California Burnin’ — a Warning Against One-Party Rule - Bloomberg

California Burnin’ — a Warning Against One-Party Rule - Bloomberg

California Burnin’ — a Warning
Against One-Party Rule

Fires, blackouts, high taxes, poverty, scarce housing, urban
squalor, lousy schools — it’s a wonder anybody stays.

By Niall Ferguson

September 20, 2020, 1:00 PM GMT+1

 “California, folks,
is America fast forward.” Thus said Governor Gavin Newsom, hoarsely, amid brown
smoke at the North Complex Fire on Sept. 11. “What we’re experiencing right
here is coming to a community all across the United States of America … unless
we get our act together on climate change.”

I was with him all the way until he said the words “on
climate change.”

As my Hoover Institution colleague Victor Davis Hanson put
it last month, California is “the
progressive model of the future: a once-innovative, rich state that is
now a civilization in near ruins. The nation should watch us this election
year and learn of its possible future.”

Let’s start with the fires.
So far this year, they have torched more than five times as much land as
the average of the previous 33 years, killing 25 people and forcing about
100,000 people from their homes. At one point, three of the largest fires in
the state’s history were burning simultaneously in a ring around the San
Francisco Bay Area. According to the California Department of Forestry and Fire
Protection, or CAL FIRE, of the 10 largest fires since 1970, five broke out
this year. Nine out of 10 have occurred since 2012.

No doubt high temperatures and unusual thunderstorms bear
some of the responsibility for this year’s terrifying wildfires on the West
Coast. It is deeply misleading to claim, as some diehard deniers still do, that
temperatures aren’t rising and making wildfires more likely. But it is equally misleading to claim, as the New York
Times did last week, that “scientists say” climate change “is the primary
cause of the conflagration.”

In reality, as Stanford’s Rebecca Miller, Christopher Field
and Katharine J. Mach argue in a recent article in Nature Sustainability, this
crisis has at least as much to do with disastrous
land mismanagement as with climate change, and perhaps more. Anyone who
thinks solar panels, Teslas and a $3.3 billion white elephant of a high-speed
rail line will avoid comparable or worse fires next year (and the year after
and the year after) doesn’t understand what the scientists are really saying.

Most measures proposed by environmentalists to reduce carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse
gas” emissions will pay off over 50 to 100 years, as the International Panel on
Climate Change has long made clear. Even a best-case scenario of “stringent
mitigation” (what the IPCC calls Representative Concentration Pathway 2.6)
would not bring carbon dioxide emissions down to 1950 levels until around 2050.
Nor would it lower global average temperatures; it would merely stop them
rising.

And that’s only if the whole world — including China and
India — takes action. California’s wildfire problem cannot be solved by the
state’s citizens “getting their act together on climate change,” in Newsom’s
words. The problem needs immediately effective action — and that means a return to sane forest management, if
such a return is still possible. For decades, Democratic leaders in California
have presided over a policy of leaving dead trees to rot, instead of the old
and rational system of prescribed or
controlled burns, not least because environmental and clear air
regulations, as well as problems of legal liability, made controlled burns
harder and harder to do.

In prehistoric
California, according to a recent analysis in ProPublica, between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned
each year. California’s
land managers burned about 30,000 acres a year on average between 1982 and
1998. Over the next 18 years, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres.
The result has been a huge accumulation of highly flammable kindling. 

Miller, Field and Mach concluded that a total area of around
20 million acres — roughly one-fifth of the state’s territory — was in urgent need
of “fuel treatment,” meaning prescribed burns, mechanical thinning and
managed wildfire. It is hard to imagine anything remotely close to that
happening under the current political dispensation. (The authors politely
called for “fundamental shifts in prescribed-burn policies, beyond those
currently under consideration.”) Or rather, it is going to happen, but at a
time of Nature’s choosing, with catastrophic consequences.

A case in point: For a year and a half, red tape slowed down
a forest-thinning project
in Berry Creek, Butte County. The project covered just 54 acres
but, thanks to the burdensome provisions of the California Environmental Quality Act, work had yet to start when the
North Complex wildfire struck, devastating the town and killing 10 people.

I have some skin in this game. Four years ago, I moved from
Harvard University to Stanford University. My family traded a solid,
century-old professorial residence in Cambridge for a wooden house in a wooded
area that to our wooden heads seemed most idyllic. A few weeks ago, our
neighborhood was on the edge of the evacuation zone.

However, I have less skin in the game than Victor Davis
Hanson. He lives on the fruit and nut farm near Selma, in the Central Valley,
that his family has owned since the 1870s. The air quality index in Stanford rose above 170 on three days in
the last month. In Selma last week it was 460.
(Anything above 301 qualifies as “emergency conditions.”)

I write these words over 1,000 miles from our California
home, but it’s no good: in recent days the smoke has found us, too. Hotel
parking lots full of vehicles with CA license plates confirm that we are not
the only eastward migrants. It’s like Steinbeck’s
“Grapes of Wrath” in reverse: Now that the Golden State is the Char-Grilled
State, Californians have become the new Okies, though a good deal less
impecunious.

Yet wildfires are only one of the reasons people are fleeing
California. In addition, the wrongheaded
environmental policies of the sages of Sacramento have so undermined the
power grid (for example, by shutting down gas-fired power plants and
refusing to count hydroelectric energy as renewable) that residents have
been subjected to rolling blackouts
this year. The same policies have largely killed off the oil and gas industry.
Newsom & Co. have failed to upgrade
the water system to keep pace with the last half-century of population
growth.

It’s not that California politicians don’t know how to spend
money. Back in 2007, total state spending was $146 billion. Last year it was
$215 billion. I know, I know: In real terms California’s GDP increased by
nearly a third in the same period. And I know: If it were an independent
nation it would be the fifth-largest economy in the world, ahead of India’s.
But for how much longer will that be true?

California’s taxes aren’t the highest in the country — for
the median household. But the tax system
is one of the most progressive, with a 13.3% top tax rate on incomes
above $1 million — and that’s no longer deductible from the federal tax bill as
it used to be. The top 1% of taxpayers (those earning more than $500,000) now
account for half of personal income-tax revenue. And there’s worse to come.

The latest brilliant ideas in Sacramento are to raise the
top income rate up to 16.8% and to levy a wealth tax (0.4% on personal fortunes
over $30 million) that you couldn’t even avoid paying if you left the
state. (The proposal envisages payment for up to 10 years after departure to a
lower-tax state.) It is a strange place that seeks to repel the rich while making itself a magnet for illegal immigrants
by establishing no fewer than 20 “sanctuary” cities or counties.

And the results of all this progressive policy? A poverty boom. California now has 12%
of the nation's population, but over 30% of its welfare recipients. By the
official measure, based mainly on income and family size, California’s 11.4%
poverty rate in 2019 was close to the national average over the past three
years. However, according to a new Census Bureau report, which takes housing
and other costs into account, the real
poverty rate in California is 17.2%,
the highest of any state. (Newsom gets one thing right when he says, “We're
living in the wealthiest as well as the poorest state in America.”)

About a third of California’s poverty can be attributed to
housing and other living costs such as clothing and utilities. As everyone who
resides there knows, there’s a chronic housing shortage in the Bay Area (the
median-priced home in San Francisco costs about $1.5 million), mainly because a
plethora of regulations make the construction of affordable housing well-nigh
impossible. In blithe
disregard of all we know about rent
controls — which discourage landlords from providing housing — that is,
predictably, the solution the Democrats propose.

But that’s not all. The state’s
public schools rank 37th in the country overall and have the highest
pupil-teacher ratio. “Only half of California students meet English
standards and fewer meet math standards, test scores show,” was a headline in the
Los Angeles Times last October. Health
care and pension costs are unsustainable. Oh, and they messed up on
Covid-19, despite imposing the nation’s first shelter-in-place orders. Having
prematurely claimed victory, California now leads New York in terms of cases,
though not deaths.

Back in the 1960s, California was the world’s fantasy
destination. “California Dreamin’,” “California Girls,” “Going to California” —
you know the songs. But reputations have a way of outliving reality. Despite
the economic miracle wrought in Silicon Valley, beginning with the genesis of
the internet back in the 1970s, and despite the continuing strength of the
state’s universities, the dream in
terms of quality of life has slowly died.

When I first visited San
Francisco in 1981, it was still one of the loveliest cities I had ever
beheld. Now its streets are so filthy — human feces and syringe needles
are the principal hazards — that I avoid it. (I was going to say “like the
plague,” but that’s Lake Tahoe.)

Yet the Bay Area and its southern sister Los Angeles are
only one of the two Californias. As Hanson argued 10 years ago, the Central Valley is another country,
more “Caribbean” or Latin American, where “countless inland communities … have
become near-apartheid societies, where Spanish is the first language, the schools are not
at all diverse, and the federal and state governments are either the main
employers or at least the chief sources of income.”

The principal reason for California’s decline is that the
Golden State became a one-party state. The Republican candidate won California
in every election but one (1964) between 1952 and 1988. But the Democrat has
won California in every election since, with the Democratic vote share rising
from 46% in 1992 to 62% in 2016.

One-Party State

Democrats' minority/majority in California Legislature*

Source: Michael J. Dubin/Party Affiliations in State
Legislatures

*Excludes independents

Democrats now have 61 out of 80 seats in the California State
Assembly. The last time Republicans had a majority (of one) was in 1994, but
that was an anomaly. The Democrats have
essentially controlled the State Senate since 1958, with rising majorities
since the 1990s. Apart from 1994, the only other year since 1958 when they did
not win a majority of seats in the Assembly was 1968.

When regular voting has no effect, people eventually vote with their feet. From 2007 until
2016, about five million people moved to California but six million moved
out to other states. For years before that, the newcomers were poorer than the leavers. This net exodus is surging
in 2020. And businesses (for example, Charles Schwab Corp.) are leaving too. Silicon Valley is going virtual, with
many big tech companies thinking of making work from home permanent for at
least some employees. (One tech chief executive told me last week that his engineers
were pleading not to return to the office.)

People are getting out of the Bay Area as much and perhaps
more than they are getting out of New York City. Texas is only one of the
favored alternatives. Realtors in Montana
are reporting record demand from West Coast refugees. The hotels are full,
which is unheard of at this time of year. I also know a number of eminent
Californians who are now Hawaiians.

The conservative writer and broadcaster Ben Shapiro, born in
L.A., just announced that he is heading to Nashville, Tennessee. “I love the
state, grew up in the state, married in the state and have had children in the
state,” he told Laura Ingraham. But California was “not a great place to raise
children and not a great place to build a company.” Now we know the true
meaning of Calexit. It’s not
secession. It’s exodus.

I cannot blame the leavers. When I moved West in 2016, it was in the naive belief that
California was Massachusetts without snow and Stanford was Harvard with
September weather all year round. How wrong I was.

But am I leaving? Well, maybe there’s no point. As Newsom’s
predecessor Jerry Brown put it last week: “There are going to be problems
everywhere in the United States. This is the new normal. It’s been predicted
and it’s happening … Tell me: Where are you going to go? What’s your
alternative?”

Great question, but — as with Newsom’s prophecy — wrongly
framed. The big problem is not that climate change is coming to every state. It
is, though most states will mitigate it better than California. The problem is that Democratic governance
could be coming to the nation as a whole, starting on Jan. 20. And with the
Democratic nominee, Joe Biden, turning 78 two weeks after election day, it is
not a little troubling to me that his vice-presidential pick is a Californian,
just as so many of his plans to spend, tax and regulate have “designed in
California” all over them.

Yes, folks, California is America fast forward. Can someone
please hit pause?

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the
editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story:

Niall Ferguson at nferguson23@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:

Tobin Harshaw at tharshaw@bloomberg.net