The New Class Warfare

by Joel Kotkin, City Journal Spring 2012  h/t Instapundit

Excerpts:

• California’s superwealthy progressives seem intent on destroying middle-class jobs.
• Even before the economic downturn, California was moving toward greater class inequality, but the Great Recession exacerbated the trend.
• Yet while the working and middle classes struggle, California’s most elite entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are thriving as never before.
• One reason for California’s widening class divide is that, for a decade or longer, the state’s progressives have fostered a tax environment that slows job creation, particularly for the middle and working classes.
• Still more troubling to California employers is the state’s regulatory environment.
• The list of companies leaving the state or shifting jobs elsewhere is extensive.
• Radical environmentalism has been particularly responsible for driving wedges between California’s classes. 
• California’s legislature in 2006 passed Assembly Bill 32, which, in order to cut greenhouse-gas emissions, imposes heavy fees on using carbon-based energy and severely restricts planning and development.
• The renewable-fuel regulations are driving even green jobs out of the state.
• The explanation for the progressives’ hypocritical friendliness to Silicon Valley is simple: money and politics.
• Hollywood manages to outdo even Silicon Valley in its class hypocrisy.
• According to the Tax Foundation, California residents already pay the nation’s sixth-highest state tax rates, and they are likely to keep rising.
• More important still is that a pro-growth strategy could help reverse California’s current feudalization. The same Public Policy Institute of California study shows that during the last broad-based economic boom, between 1993 and 2001, the 10th percentile of earners enjoyed stronger income growth than earners in the higher percentiles did. The lesson, which progressives once understood, is that upward mobility is best served by a growing economy.

Comment:

If Romney wants to win this fall, he'd better hammer on these points incessantly.  It may not make any difference in California, but the rest of the country could be persuaded that this is not the model to be emulated.

The contrast between California and Texas couldn't be more extreme.  If jobs are important, and the economy is important, it should be clear which model is superior.