or the worker laws are such it’s just a few legal steps away from slavery.

Where is all of Silicon Valley going to relocate to—Kansas?  How about the movie industry?  Are they going to pick up and move everything to Mississippi because their property tax rate is lower?

Silicon Valley relocating to Mississippi….bwhahahahaha!!! Considering Mississippi’s public education system is so bad that my relatives and all their fellow upper-middle class/upper-class neighbors are sending their kiddies to expensive private schools…...ain’t gonna happen unless there is a dramatic paradigm shift in the way the Mississippi politicians and the upper/upper-middle classes look at the place of public education in their state…..

As for Kansas…..only if the anti-science nuts are all kicked off their local and state education boards….

Out of curiosity, where in NJ? We NYC residents love making jokes about garbage..

I keep trying to remind people that those jokes about NJ and garbage don’t really apply to the rest of the state—it’s just that open landfill that used to be near the intersection of 280 and the Turnpike that everyone associates NJ with and isn’t reflective of everywhere else. On the other hand, I grew up not thinking that regularly driving by a large landfill from which you could smell the garbage was anything unusual.

especially considering how a Republican congressman representing one of its districts has recently been scandalized by driving drunk on his way to visiting his “second family” in the Washington D.C. area.

I hear he resigned to “spend more time with his families.”

Which has less to do with taxes and rather more that they have the educated workers at the entry level position.

...where in India….making $6,000/year as a computer programmer means you can live the life of the middle/upper-middle class whereas that would be considered below poverty wages in this country due to dramatic differences in living standards/cost of living compared to here.  A large part of that is due to the fact the vast majority of India’s population lives in horrific poverty that the vast majority of middle/upper-class Americans can scarcely imagine. 

Despite Mainland China’s great economic boom, the same could be said of the vast majority of its population….notwithstanding the facade of great wealth and prosperity we’ve seen on Western and Chinese MSM where they often forget to mention most of that prosperity has gone to the Chinese upper/upper-middle-classes….a still tiny, albeit growing minority compared to the multitude of poverty stricken farmers, migrant workers, and the poor. 

This was brought home to me when a recent Chinese undergrad argued vehemently that she was barely middle-class despite the fact her family owned a large business concern and had more than enough money to comfortably pay the $45k+/year tuition in full plus expenses so she could enjoy all that NYC had to offer without any financial worries….something even most US middle/upper-middle class families cannot guarantee to their college-bound children. 

In China, earning $45k/year would easily place you in the upper-middle classes when you consider most educated working professionals there would be lucky to even make half that….

Hate to break it to you, but the countries you mentioned have a lot more going for them, HR-wise, than just lower corporate taxes. 

Ireland?  Universal government-paid healthcare.  I believe education is also cheaper, and certainly better, and social services in general are easier to come by.  I would also hazard a guess that infrastructure is stronger. 

China?  Much cheaper on almost all levels than the US (payroll, expenses, etc), not to mention that business faces much less regulation (even down to labor laws, environmental policy, etc), and because China is part of the developing world, Western mega-corporations can throw their weight around and get what they want even easier than they do in the US.

Singapore I know a little less about, but I would guess that there are a lot of the same benefits that I described for Ireland.  Not to mention that Singapore might have been where the qualified people were—It’s much easier to open an office in Singapore than it is to bring an entire Singaporean staff to California.

It’s also interesting that, for the most part, different tax rates between the states don’t seem to influence where American industries tend to locate themselves in the US.  It would be way cheaper for a company to base itself in Memphis or Mobile than in Manhattan (especially wrt telecommunications).  And yet practically every important company on the planet has a New York office, and basically zero important companies are run out of Memphis or Mobile.

As the oceans rise, both the east and west coasts (where the highest concentration of Blue is) will submierge, hopefully killing off as many liberals as possible, leaving “the heartland.”

Win win.

(Note to humor disadvantaged individuals, the above is a joke and not meant to imply that I actually wish to kill off live human beings.)
Libertarian on 01/31 at 06:30 AM

But look at a topographical map some time. If the sea levels rise, with some heroic engineering, much of California’s densely populated land can be saved, since the coast is mountainous.

Florida, on the other hand, would be SOL. As would most of the Atlantic, including Gulf, coastal states. Which include a whole lot of “Blue” America but also a lot of “Red,” notably the electoral powerhouses of Florida and Texas.

None of this is relevant really, because the vast majority of humanity either lives on land that would be flooded or depends on crops that would be flooded; mayhem would surely ensue on a global and cataclysmic scale.

Bosworth, in a growing industry, people will get employees anywhere they can, even if they need to move there to get to them. Right before the “Ireland boom,” I worked for a high tech company which was recruiting people from Ireland to come out to the company I used to work for in the midwest. Of course, if you have European operations, you can simply short-circuit the process by opening up an office in Ireland to begin with.

The biggest danger is if America either faces a decline in its talent base or it makes it difficult for talented people to come into the US. Then companies suddenly will have a huge incentive to move the operations abroad. Heck, while your company was moving operations to Shenzhen, I interviewed for a Shenzhen-based company that was opening up an R&D;lab in Germany. Why? That’s where the talent was.

Corporate tax rate on US $’s was 38%

US corporations will be shocked to realize that, given that they pay a much lower percentage of their earnings in taxes.

Fix the Prop 13 problem with commercial real estate, and more business will relocate. Raise the taxes on those who can pay, and they will relocate.

This is actually, similar to Libertarian’s joke about climate change destroying the coastal blue states… it’s an apocalypse fantasy where those darn Californians (or New Yorkers) finally get their fiscal house in order, make the changes to their tax systems that they need to, and they face an exodus of business into Mississippi and Tenneessee, and all the right-thinking people there will be laughing, especially at their uppity, thought-they-were-so-great people they grew up with who moved to NYC or California and have to come trudging back begging for a job in a nice, laissez-faire low-tax place.

So, Bosworth_Focke, California’s business climate/taxes/etc. is so bad all these companies are not just moving to (presumably) lower tax states, they’re moving out of the US altogether?

So how does this support your argument that California is a bad place to do business?  It seems instead that America is a bad place to do business — if you define that to mean that people here want/need to get paid more than $5 an hour.

And let’s be clear on the business decisions being made here.  It’s not that somehow it’s impossible to make a profit in California because we’re such an onerous state to be located in.  Rather, the profits you make here might not be as large as if you could exploit people in some other country.  In that respect, California is no different from any other state in the US.

However, as our current economic problems show, in the long run this is a self-defeating strategy.  Handing all the profits to the rich, and refusing to tax them, while taxing the poor and the middle class, and paying shitty wages to all except the people at the very top, will eventually result in economic collapse. 

It seems pretty obvious (and something I’ve heard for years) that if you don’t pay people enough or offshore their jobs…(wait for it)...they won’t be able to buy your stupid trinkets anymore.  And if the sales of trinkets fall low enough, you won’t make a profit, no matter where you make ‘em.

The race to the bottom of wages and benefits will come to and end sooner or later.  And there will be a resulting economic realignment.  It may take a revolution first, but it will happen…

Ireland?  Universal government-paid healthcare.  I believe education is also cheaper, and certainly better, and social services in general are easier to come by.  I would also hazard a guess that infrastructure is stronger.

The Opoponax,

Most of my Irish friends would have a bone to pick with the last point.  From what they’ve told me, one of the effects of the lower tax rates is that infrastructure in many urban areas, especially those in the working-class areas are being nearly/completely neglected by the municipal and national governments.  Though they may look nice now, they said give it a few decades and they will go to seed if this trend of neglect continues at its current rate. 

Singapore I know a little less about, but I would guess that there are a lot of the same benefits that I described for Ireland.  Not to mention that Singapore might have been where the qualified people were—It’s much easier to open an office in Singapore than it is to bring an entire Singaporean staff to California.

It is also an authoritarian pro-corporate state where political leaders and their allies have been able to use various means to quash dissent….including the use of libel suits in order to try to bankrupt their political opponents.  There is also a “government/business knows best” paternalistic attitude towards the populace…especially those who are not in that elite. 

Did I mention that Mainland China has been using Singapore as a model on how to bring economic growth and prosperity to their society while maintaining authoritarian one-party rule?

China is part of the developing world, Western mega-corporations can throw their weight around and get what they want even easier than they do in the US.

They are a large part…..along with corrupt government officials….especially at the rural and provincial levels. 

Also, the power dynamic is not as one-sided and unbalanced as you portrayed it…..especially if you’ve talked to anyone who has studied China/attempted to do business there from the 1980’s to the present.  I mean….even Microsoft lost a series of recent major piracy cases in Chinese courts. 

Fix the Prop 13 problem with commercial real estate, and more business will relocate. Raise the taxes on those who can pay, and they will relocate.

This is actually, similar to Libertarian’s joke about climate change destroying the coastal blue states…
Tyro on 01/31 at 11:39 AM

And it is similarly unfunny, because what would really happen would be a series of catastrophes and mayhem for everyone.

This line about “nope, you can’t have taxes and big government ‘cause the entrepreneurial types will just up stakes and move to where they are appreciated!” is perennial, and one reason for that is that it has some truth to it. The capitalists are that ruthless and will abandon a costly infrastructure, built up over decades, to start afresh elsewhere.

But when they do, after a lag in which they make profits unimpeded not only by taxes but by a weak labor force unable to demand decent wages and a lack of environmental and workplace safety regs, etc, the chickens come home to roost. The poorer working class citizens whose “irresponsible” voting for government services and taxes to pay for them leave their abandoned former digs—and show up to work in the new glibertarian paradise. Or they are replaced by a new working class, perhaps immigrants. Either way—they have the same objective interest as their allegedly degenerate predecessors back in the old industrial areas, and they have the numbers—because no matter how much of an ideological fan dance our ownership-society “betters” put on, wealth is the product of human labor, and that means the capitalists get outnumbered fast anywhere there is actual potential profit to be made, because that profit is produced by working people. So either there is no effective democracy and you get mounting social tension leading toward revolution, or there is some and soon our John Galts are facing yet another legislature raising taxes on them yet again.

Meanwhile—workplace safety and environmental regulations also exist for a reason, and AynRandLand is probably becoming yet another grim example of why they do; this is a formula for redress by building up a new structure of regulation.

And if this is all there were to it, the world would be locked in an ugly sort of meta-ecocycle of perpetual capital flight. But there is an alternative—it is possible for capitalists who accept the legitimacy and inevitability of costly investments in human capital to configure high-tax, high-service regimes into the infrastructure for high-value, high-productivity industry that has the consent, more or less, of the workers, who have a stake in it as well.

The thing is, taking down a perfectly functional worker/capitalist partner region like that can be very profitable, for the same reason that piracy can pay—a few people steal the work of many and live high off the plunder for a while. So it is difficult to build these bastions of enlightened capitalism and not easy to keep them.

The next company started a 1000 person manufacturing, sales, R&D;, and marketing division in Shenzhen, China because of vastly lower tax rates as well as labor and employee costs.

In other words, they did not move solely because of the tax rate.  They moved because they could pay people enormously less money, and the tax break was just a nice extra.

You don’t move operations to China or India or even Ireland because your corporate tax rate is too high.  You move there because you can pay your employees much, much less than you would have to in the United States. 

US companies are addicted to cheap labor but, as MikeEss pointed out, it only takes you so far because if you impoverish the people in the country that you hope to sell your products to, they can’t afford to buy your products.  It doesn’t matter how cheap the labor is in China if people don’t buy your product once you ship it to the United States.  US automakers built their cars in Mexico because labor was so much cheaper, but the labor savings doesn’t do any good if the cars all end up sitting in storage because no one wants one.

In other words, all of your examples have disproven your point that raising taxes on corporations will automatically make them flee.  I still haven’t seen an example of yours with an industry that can’t be easily outsourced like manufacturing moving out of a state solely because of the tax rate.

Uh, Mark: a lot of those ‘backwards ass “real America” town[s]’ are in the South, where the weather is either pretty mild or downright warm in the winter. At the same time, a lot of towns which are under five feet of snow are in blue states.

The race to the bottom of wages and benefits will come to and end sooner or later.  And there will be a resulting economic realignment.  It may take a revolution first, but it will happen…

Fears of revolution are one reason why the Mainland Chinese government has attempted to be proactive in providing expanded unemployment benefits, especially to unemployed college graduates.  They know their modern Chinese history well enough to know that protesting college students/graduates are trouble…...just look at their reactions to the last major protest on June 4, 1989…....

Another mormon barfs up some nonsense on fox.  Now that’s news I can believe in.  And even in the context of the blatherers at fox, beck is a genuine pearl of sillyness.

Keep in mind, oreily can’t live forever, who do you think they’re grooming for the daily hour of hate and lies?

I imagine Oregon and Washington would want to join California so America would be left with virtually no domestic computer industry.

It may be worthwhile resurrecting this book.

And isn’t a lot of California’s economy built on skilled labour and clusters (apart from agriculture based on <strike>slave</strike> Mexican labour - Silicon Valley and Hollywood?  If the Ayn Rand types move out, what exactly stops that talent from continuing and forming their own enterprises?  For that matter, are the Randites going to take the ports of San Francisco and Los Angelos with them when they move to Jesusland?

The bottom line is that California is viable as a nation, and would be better on average than the rest of the States.  There would be pain from adjustments, but seceding would hurt the US more than California.  All the people talking about taxes haven’t considered what happens if the funds funnelled to Washington instead get applied to Californian problems.

Forming a nation would also give Californians an opportunity to fix their idiotic budget problems. Smartest people in the country or not, though, I have this suspicion they’d make a worse mess out of it.

Bosworth—the problem isn’t that companies move to take advantage of favorable taxes.  The problem is that they refuse to admit that the economies are obviously false and that the departments that do those moves pawn off costs on every other part of the company that works with them.

This is part and parcel of the collapse of Fordism.  Henry Ford famously said that he had to pay his workers enough to buy his cars.  But if you make cheap enough crap, you can pay people very very little to make things that people merely making very little can afford.

To be fair, during the election I saw a number of comments - presumably facetious - about kicking Alaska out of the USA, from left-wingers rather than the right.  So I take this kind of overblown rhetoric as just that: not clever, not even remotely helpful, but the way American political discourse, both left and right, is these days.  Alas!

dr ngo, Alaska has a historical separatist movement and a separatist party. Not quite the same as California.

*applauds MikeEss at 2:49*

The last 8-years for California have been like being one of a pair of conjoined twins — but the other twin has been going slowly insane. 

We’d leave but we’re physically unable to do so…

” lot of those ‘backwards ass “real America” town[s]’ are in the South, where the weather is either pretty mild or downright warm in the winter.”

What the hell are you talking about?

The south gets cold in the winter time. We may not have snow but it is chilly and a lot of people hate it especially if it does snow since one foot of snow shuts down the entire south.

“companies are addicted to cheap labor but”

Until it turns out that the toys are lead containmanted or that a huge percentage of the goods are otherwise defective. A number of companies have actually moved manufactoring out of China and back into the US or other European countries since in actuality it is far more cost effective and profitable to do the manufactoring locally even at higher wages then have the Chinese or other overseas markets do it.

To be fair, during the election I saw a number of comments - presumably facetious - about kicking Alaska out of the USA, from left-wingers rather than the right.  So I take this kind of overblown rhetoric as just that: not clever, not even remotely helpful, but the way American political discourse, both left and right, is these days.  Alas!

Huh?  I saw none of that from the left.  What I saw was people mocking the right-wing Alaska separatist movement- which only got attention at all due to Palin’s association with them.  A sarcastic “don’t let the door hit ya in the ass on the way out” is not the same as joking about “kicking Alaska out of the USA.”  It’s a joke about letting them leave, not making them leave- iow, not at all like Beck’s dumbassery.

I made a few such comments myself, to the effect of, “so, you’re a giant landmass with vast reserves of mineral wealth and not enough population to support a military even if you drafted everyone and spent every dime on weapons.  How long do you expect to stay independent, so close to Russia and the US?  Good luck with that.”

I’m just wondering what would happen to all those military bases.  Would the new national govt of CA be able to charge rent?  What would be fair market value for, say, Camp Pendleton (afaik, the single biggest piece of undeveloped oceanfront land between LA and San Diego?  Or all those vast Navy holdings in SF and San Diego?  That’s a lot of bayfront property, man.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Nashville. Where I grew up.

Just as long as the remaining number of stars on the flag can be rearranged in X number of rows, with nothing left over. 49 = 7 x 7, fortunately. If Beck eliminates another state (Illinois would probably suit his purposes) then he’d still have 12 x 4 or 6 x 8, however it once was when there were 48. But I’d really advise against a total of 3 states - 47 being a prime number - forcing either 47 stars strung out along one row, an impossible challenge for the most enterprising Betsy Ross, or at least one row with fewer stars, while eliminating 4 states for a total of 46 would still be awkward - 2 rows of 23? the lines are still too long. 45 would work out well. Would Beck be interested in finding 4 additional states worthy of involuntary secession?

To be fair, during the election I saw a number of comments - presumably facetious - about kicking Alaska out of the USA, from left-wingers rather than the right.

I think those jokes were the direct result of the Republican vice presidential candidate’s husband being the member of a secessionist group.  Palin tried to divide this country by claiming *her* part of the country as the “real” America, and at the same time her fucking husband wants Alaska to be its own country.

Anyway, if California gets kicked out of the union, can I get automatic California citizenship since I was born there?  I’d totally move back if that’s the case.

Dayum, keshmeshi, I miss that border by about 20 miles! 

Maybe Ecotopia will become reality?

They also voted last week to raise emissions standards because it’s too smoggy there and they care about their bronchial trees and cardiovascular health.

There. Fixed.

Exactly, Bad Jim - the Atlantic Coast has been eroding into the Gulf or the Gulfstream for millions of years.

The Pacific Coast is being pushed up out of the sea.

Big difference when it comes to the elevation profile as you move inland.  The Pacific slams into a lot of cliffs, and becomes mountainous straight away.  I live on the wall of a valley of a broad estuary on the east coast.  Even though we are one floor above our neighbor’s roof line and can see all the way to Boston from our dining room, we are only 65 feet above sea level at 2 miles in land - and we are on a ridge!

But, but, California gave the world Reagan! And Nixon! Isn’t that enough right-wing cred?

Why doesn’t this jerk pick on Massachusetts? Better still, why doesn’t he leave the country himself?

Boy, is his face going to be red when he realizes that we contribute billions more to the federal coffers annually than we use. You can’t drop 12% of the nation’s population and expect to still balance the budget. We’d probably balance our state budget should we Sacramento collecting all the CA’s fed bucks, too. Why couldn’t he pitch this idea 8 years ago?

You joke, but this is just a variety of conservative fantasies. Most of them involve some scenario in which the blue state heathens “get theirs” in the end, leaving those in the Heartland to get the last laugh. It could be rising sea levels, it could be a nuclear attack survived by heartlanders, or it could be the rapture where the righteous look down from heaven at the suffering of the sinners on earth during the tribulation.

My original response to Tyro’s comment was eaten, but essentially this was the fundamental gist of the John Titor… performance art story thingy—a scenario where a city vs. country civil war in the US lead to a rural, agrarian US with the cities burned out by nuclear attacks and essentially an end to feminism, atheism, and diversity. At the time the scenario read like a libertarian’s wet dream, but let’s be honest—libertarians weren’t the only thing thinking this.

Bitter Scribe:

Oh, Massachusetts has already run this gauntlet. We still get wingnuts suggesting kicking us out of the union occasionally, and I imagine I’m not the only Bay Stater who takes the “Minutemen” “guarding” the border as a personal insult to this state.

I’m not a fan of CA.

High taxes, social givaway fraud to illegals at taxpayers’ expense…...and particularly in the North….lotta weirdos.

Wouldn’t break my heart.

Brendan Skwire, thanks for letting this Californian know why I shouldn’t be a fan of you.

“High taxes, social givaway fraud to illegals at taxpayers’ expense…...and particularly in the North….lotta weirdos.”

...that list of items (which is bullshit, but whatever warms the cockles of your no doubt tiny heart) personally offends you how? 

If you’re living in Cali and you don’t like it, please leave and find some Red State more to your liking.  Nobody here needs you.  If you’re not living here then it’s not your concern, so keep your ignorant opinions about things you know nothing about to yourself…

“What the hell are you talking about?

The south gets cold in the winter time. We may not have snow but it is chilly and a lot of people hate it especially if it does snow since one foot of snow shuts down the entire south. “

Dude. If the weather was not mild, a foot of snow would not close down “the entire south.” Trust me on this.

“Mild” does not mean “does not get cold.” In the winter, it means that the weather doesn’t get *that* cold, and doesn’t stay cold for that long. Yeah, you’ll have some cold days, but not enough for snow to be common, and you’ll have a fair number of days in the sixties or seventies. The further south you go, the warmer it tends to be.

I love the “if you raise taxes, all the businesses will leave” nonsense.

It’s just like the “if you ban all indoor smoking, all the restaurants and bars will go out of business!”

Funny how one year later all these Illinois restaurants and bars saw their business go up once they were smoke-free. 

People live in the United States, and they need goods and services.  If companies think it’s too expensive, they should leave.  That’ll leave a large niche for smaller companies to fill.  And especially in Northern California, where corporate motivations matter, smaller corporations would seem to have a leg up already.
—————-
Businesses in the US are hindered b/c they have to provide employee healthcare.  That’s the real reason we have a chance at universal health care=it’s affecting the big corporations’ ability to do business here.  It’s a real cost that they don’t have to match elsewhere.

As for paying taxes, Great Discoball!  W cut taxes on the rich and corporations for nearly a decade.  How’s that working for us?  It’s NOT.

Thirty-eight percent taxes?  Are you nuts?  Do you know how many TIFs and other tax relief measures cities and states throw at corporations when wooing the business?  Not to mention allowing American companies to set up “headquarters” in the Cayman Islands is another practice that needs to be stopped.  A mailbox in the Caymans shouldn’t free you from paying taxes.

You want to live in a first world country?  You need to pay for it.  It’s time for the corporate welfare to end and to stop funneling the income upstream to the rich.

The south gets cold in the winter time. We may not have snow but it is chilly and a lot of people hate it especially if it does snow since one foot of snow shuts down the entire south.

Boy, there was a lot of entitled whining when DC shut down b/c it got cold and Obama mentioned that not only wouldn’t Chicago schools have closed (they NEVER close) but Sasha said she would have gone outside for recess.  How DARE the Obamas question DC traditional practices.

Yeah, it might be more cost-efficient to shut things down instead of investing in serious snow removal equipment, but it does seem awfully wimpy to people from the North.  It does snow down there every year.  Would it kill all y’all to invest in snow blades for the garbage trucks?

and all the right-thinking people there will be laughing, especially at their uppity, thought-they-were-so-great people they grew up with who moved to NYC or California and have to come trudging back begging for a job in a nice, laissez-faire low-tax place.

Except, as with the response to Libertarian, that’s an amazingly naive way of imagining what the fallout would actually be (if fallout there was, of course).  The folks who went off to NYC and California to be where the jobs were wouldn’t have to “trudge” back.  They’d be transferred back, and they’d keep all the success they’d built on whichever coast, and they’d start up all the institutions Heartland types hate (health food stores!  montessori kindergartens!  places to get good coffee!), vote Democratic, buy up all the real estate, etc. etc. etc.  The divide would be the same between the Blue Staters and the Red Staters, and the Red Staters would still lose.  It would just be happening on the same turf.

Though they may look nice now, they said give it a few decades and they will go to seed if this trend of neglect continues at its current rate.

Which is still worlds better than the infrastructure conditions in the rural heartland, which don’t “look nice now” - they by and large don’t exist, or exist in such a shambles that they’re not even usable.  One of the main reasons not to relocate your company to Shreveport, Louisiana, is that it’s in the ass-end of nowhere, the roads in that part of the country suck, there’s no public transit (not even Amtrak goes there), the schools are shite, the power goes out when it rains, you can’t get anything, local government is corrupt (and not in the fun way).  It’s like all the downsides of relocating to a third world country, except without most of the benefits.

Dude. If the weather was not mild, a foot of snow would not close down “the entire south.” Trust me on this…

The further south you go, the warmer it tends to be.
befuggled on 02/01 at 07:02 AM

Do say on, Captain Obvious! Perhaps you will un-“befuggle” your point!

I thought the era of cretins as pundits had been discredited by now, at least by Joe the Plumber’s adventures in Israel.

When tootiredoftheright tried to tell me that the weather in the South is not mild or warm, why yes, I pointed out the obvious. Sue me.

I vote to keep California and to kick Glenn Beck out of the U.S.

But I’d really advise against a total of 3 states - 47 being a prime number - forcing either 47 stars strung out along one row, an impossible challenge for the most enterprising Betsy Ross, or at least one row with fewer stars

I don’t know why, but this made me laugh so much.  Having on row with fewer stars would be really bad for my OCD.  But Rather than one long row, the 47 stars could be in a huge circle overlaying the stripes.  Anyway, if California leaves then I’m going with it.  A flag with only one star would be about as symmetrical as it gets, although I would also enjoy 4, 16, or 25.  Maybe we could split the stats 50/50, but not chosen geographically.

Glad to amuse you, Cat. Is there a name for the brand of humor I used - mocking Beck by minimizing the issue vis a vis number of stars on the flag? a point he wasn’t addressing in the slightest?

Thanks to whoever left the movie trailer link (somewhere way above, I got it in my email where the poster is not named). It was about as unappealing as I predicted, which may or may not have something to do with the fact that I have kids older than the cast members.

I, too, loved Daphne’s post. Pure gold, thank you.

If we are going to kick a state out of the US, I’d start with South Carolina.

We should have just let their dumbasses go when we had the chance.

I grew up in the DC area. DC winters can be northern-style cold winters or southern-style not-so-cold ones. A generation or two ago, DC was most definitely a southern city. The DC area has changed in so many demographic and cultural ways—not to mention the suburbs have developed out of all my 1970s childhood recognition—but the conceit of DC as a sleepy southern town persists.

I lived in Iowa for ten years. After that, I cannot think of New England winters as terribly cold. And there’s practically no cold at all south of Virginia.

No, Ms Kate, don’t let us go. America deserves our fantastic beaches. God knows, we’d ruin them if left to ourselves.

You should occupy us and launch Reconstruction 2.0. Do it right this time.

In terms of California and other blue states subsidizing the red states, I have always loved this:
http://fuckthesouth.com/

And there is such a thing as killing the goose that lays the golden egg.  For many decades Ontario (and later Alberta) subsidized the rest of Canada under our equalization system.  Very little federal money flowed back in general and no money came back regarding transitioning Ontario (the country’s industrial heartland) to a post-industrial economy.  That downhill slide, aided by the feds, has now come to the point that this country’s engine is on the verge of being a “have not” province as its industries go overseas and the tax money that it does produce go to other provinces.

It IS okay to have your rich uncle pay for your kid’s schooling.  It ISN’T okay to have your rich uncle pay for everything to the point where his own kids can’t afford school and his business goes under.  So many people, in pissing on Cali-for-nye-ay seem to forget that.

Tyro re NJ: Tell me about it.  Dislike for Ontario is universal across Canada, and deep dislike about Toronto similarly so and even in other parts of Ontario.  Somehow their disdain for our personalities is never strong enough to have them take their hands out of our wallets.

Just a follow-up thought:

Visceral dislike is one of the worst possible foundations of policy.

as far as california being viable as a nation, i’m thinking that’s not quite accurate.  two reasons come to mind - 1. water, 2. electricity.

but the rest of us do all like california’s food, that’s for sure.  and their entertainment and computer industries. 

i honestly don’t know if it’s a good swap though.

If Dude wants to try to get all of his product in to the US through the port in Seattle he can try, but when that fails California will be glad to import for him at a hefty price.

No way.
If you go, we go.
We’re taking the whole left coast.
Though to be fair, we should move Pacifica’s capitol to Portland

Thank you, Essie. I think I’m going to call this form of humor trivializing the topic in order to mock the moron.

nothings new.certain thing will definitely happen.

..