Over at the Free Press, the editors use the LA wildfires as an excuse to run that most tedious of genres: how California went from being great to being a progressive hellhole that spends all its money on woke frivolities:
But they’ve neglected the basics: crime (the murder rate is up more than 15 percent since Newsom took office); public education (per-pupil spending has gone up under Newsom even as test scores have plummeted); and now firefighting. The Pacific Palisades fire alone has consumed some 17,000 acres as of this writing. The whole island of Manhattan is 14,000 acres.
As usual, all of this is untrue. Here's crime:
California's violent crime rate is lower than the national average and has been since 1996—about the time that California turned solidly blue.
On education, you have to disaggregate by race to see what's going on. Here are state rankings on the NAEP reading test for white, Black, and Hispanic students:
California is above average everywhere. Finally, here are natural disasters:
It's ridiculous to rate states on natural disasters, which obviously depend on geography and climate, but I'm including it since the FP brought it up. The most disaster prone states are places like Texas, Florida, and, yes, California, but that's only because they're big. Adjust for population to get a true picture and they all look pretty good.
Are conservatives ever going to tire of playing this juvenile game? California is fine. It has its problems, just like any state, but the main one is a housing shortage and the related epidemic of homelessness. Go ahead and criticize on that score if you have to. But leave the rest of the nonsense for Fox News.
great post once again, i just wish fox news brained people could absorb the reality on the ground.. my in laws sure cannot even if you point it out...
Are conservatives ever going to tire of playing this juvenile game?
Hahahahaha, stop! Yer killin' me!
They won't stop, because for almost all of them, to varying degrees (some nearly entirely), it's NOT a game. It's a serious, even pathological psychological defense, motivated by things like low self-esteem and accompanying jealousy, along with the usual emotional underdevelopment typical of current American "conservatism." They know Cal is doing well, that people (including their friends, their kids, and even they themselves) want to move there, and that people there are on average happier and better off, and their reaction is like that of jealous kids -- "nuh-UH, yer just a POOPY-HEAD with BAD CRIME and stuff!!"
My reaction to this sort of thing always has been "ok, you're right, just stay away, thank you." It's win-win!
If I could find a way to afford it I'd move to California in a heartbeat. San Diego would be my first choice.
Exactly, and you understate it. Modern American 'conservatives' - the ideologically committed - hate liberals, and humanistic liberalism. They hate - hate - everything that CA stands for, from the hippies to Hollywood to SF to any kind of life that's not emotionally, spiritually, socially, and psychologically twisted, repressed, constipated, transactional, grotesque, retarded....they hate that CA takes action to build towards a sustainable future that doesn't eat the shit of predatory capitalism and say thank you. They hate that CA is and represents an immensely powerful and successful economic and governmental model that isn't quasi-fascist. It's more than just resentment; CA, and what it represents, in merely existing is an existential threat, something that must be destroyed, like anything not subordinate to the Great Cause.
Or maybe it's just all in good fun.
As global warming goes on, the greater disaster impact will probably be from floods rather than wildfires. The water content of the air will increase on average - it's part of the greenhouse effect.
And that's not counting the rise in sea level, which will obliterate a lot of low-lying places. Other states will have at least their own share of disasters.
I would say that the other problem California has is Prop 13, which erodes the tax base. I mean, commercial property is included. That seems like a big policy mistake, and not how it was sold. (It is probably what was intended, though).
It's curious that midwestern states show the lowest rate of natural disasters. This seems like a measuring artifact, because these states have winters, and that means a lot of storm damage and highway deaths that, in the aggregate, top quite a few of the more southern natural disasters. Besides, a winter in Minnesota or the Dakotas is basically one long natural disaster. Try experiencing a winter storm warning event sometime.
Winter is hardly a natural disaster, and snowfalls don't create much storm damage. Sure, cars get into accidents, but it's typically less bad in far northern states than in others. That's partly due to drivers having more experience with ice, but mostly because we spend a lot more on plowing and salting/sanding.
While you can get weather-related vehicle deaths in the upper midwest, I don't think you can compare them to natural disasters in Southern states. Northern states tend to have lower vehicle death rates overall. The Dakotas have higher rates - lots of speeding on long, lonely highways - but even then, they are still lower than Southern states. And most traffic deaths in the Dakotas are in the Summer. Winter driving is mostly fender benders and spinouts.
In the upper midwest it's the summer storms with hail that are expensive. It seems like everyone is getting new roofs because of hail.
On the chart above the Dakotas score high on disasters. A lot of that is just because there are so few people, any per-person measure would be high. They also like to declare a disaster every time there is a blizzard, but in the Dakotas that's just an average Tuesday in winter. That measure goes back to 1953, and I would be willing to bet that disaster spending is actually not so bad in the Dakotas these days because of massive improvements along the Red River Valley. After several terrible floods they actually did force people to move, and now floods don't take out many homes.
I believe you may be factually correct. However, having lived in Minnesota I also believe describing a winter there as "one long natural disaster" is emotionally correct. And I think most Minnesotans would agree. Now living in California, I prefer the higher fire insurance premiums and risk of fire to having to get somewhere on a winter's morning and finding a half inch of ice on the windshield of my car. Since it seems to be glued to the windshield perhaps if the car were warmed up it would loosen the ice. And I think it would if the doors weren't frozen shut as the result of an occasional phenomenon where it rains and freezes at the same time. It's best to go back inside and wait until about 2 PM and hope the sun comes out and warms the car to let you get in and proceed with your life. And perhaps by then the cars tires will no longer be frozen to the road. It's 12 degrees in my hometown in Minnesota right now. It's 72 where I live in southern California. It's a choice.
Wimp. Cold weather builds character.
It's actually the summers around here that get to me. When I came to Minnesota for college 38 years ago from SE Michigan, I knew the winters were going to be colder. I had no idea that the summers were going to be hotter. And humid. God, the humidity. I was used to Michigan, which is surrounded by real lakes that act as heat sinks. This is the land of 10,000 puddles, good only for humidity and mosquitos.
It has great women's hockey, though. That makes up for everything.
"the murder rate is up more than 15 percent since Newsom took office". It looks from your graph like that might be true. Now if we had actual numbers to look at... It looks like the murder rate might be up a comparable amount lots of places, making one wonder about the reach of Newsom's baleful influence.
How does it look when disaggregated by income?
Would be interesting to see in different bucket configurations.
Then I'd also want to be able to crosstab by subject, like math and english, or by more buckets (science, social studies, etc.).
Also, another excellent post Kevin, thanks.
That's the fundamental problem with TFP -- they're snarky but so very very lazy and just make stuff up, especially if it sounds good. Their articles are for those who already agree with them, and just want to hear their biases confirmed.
Are conservatives ever going to tire of playing this juvenile game?
No, because that their whole shtick: we aren't even in a Depression and people aree acting as desperate/crazy as if we were....because they're listening to Fox; It's a self-induced mass delusion of psychotic woe. I thought growing up in the South's psychotic racism was bad...but this is something worse metastasized to the nation at large.
They aren't spending or saving like we're in a Depression.
So it's less 'acting' and more 'whining'.
If a shitload of people live in a disaster-prone area, if you adjust for population it's going to look "pretty good", but really you're just showing that too many people live in a disaster-prone area.
That said, I don't disagree with the general thrust of the post or that conservatives are always arguing in bad faith/are nincompoops.
I just think that you shouldn't fight back against bullshit with a bunch of stats, much less contrived stats that don't really show what you say they do. If you're going to argue back with stats, you need them to be (1) simple and (2) ironclad. That particular one is neither of those things.
Once more, with feeling:
They. Are. Liars.
Always, about everything.
The real question is why are all the white kids in New Jersey so smart?!
And the Hispanic and Black kids too (both #3). And the black kid in Vermont.
Really high property taxes that fund schools, I imagine. My kid has an IEP and NJ is definitely on my blue-state relocation list.
Does that include the parenthetical they have for crime?
Your counter seems to be not that it hasn’t but that we are better than average.
For education their claim seems to be
But your counter shows scores at just one point in time. I would have expected a counter in the form of a chart showing scores improved /held steady during the Newsom era rather than a “We are above average” one.
But it's up nationwide.
States with the highest murder rates (per 100k):
Mississippi 23.7
Louisiana 21.3
Alabama 15.9
New Mexico 15.3
South Carolina 13.4
Missouri 12.4
Illinois 12.3
Maryland 12.2
Tennessee 12.2
Arkansas 11.7
Of that top 10, by my count 7 are blood red conservative states, and 3 blue. California? 6.4. So even if the murder rate has increased during Newsom's tenure it's increased a lot more elsewhere, and CA is still one of the safer states in the country.
Source: https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/murder-rate-by-state
Odd that most of the States to the right of California are red states.
The last chart should also show the actual number of disasters, lest people complain California's rate is skewed by its large population.
California is physically large, though. It should have a large portion of disasters.
My first thought was that the chart should be by surface area. That would make more sense for Alaska, too
Next week TFP will take in depth look at the problems with West Virginia...
...Not.
They lost me at their reuse of the bogus "world's fifth largest economy" line.
Who lost you with what fact?
California is Lake Wobegon.
If ALL of this is untrue, I await the corrections on the size of the fire, and of Manhattan.