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from the you-can-go-your-own-way-♩♫♩♫ dept.
Supporters of a plan for California to secede from the union took their first formal step Monday morning, submitting a proposed ballot measure to the state attorney general's office in the hopes of a statewide vote as soon as 2018.
Marcus Ruiz Evans, the vice president and co-founder of Yes California, said his group had been planning to wait for a later election, but the presidential election of Donald Trump sped up the timeline.
"We're doing it now because of all of the overwhelming attention," Evans said.
The Yes California group has been around for more than two years, Evans said. It is based around California taxpayers paying more money to the federal government than the state receives in spending, that Californians are culturally different from the rest of the country, and that national media and organizations routinely criticize Californians for being out of step with the rest of the U.S.
Could California go it alone?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 23 2016, @08:44PM
Please please please help us secede, Californians are tired of supporting the bulk of fiscal responsibility for other states while be yelled at for just about everything.
To help support the policies that 'the democrats' helped put in place. You would also need to take with you the debt you have helped incur. We can be nice and say you get 1/50th of it. Can your state take on an additional 400 billion in debt? Proportionally probably MUCH higher. As you are going to have to give the US a sweetener to make it worth their time to let it happen.
Also you probably would end up tearing your state in 2. A good portion of the country folk do not like you. They will not sit by and go 'oh well no biggie'. They will be pissed off about the shit show you put forward they are not going to be happy with the idea that the 'city is in charge'.
Do you like higher prices? You better. The country folk are going to stick it to you.
Do you have your own currency? Better set one up. Do you have anything to back it up except code and happy feelings?
Those 'key bases' do you have a plan to take them from the US? They do not give them up easily.
Do you have a plan for the 800,000 federal employees and how to pay them if you decide to keep them on? Or are you just going to throw them in the streets and hope they can find a job in the now massive unemployment you just created?
Do you have a plan for the 47% of the land the US gov owns? Do you have a plan for the 50 million dollars per year they feed into your local govs which is now gone? They pay local taxes on it and make sure the places stay nice. Better have a plan for the 1.5 billion dollars in local spending that those parks generate going away.
Do you have a plan for the several million retired, federal, and service men and women? Do you have funding for them? They are going to want their money.
Do you have a plan for the millions of dollars the fed pays to local govs for those nice military bases? You better be ready to renegotiate and they have 0 reason to leave. Better raise some local taxes to cover the deficit.
Do you have a plan for the postal service? You will end up with a large infrastructure that is underfunded. Better raise those taxes to help pay for it.
How are your roads and rails? Better find a way to fund them. Federal aid will be gone. Time to raise gas prices again.
How are your oil reserves? Better like higher prices for that too as the bankers will stick you on the exchange rates for your new untested currency that has massive inflation.
How is your large h1b visa population? Do you have a plan for them? They will now be in the wrong country. Not all will be looking to just move to your new country.
Did you like other americans coming to your area to live? Well that will fall off quickly. As moving from one country to another is massive challenge. Even from one state to another is a pain. You think otherwise but try looking into moving like that. It is not that easy and not cheap so you better be willing to pay for people to move there.
Do you have a military? Better get one going or be prepared to pay for one to help you. The Americans are coming and I would say 50% of your population will help them.
Do you have a plan for the massive drop off in federal school aid? Better raise that tuition and make loans with your newly minted inflationary currency.
How is your water supply? Huge parts of it come from the nevadas. Owned by the federal gov. They will quickly see no reason to help you when other states are saying 'we could use the water'. So hope you have those desalination plants working. Better have a way to deal with the brine they churn out by the millions of gallons at a time.
Oh do you like taxes and tariffs? You have 0 treaties with anyone. So they will screw you over on them. Remember the federal gov no longer has your back on that. The fed has been negotiating for you for years. You think the UK, EU, Korea, Japan, China, Canada, Mexico, and the your new foe the US will be all over that. Remember all of those countries are good at it. Beware bankers with smiling faces.
How is your copyright/contract regime. Remember you no longer have the fed backing you up. GPL depends upon it. Hollywood depends on it. You have no treaties. Copyright law is very clear in the US about that. You get no protection. Drag it on negotiations for 2-3 years (which the US and EU are quite capable of doing) and suddenly your software economic bubble dries up.
Do you like corruption? People will quickly realize they can buy favor from their new political friends with money. Some of the largest 1%rs live in cali. Think they are not going to abuse that?
Do you like the CIA and other five eyes orgs? You would become their playroom. The FBI would just up and look the other way as it would be out of their jurisdiction.
The troglodytes are tired of having their flaws pointed out, and I'm pretty sure we Californians could drastically improve our state health once we've removed the various forces that are screwing us over
Ah so you are going to remove your economic base and continue to insult them than work with them. Good plan. You may want to look to why your state has continuously built large cities and farms in what is very arid conditions.
You will see a continuing large exodus as your young adults flee the oppressive states for a more accepting and tolerant culture.
You think your propaganda would continue to be played on the air? You think the federal gov would allow another country to have a say in what it means to be 'american'?
Your youth will gradually shift your politics,
People as they get older realize that the pie in the sky help everyone does not work out. Resources are scarce and other people own them. All 'youth' think that.
My bet is the Fed wouldnt even need to use military force against you. They would cripple you with debt and backroom deals that cut you out of the mix. They have done it before and they *will* do it again. You don't think the entirety of the middle east and central america is pissed off at us because we are such great guys do you?
I do not quite think you realize HOW intertwined all of the states are at this point. California is where it is because of massive federal aid (money and personal). If it were not for the fed it would just be another shitty part of mexico with some nice beaches.
You propose an idea out of anger. You are now in stages 2 and 3 of the stages of grief. Anger and bargaining. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%BCbler-Ross_model#Stages [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 23 2016, @08:53PM
No, my proposal was not serious, just a rebuttal to all the people saying "yeah, get rid of California!" It was basically a bit of satire to throw back.
You have quite a few of your financial points mixed up, California is one of the economic powerhouses of the US, we subsidize the other states and yet overwhelmingly we are fine with it. It would just be nice if that help wasn't thrown in our face...
People as they get older realize that the pie in the sky help everyone does not work out. Resources are scarce and other people own them. All 'youth' think that.
This is the fundamental shift the world is going through, realizing that we can not continue on with insane private ownership that lets thousands live in opulence while millions go starving. Many of the Native Americans by and large had a much more egalitarian society where everyone worked together, the individualist ideas of Western culture have some merit but they are now tearing at the very fabric of human society. Summed up nicely by "fuck you I've got mine".
We have already reached the technological point where scarce resources are not that much of a problem for human survival, but you keep beating that dead horse. Other people are busy creating / supporting a better future.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 23 2016, @09:29PM
Le sigh, backpedaling like a true champion, good job.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 23 2016, @09:33PM
No, my proposal was not serious, just a rebuttal to all the people saying "yeah, get rid of California!" It was basically a bit of satire to throw back.
I understand now. It was not clear to me.
Many of the Native Americans by and large had a much more egalitarian society where everyone worked together
I studied native american history for a few years. It is not all the sunshine and lollipops that they show you on TV. It was a fairly brutal way to live. They got eviscerated by the very idea you are trying for. The idea no one owns anything. They found out that those who DO own things can afford to buy guns and people to man them. The concept of ownership was foreign to them. They understand it *very* well now. But back then they felt they were getting one over on 'the pale face'. To them it was nothing more than a game. By the point they realized they had been had it was too late. Take for example the oil thing happening now with one of the tribes. No one gave a damn about them until there was money and oil involved. A bunch of NIMBYs are taking advantage of them. They will realize again too late they have been had. Either by the gov, the NIMBYs, or the oil company.
California is one of the economic powerhouses of the US
If you remove apple and google it is not quite as sunny. Do not confuse the prosperity of a few companies that hire a small percentage of the population with the health of the rest of the economy. I picked those two as they are both companies that could conceivably pick up its entire labor force and move somewhere else if they liked. Labor participation rate is at a 40 year low right now. It sounds as if you are grasping at ways to fix it. There is no nice way to fix it. No clean fix. Basic income only works until the inflationary measure it creates catches up in the market. Low level base jobs are being automated away. With nothing to replace them. Min wage is going up and locking more people out of the labor pool. Companies are not doing as good so they hire as little as possible and skirt as many laws as they can get away with. We can tax the companies more but they just pass it on as an expense to those who already can not afford it.
We have already reached the technological point where scarce resources are not that much of a problem for human survival, but you keep beating that dead horse. Other people are busy creating / supporting a better future.
My points was the economies of all of the states are mingled. To remove one would hurt them all. Especially the one removed. Not about resources. I used resources as a point to show how unprepared cali would be for that sort of move. People with resources would take advantage of the situation and many would suffer for the 'noble' idea that cali is better than the others. We are americans. In the slogan of one of our presidential candidates. We are stronger together. Even if we disagree :)
Only one thing leads to economic prosperity. That is building things (we both can agree on this I hope). I like to recommend this book to those who disagree and think you can just manage the money better. http://steshaw.org/economics-in-one-lesson/contents.html [steshaw.org] I like to recommend this book as it shows why the very things we try to do to help others ends up harming them even worse. It is a good read even if you do not agree with it from an ideological POV. It shows the major pitfalls of the solutions we keep trying.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 23 2016, @10:13PM
I agree with most of those as well, except for the economics and native american bits.
Native Americans understand private property now because that is the system they have to work with. On the reservation things are different, though they still have problems with private ownership and greed within the tribe.
Economics: its all just a system to help humans exchange goods and services, at a certain point building more things is actually detrimental, and doing anything solely for the sake of "the economy" is a backwards approach. Do things to solve human problems, let the economy just be a secondary game hardly necessary for daily survival. I have spent lots of time optimizing things that have no monetary benefit to myself, so I don't believe we humans require a profit motive to accomplish things. I'm sure there are good points in that book you linked, but I stopped at the beginning of chapter 2 when he argues that a hoodlum breaking a window is actually beneficial to the economy. That may be true, but it fails to account for the environmental concerns of wasting energy / resources fixing something that shouldn't have needed fixing. It also takes resources away from building new housing. With such basic assumptions forming the foundation of his book I am not going to bother continuing since there will be subsequent errors built upon the flawed assumptions.
Social safety nets should not be considered from a monetary perspective, when done that way it is near impossible to see the benefits. You need to view things from a human perspective first, and monetary concerns come second.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 24 2016, @01:09AM
You may want to actually finish the chapter. He makes his point in the last paragraph.
The glazier’s gain of business, in short, is merely the tailor’s loss of business. No new “employment” has been added. The people in the crowd were thinking only of two parties to the transaction, the baker and the glazier. They had forgotten the potential third party involved, the tailor. They forgot him precisely because he will not now enter the scene. They will see the new window in the next day or two. They will never see the extra suit, precisely because it will never be made. They see only what is immediately visible to the eye.
tl;dr you broke something, and other things are not done because of it.
Also damn its like maybe 3 paragraphs of text... You read it with a closed mind and learned nothing. If you *read* the whole thing you will see why social programs tend to fail and why. If you want to build systems that work you *must* work around those issues. They are important if you actually want to help someone with those programs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 24 2016, @04:38AM
Just scanned through your link, Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt.
There is at least one huge unwritten premise behind his book -- that the markets are in some ways "fair". What we have now is possibly like a repeat of the Robber Baron era in the late 1800s, where a few super rich buy politicians to further enrich themselves...also known as corruption. Corruption on a scale never imagined. Nothing works right when there are billionaires throwing their weight around.
Further, based on the examples set by the super rich, people that might act like good competing capitalists in "normal times" develop the great urge to become monopolists (while usually hiding behind a screen of "just a successful capitalist"). And the lack of regulation (through subversion of government) lets monopoly and other unfair practice grow.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 24 2016, @11:09AM
Jeezus!
No system operates well with corruption. Blaming markets is just ignorant (no, they are not fair, they are self-correcting), and pulling out the Robber Baron trope is just ignorant (recall spending for Hilary was 10 to 1).
You're being willfully obtuse.