The Great California Exodus — the epic failure of the Progressive Left

◼ A leading U.S. demographer and 'Truman Democrat' talks about what is driving the middle class out of the Golden State. - Allysia Finley/Wall St. Journal

"Basically, if you don't own a piece of Facebook or Google and you haven't robbed a bank and don't have rich parents, then your chances of being able to buy a house or raise a family in the Bay Area or in most of coastal California is pretty weak," says Mr. Kotkin.

While many middle-class families have moved inland, those regions don't have the same allure or amenities as the coast. People might as well move to Nevada or Texas, where housing and everything else is cheaper and there's no income tax.

And things will only get worse in the coming years as Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown and his green cadre implement their "smart growth" plans to cram the proletariat into high-density housing. "What I find reprehensible beyond belief is that the people pushing [high-density housing] themselves live in single-family homes and often drive very fancy cars, but want everyone else to live like my grandmother did in Brownsville in Brooklyn in the 1920s," Mr. Kotkin declares.

"The new regime"—his name for progressive apparatchiks who run California's government—"wants to destroy the essential reason why people move to California in order to protect their own lifestyles."

◼ One very dirty and not so secret thing about Gov. Moonbeam’s November tax initiative is that while it is touted by the Lefties as an “education initiative” not one dime will end up in the classrooms. Half of the projected (heh) $7 billion raised will go straight into unionized teachers’ pension fund with the rest going to state employee pension funds. What a racket. - Darleen Click at Protein Wisdom