◼ If you’re finding it harder and harder to live in California, you’re not alone. - William Ruger, Jason Sorens/San Diego Union-Tribune
California’s beautiful Pacific coastline and beaches were not enough to keep 1.5 million California residents from fleeing the state between 2000 and 2010. That amounts to over 4 percent of the state’s 2000 population. To make matters worse, Californians saw their real personal income shrink by 0.4 percent from 2000 to 2007 – before the Great Recession wreaked its damage. Only the state of Michigan beats that record.
....Some freedoms mean more to people than others, of course, and if you can’t find a good job in a state, you might not care how free it is by anyone’s standards. But we’ve considered a range of social and personal freedoms, including the right to consume alcohol and tobacco, to bear arms, to home school your children and to be free from arbitrary search and seizure.
While California does well on marijuana policies and same-sex civil unions, it nonetheless lands near the bottom on overall personal freedoms. California’s high incarceration rate, tight gun laws, trans fat ban, cigarette taxes and regulations on drivers all help drive down its personal freedom score in our index.
After studying the complicated effects of more than 200 distinct public policies, we reached one simple conclusion: The more a state denies people their freedoms, increases their taxes, or passes laws that make it hard for businesses to hire and fire, the more likely they are to leave.
And while there’s clearly more to life than eating trans fats or riding a motorcycle without a helmet, the states that won’t allow you to often cause trouble for their residents in other ways.
Where legislators try to protect citizens from their own choices, it’s no great surprise that they also see fewer limitations on their power in other areas.
That costs Californians billions of dollars a year, makes their lives harder, and encourages more and more of them to move somewhere else.
