T**********e
发帖数: 29576 | 1 【 以下文字转载自 SanFrancisco 讨论区 】
发信人: TravisBickle (Travis), 信区: SanFrancisco
标 题: There Is No California
发信站: BBS 未名空间站 (Thu Aug 16 11:36:43 2012, 美东)
By Victor Davis Hanson - August 16, 2012
Driving across California is like going from Mississippi to Massachusetts
without ever crossing a state line.
Consider the disconnects: California's combined income and sales taxes are
among the nation's highest, but the state's deficit is still about $16
billion. It's estimated that more than 2,000 upper-income Californians are
leaving per week to flee high taxes and costly regulations, yet California
wants to raise taxes even higher; its business climate already ranks near
the bottom of most surveys. Its teachers are among the highest paid on
average in the nation, but its public school students consistently test near
the bottom of the nation in both math and science.
The state's public employees enjoy some of the nation's most generous
pensions and benefits, but California's retirement systems are underfunded
by about $300 billion. The state's gas taxes -- at over 49 cents per gallon
-- are among the highest in the nation, but its once unmatched freeways,
like 101 and 99, for long stretches have degenerated into potholed, clogged
nightmares unchanged since the early 1960s.
The state wishes to borrow billions of dollars to develop high-speed rail,
beginning with a little-traveled link between Fresno and Corcoran -- a
corridor already served by money-losing Amtrak. Apparently, coastal
residents like the idea of European high-speed rail -- as long as noisy and
dirty construction does not begin in their backyards.
As gasoline prices soar, California chooses not to develop millions of
barrels of untapped oil and even more natural gas off its shores and beneath
its interior. Home to bankrupt green companies like Solyndra, California
has mandated that a third of all the energy provided by state utilities soon
must come from renewable energy sources -- largely wind and solar, which
presently provide about 11 percent of its electricity and almost none of its
transportation fuel.
How to explain the seemingly inexplicable? There is no California, which is
a misnomer. There is no such state. Instead there are two radically
different cultures and landscapes with little in common, each equally
dysfunctional in quite different ways. Apart they are unworldly, together a
disaster.
A postmodern narrow coastal corridor runs from San Diego to Berkeley, where
the weather is ideal, the gentrified affluent make good money, and values
are green and left-wing. This Shangri-La is juxtaposed to a vast
impoverished interior, from the southern desert to the northern Central
Valley, where life is becoming premodern.
On the coast, blue-chip universities like Cal Tech, Berkeley, Stanford and
UCLA in pastoral landscapes train the world's doctors, lawyers, engineers
and businesspeople. In the hot interior of blue-collar Sacramento, Turlock,
Fresno and Bakersfield, well over half the incoming freshman in the
California State University system must take remedial math and science
classes.
In postmodern Palo Alto or Santa Monica, a small cottage costs more than $1
million. Two hours away, in premodern and now-bankrupt Stockton, a bungalow
the same size goes for less than $100,000.
In the interior, unemployment in many areas peaks at over 15 percent. The
theft of copper wire is reaching epidemic proportions. Thousands of the
shrinking middle class flee the interior for the coast or nearby no-income-
tax states. To fathom the state's nearly unbelievable statistics -- as the
state population grew by 10 million from the mid-1980s to 2005, its number
of Medicaid recipients increased by 7 million during that period; one-third
of the nation's welfare recipients now reside in California -- visit the
state's hinterlands.
But in the Never-Never Land of Apple, Facebook, Google, Hollywood and the
wine country, millions live in an idyllic paradise. Coastal Californians can
afford to worry about the state's trivia -- as their legislators seek to
outlaw foie gras, shut down irrigation projects to save the 3-inch delta
smelt, and allow children to have legally recognized multiple parents.
But in the less feel-good interior, crippling regulations curb timber, gas
and oil, and farm production. For the most part, the rules are mandated by
coastal utopians who have little idea where the gas for their imported cars
comes from, or how the redwood is cut for their decks, or who grows the
ingredients for their Mediterranean lunches of arugula, olive oil and pasta.
On the coast, it's politically incorrect to talk of illegal immigration. In
the interior, residents see first-hand the bankrupting effects on schools,
courts and health care when millions arrive illegally without English-
language fluency or a high school diploma -- and send back billions of
dollars in remittances to Mexico and other Latin American countries.
The drive from Fresno to Palo Alto takes three hours, but you might as well
be rocketing from Earth to the moon.
//
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution,
Stanford University, and author, most recently, of "A War Like No Other:
How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War." You can reach
him by e-mailing a****[email protected]. |
|
