Farhad Manjoo, in his continuing quest to be wrong about everything, says that Texas is the new California:
I’ve lived in California nearly all my life, and it’s still more likely than not that I will remain here....Still, there’s plenty going wrong — soaring housing costs, devastating poverty and inequality, and the cascading disasters brought about by a change in what was once our big selling point, the climate. Not a month goes by that I don’t wonder what I’m doing here. There’s got to be somewhere better, right?
....As the Golden Gate shuts, the Lone Star beckons. If you’re looking for an affordable, economically vibrant city that is less likely to be damaged by climate change than many other American cities, our data shows why Texas is a new land of plenty.
I am tired of this. I'll acknowledge right off that California has expensive housing and this is a big problem. For some people this is enough to lure them to Texas, and I totally sympathize.
But this is far from the whole story, which is considerably less favorable toward Texas. Since Manjoo starts off with climate change, let's start there too.
Climate Change
First off, just for context, here's an overview of how weather-related fatalities stack up today:
You will note that California-style natural disasters—earthquakes and wildfires—add up to basically nothing, both in absolute terms and per capita. They're dramatic and they get a lot of press, but the real killers are heat, cold, floods, and storms, all of which are far more prevalent in Texas than California.
So what does this mean for global warming? Texas and California are both southern states, which means they'll both see similar amounts of warming over the next few decades. However, Texas starts with a much higher average temperature than California. What's more, there's more than just temperature to climate change. There's also floods, storms, drought, and other forms of climate variability. So it should not come as a surprise that Texas is more vulnerable to climate change than California:
Texas faces greater danger of crop failures, weather-related deaths, higher energy costs, and labor risks. But which counts more, crop damage or mortality? Energy costs or labor? The best way to make these comparisons is to put them on a level playing field by simply pricing them out. When you do this, Texas comes out in much worse shape than California:
If you choose to live in the fairly narrow bits of residential California that are vulnerable to wildfires, climate change poses a significant threat. But it doesn't take much to avoid that. If you live in ordinary urban and suburban areas, the danger is basically zero.
Bottom line: climate change is a problem everywhere, but it's likely to be a bigger problem in Texas than in California.
Economy and Taxes
Let's start with the basics. Here is household income in Texas and California going back four decades:
This is median income, so it's not affected by either oil barons or Silicon Valley zillionaires. California has a considerably higher median income and it's grown faster since these statistics have been kept.
But wait. Texans keep more of their income than Californians thanks to their famously low taxes. But famous as this reputation may be, it's entirely undeserved. Here's how it nets out depending on your income level:
Tax rates in Texas are low only if you're affluent: If you're upper middle class they're a little bit lower than California and if you're in the top 1% they're a lot lower. But for everyone else they're either higher or about the same. As a result of this and other things, Texas has a higher poverty rate than California:
If you're relatively well off, maybe you don't care that your state's poverty rate is high and you're basically funding it on the backs of the poor and working class. But just think of what that says about your affluent neighbors. Basically, this:
Texas has more low-income residents than California but covers far fewer of them via Medicaid. Despite this, they have refused to adopt the almost-free Medicaid expansion in Obamacare that they're paying for anyway since it's funded by federal taxes. They would literally rather let their money go down a hole than use it to provide health care for the poor. As a result, 20% of Texans are uninsured compared to 8% of Californians.
Bottom line: If you're affluent, Texas probably looks pretty good compared to California. But if you're not, your income is lower; your tax rates are higher; you're more likely to be in poverty; and you're way more likely to be uninsured. If you call this an economic success story, you live in a different universe than I do.
Weather
Let's talk now about the weather. This is sort of unfair, but it has to be done. Here, for example, is a comparison of Dallas and Los Angeles:
There's a reason California is famous for its climate and Texas is infamous. It's because California has a great climate and Texas has a terrible one. Summers in Los Angeles average about 85°, which is hot, but summers in Dallas are a roasting 95°. In winter LA remains a balmy 65° while Dallas is a chilly 55°.
Lows are similar. During the summer, temps in Dallas remain above 70° even at night, while Los Angeles provides a respite from the heat. During the winter LA never gets near freezing, while Dallas does.
Now, sure, this is why God invented heating and air conditioning. But get real. Dallas isn't even the hottest part of Texas, and it's pretty miserable for half the year. Los Angeles, by contrast, is pretty livable all year round.
Nor is this just a matter of comfort. It also kills people. In particular, Texans seem to have a hard time not locking their kids in cars on hot days:
Even after adjusting for California's much lower incidence of freezing weather, it ranks far better than Texas in winter driving fatalities:
Safety
You've probably heard that California is a high-crime state. That was true at one time, but California has worked hard to reduce crime and is now a little bit safer than Texas:
It's also safer to drive in California than in Texas:
Education
There was a time when Texas schools produced modestly better results than California schools. That's no longer true:
With the exception of the 2019 score for Black students—which may be an error in the underlying data—California has gotten steadily better and Texas has declined. Today, white students in California perform significantly better than in Texas, while Black and Hispanic students perform about the same.
Then there's higher education. SmartAsset puts California at #5:
Keep scrolling and scrolling and you'll eventually find Texas at #28. Likewise, USNews puts California at #3 and Texas at #31. On a different metric (number of highly ranked universities) Stacker places California #1 and Texas #5.
Texas is simply nowhere near the overall quality of California in higher education. This is something to think about if you're hoping to get your kid the in-state tuition rate at a good college.
Other Stuff
California has nine national parks to Texas's two.
As the ads say, you can surf, ski, and hike all in a single day in California. In Texas you can . . . hike.
Manjoo mentions diversity in his piece, but come on. California, like Texas, is literally minority white:
There's not a nickel's worth of difference in the diversity of California and Texas. They're both near the top of the pack.
But speaking of that, California is certainly a much more welcoming place for gay and trans folks.
California is politically more liberal than Texas, and it's certainly true that both states do some dumb stuff. California, for example, recently passed a law that requires big toy stores to include a "generic" toy section in addition to boys and girls sections. This is typical California woo, and the butt of many a joke. Texas, by contrast, has passed a law that effectively bans abortion. It's up to you to decide if these are essentially the same. I sure don't think so.
Housing, Housing, Housing
There's a pretty simple conclusion to all this: It's all about housing.
The (smallish) migration from California to Texas is nothing unusual. Throughout history, nice places have gotten popular and therefore more expensive, which has prompted people to seek cheaper pastures. In the case of California this means moving to nearly anyplace since it's cheaper nearly everywhere else. It's practically hydraulic in its operation.
Texas has been the beneficiary of this because it's in a bit of a sweet spot. It's hardly the cheapest place to buy a home—in fact, it's kind of middling—but it's (a) reasonably cheap, (b) not in the deep South, (c) has a pretty good economy, (d) offers plenty of white-collar jobs, and (e) has some liberalish cities that are attractive to lots of Californians.¹
If you really just wanted cheap housing, you'd move to Mississippi or West Virginia. But most Californians wouldn't dream of moving to backwaters like that. Texas is sort of a compromise: on nearly every concrete metric it's not as good as California, but it's not way worse and it's pretty affordable. That's pretty much it.
¹But act fast! The favorite city of lefty Californians is Austin, and houses there are now going for an average of $536,000. That's still cheaper than LA or San Francisco, but the property taxes are higher and that adds up over time. Austin is suffering the usual fate of cheap but popular places: it's gotten so popular that it's no longer cheap.
Even if Texas is cheaper, it's still full of Texans....and they keep electing Ted Cruz. Hard pass.
It is really hard to imagine that Texas would continue to re-elect that sniveling yellow-bellied coward. That the men of Texas would want that sorry excuse for a man to represent them says what you need to know about Texas.
Ted Cruz's lacking masculinity makes the rest of Texas's men look that much more macho.
Surprised the Loq Qabin GQP of Texas hasn't used a "butch me up" campaign to increase internal turnout for Rafa in the previous election cycles.
Perhaps that explains the beard.
Ted Cruz's beard looks like a wound that never heals.
Ted Cruz's blooper reel would be appropriate to play as the accompaniment to a Butthole Surfers live performance.
How do you define blooper in that connection, where it's almost anything he's done?
Though a time lapse of the beard might be hilarious. He tries to grow it to cover up the weak chin, but then it refuses to go near the chin at all, making it so much worse.
If Kevin James weren't a Hollywood Falangist, I would recommend him for Ted Cruz mockumentary biopic.
No way a GQP number would take on that role. Would have a better chance pitching a turn as Handsy Al Franken to Adam Sandler. (AS is also a Trumpist POS.)
Texass jokes:
What is similar about a texasian wildcatter and a pigeon?
They both can make a small deposit on a Caddy.
All hat and no cattle.
Two lions escaped from a texass zoo. They split up in search of food. Sometime later they met up.
One lion was fat and sleek. The other skin and bones.
The fat one asked the bones one how he hunted.
Bones said he hid in a tree till a texassian came by. Then he let out a roar and jumped.
Fat said that is what is wrong! You scarred the sh*t out of it and there was nothing left to eat but the hat and belt buckle.
Holy cow! I just scrolled the length of this posting, prior to actually reading it. If this doesn't say it all, it comes close.
I'm glad for this corrective. There was a period when Texas was on the rise - when the initial, centrist Republicans first took over and implemented "pro-business" policies.
The state still had the fruits of the investments made by their Democratic predecessors - excellent infrastructure (and a willingness to build more), some very good universities, a sound public hospital system, and generally decent schools and local governance in the bigger cities. The policies implemented by the initial Republicans complemented these investments. They opened things up for business without defunding these institutions or undermining the environment necessary for them to thrive.
That is no longer the case. The tide began to turn Governor Perry's last term. Fiscal conservatives rebelled against and killed his ambitious "Trans Texas Corridor" infrastructure plan - which included new investments in high speed rail that would have built on Texas' aviation infrastructure to make its major cities perhaps the easiest business centers to navigate between in the country. It did not happen. Perhaps the critics were right that the project overall was a boondoggle or wasteful. However, none of its major parts have been replaced by something more sensible or efficient; where Texas was a national leader in infrastructure, it now would stagnate.
Things have eroded since then on other fronts. The public is now actively hostile to funding education and healthcare. It also is increasingly anti-intellectual and hostile to an environment needed for academic work to prospect - the state legislature increasingly is stepping in and ensuring even that Austin does not implement policies that would maintain such an environment on its own.
The result is that Texas is not becoming California - nor a new conservative model of governance combining smart investments in infrastructure and institutions that drive growth with a pro-business and laid-back regulatory and economic climate. It is becoming Mississippi, or Trump-arcana, an increasingly backwards looking and parochial polity that is turning its back on both the environment needed for economic success, and the investments necessary to create it.
Thanks for this update and dose of reality. To add a little politics, the Republican Redistricting that's being implemented will ensure that things will continue to go from bad to worse for the next decade, and probably beyond.
Now look--if you start teaching the kids they may start thinking. And if they think, they may vote the wrong way. We can't have that, now can we!
😉
Yes Kevin, let's go ahead and encourage people to stay in/move to California. After all, what could possibly be wrong which wouldn't be made better by a state population of say 50 million people...
But then, I am of the opinion that the nation's population as a whole should decline, not just California's.
Water.
Time to move to back east (Mid-Atlantic or Northeast), or parts of Washington and Oregon. Upper MidWest can be iffy.
Please don't encourage people to move to Washington. It's already too expensive up here.
And it’s raining more than ever. Another “atmospheric river” arriving today.
This fall has really been wet. Just wish some was staying in the mountains.
Now, I'd love to see a chart (referencing the previous post in this blog) of, say, Ph.D.'s in Texas vs. the change in the presidential vote since 2004. A quick look at Wikipedia will tell you that John Kerry lost to (Texan, sort of) George W. Bush by 23 points in 2004. In 2000, Joe Biden lost to Donald Trump by 5.5 points. The trend has been steadily Democratic since 2004, with a dogleg for the African-American Barack Obama in 2008 (in '12 he reverted to trend somewhat).
It's going to be a helluva fight, but Texas is winnable in 2024. Especially if Beto wins governor in 2022, and if the Supreme Court uses the new Texas vigilante anti-abortion law to nix Roe v Wade (which will have Texas women marching marching marching).
I defer to Stuart Stevens, the big ex Republican campaign poobah guy, in believing it's all about Texas. Because of the electoral college, without winning Texas the Republican Party is sunk, at least as currently constituted; in other words, the Rs have to have Texas to win the presidency, as the Ds have to have California and New York. Thus, winning Texas for the Ds in 2024 would be the definitive end of Trumpism. The Rs would need to find a Youngkin-ish candidate to win back suburbanites in Texas.
Chris Christie is a sensible, law n' order GQP, especially given his background as a nonpartisan US attorney in the Ashcroft-Gonzalez DOJ under Bush-43, who can do nationally what sensible, businessman GQPer Yungqins did in the Commonwealth of Virginia.
Chris Christie can't be Youngkin -- he is unable to keep his temper in check.
Any news on Glenn & his wife's two person Christian fellowship organization?
Beto will not be elected governor. He’s a joke.
That's right you're not from Texas, but Texas wants you anyway.
Only a matter of time before Briannah-Joy Gray moves to ATX & becomes a fulltime cohost on the Joe Rogan Podcast, the Robin Quivers to Joe's Howie.
Thank you for this, Kevin.
I live in San Francisco.
A few years ago a friend of mine was assigned to a six month project in Texas. He looked at house prices in Texas and decided to use that time to find a new job so he could buy a house. He found out that any job he got for a Texas company would pay a whole lot less than his San Francisco job. He also found that, even in a tech company, his colleagues did a lot of religious proselytizing. He returned to San Francisco.
Oh, by the way — remember a few months ago, when the grid in large areas of Texas gave out in a winter storm? And people had no heat? And Senator Cruz dealt with the problem by going to Cancun? California has its issues but my heat never gave out.
In fact, California's most significant energy crisis metastasized because of Texas. Enron gamed power distribution in 2001 to help Schwarzenegger takedown Neoliberal Establishmentarian Democrat Gray Davis in the legendary recall of 2003.
I live on the peninsula. On the bay side of 280. PG&E shut off our power for a week because the wind was blowing in the central valley. Just to show us that if we sue them for being irresponsible, they can still be irresponsible.
California's expensive enough on housing that they really need to plan new greenfield development to be higher density than your average suburb from the beginning. They've done some stuff to make housing more available, such as allowing for quadplexes and additional housing units in suburbs. But it's politically easier to have newer built areas be denser than that still.
Otherwise, I agree with all of this. I'm not too fond of California's constantly sunny, usually dry weather - but it does have its charms, and despite the wildfire smoke it's much better than Texas.
Walking across a flat plain is not hiking!
Not all of Texas is flat. The western portions are mountainous, even if the mountains aren't all that large.
Had a friend who lived in Lubuttock. She said there were places she could get a view. They were on top of overpasses on "the Loop".
About 100 miles northeast of Lubbock is Caprock Canyons State Park, on the edge of the Llano Estacado (upon which Lubbock sits). Not exactly mountains, but the terrain is very rugged, and it's a nice place to visit, with interesting geology.
There is something called "The Hill Country" in texass. I think LBJ had a place there. A friend, retired major league football coach, has sent photos of his place. Nice.
Is that also where Gov. Goodhair's N*****head Ranch was?
Kevin says: "California, for example, recently passed a law that requires big toy stores to include a "generic" toy section in addition to boys and girls sections. This is typical California woo..."
Folks who feel this way about gender stereotyping, that it is "woo," would be better off in Texas. The reason why California has such a law is that many people in the state feel that gender stereotyping of children causes them harm, especially if the kids are themselves gender divergent or don't fit the stereotypes well. To see how bad this, visit a department store in Texas and notice the organization of such department -- especially notice what is classified as for boys compared to for girls.
Kevin apparently doesn't think sexism is much of a problem in our society, but then, he is on the privileged side of that divide, obviously taking his advantages for granted.
It's woo if it's something claimed but not shown to be real.
The vast bulk of studies show that, in fact, the more a society tries to flatten these stereotypes in children, the more children "self-enforce" the stereotypes.
It's fine to claim that you don't want to live in a society that organizes toy stores in a particular way. It's woo to claim that said organization has has much effect on reality.
Right, and it's especially "woo" to claim this sort of thing causes violence or (worse) literally is violence against gender nonconforming kids.
If anything, the folks doing real physical harm may be on the other side of this issue- it's very hard to come by good data, because all of the people writing about the issue are so ideological, but it at least appears as though there's been some over-promotion of youth transition leading to over-prescribing of puberty blockers and hormones which cause serious physical effects. Lisa Littman's research on this stuff is quite troubling, and a fair amount of it is happening in California.
I think there's a big generational divide on gender, even among liberal-ish folks.
Paraphrasing conversation during a big family get-together over the holiday:
The olds: Gender norms are more fluid than ever, and that's great.
The youngs: It's not even that. Gender norms are completely over. That's what's great.
Agreed. All the kids in this family (35 and under) are firmly in the "gender norms are over" camp. And these kids were raised Catholic.... There is a sea change coming in the next 20 years as the old folk pass on.
I think true generational change takes at least two, if not three or four, generations to imprint. Just look at the fiftysomething Qlenn Yungqins. Sure, he was educated in Virginia schools after segregation, & more importantly after the five year run of universal public school closures had ended, but he's still a platitudinous parrot of Old Dominion talkingpoints -- because outside of maybe seeing a Black kid at school, his cultural environment was still being steered by parents & grandparents who had grown up wholly in the white triumphalist era. With each successive generation, though, the cultural milieu dilutes the white maximalism & you start to see real openness to equality, if not equity.
This goes for gendering & sex roles as much as race. Where Liberace (pride of West Milwaukee, WI!) cracked the door to gender nonconformity in the 1950s, the intervening years have seen the closet door not just removed from its hinges but the drywall removed & the whole damn human comedy become an open floorplan mutual living space.
& speaking of genderally openminded Catholics, shoutout to 79 year old joebiden, who, when asked how many genders there are, said, "At least three..."
I highly doubt that Youngkin went to school with any black kids. His family was comfortable enough to have sent him to tony segregation academies.
Probably.
Also, some toys, going back to the dawn of toys, were (or should have been) ungendered. Like Tinkertoys or Etchasketch. Or even the Easy Bake Oven.
Like any of my toys, according to my sister.
Also Lincoln Logs and Legos.
re: "woo". Some years back, I strolled through the toy aisles in a major department store and was absolutely blown away by the girls' aisle. Everything was this lurid, oversaturated, aggressively PINK plastic. Everything. The intensity of the pinkness would knock your eyes out.
Also, all the actually "fun" stuff was in the boys' (several) aisles. And no, the toys weren't blue, or any other stereotypical color.
Non-"gendered" toys? Shouldn't that be effin' OBVIOUS?? For everybody, regardless of their "gender identity", "sexual preferences" (do children already have preferences as to who they want to eff?), or appearance of their external genitalia, which we used to be taught not to flaunt in public?
I feel that I have lived too long. Heck, I'm so old, I still think democracy is a GOOD thing! (and apologies for the rant.)
Some of the gendering of toys is just odd. When my kids were younger I tried to buy a toy cash register. Almost every option was all pink. The one option with a variety of colors was several dollars more. Makes it extremely tough when both your children hate pink.
Quite honestly, I think the toy gendering exists to push parents to buy doubles of the things you would otherwise view as non-gendered. Two doctors kits, two cash registers, two play tents, etc.
But why a pink cash register?
'Cause "checkout clerk" is a woman's job? Which sure doesn't mesh with my decades of checking out. Lots of men do it.
The PINK toys is to prime the pump to boost sales of the Jeffrey Epstein Victoria's Secret Signature Line PINK.
I mean I used to like the color pink but toys were never like that when I was a kid in the late 1960s/1970s. I abhor the hyper gendered girlie-girl stuff, like pink tools for women. Yeah nope.
You can buy a pink girl gun to kill people with, and when they're dead it'll still be OK, because it's like they'll be non-lethally dead, just attractively and circumstantially dead.
Did you order the Code Pink?
Ammo comes in colors, not caliber.
In economics there is a concept called revealed preference: you examine what people do, rather than what they say. The revealed preference, in this situation, is clear: the balance of population movement is from CA to TX and not the other way around.
https://kinder.rice.edu/urbanedge/2021/03/03/californians-moving-to-texas-covid-migration
The balance of population though is for the vast majority of Californians to stay in California. Any discussion of population movement should begin with an honest assessment of how many people are moving vs not moving in a given year.
Yes. From which we can conclude that Californians who move to Texas prefer to live in Texas. And the vast majority of Californians who don’t move, prefer to live in the Golden State.
Austin and KenSchulz - I agree with you completely. Most people are not moving. However, the question raised by this post is about the flow of interstate migration: on that question, the dominate flow of migration is clear.
Well, yeah, Cali is expensive. Tons of peeps have made their millions and can afford to move anywhere they want. Some move to Texas; there’s no accounting for taste.
Not many people like the Clampetts are striking it rich in Texas and able to move to Beverly Hills.
So about the only reason to move to Texas is if you're either rich, or upper middle class, and want to lower your tax bill and don't give a crap about anyone else's standard of living. I guess "Texas -- It's for Assholes!" doesn't have the same ring as "Virginia is for Lovers", but you do you, longhorn state! Also no environmental regulation, no reproductive rights, hot, shitty weather, and the only places to live where you wouldn't be surrounded by a bunch of heavily-armed, racist rednecks cost a fortune.
I'll visit for the bbq and TexMex, but I wouldn't want to live there, thank you very much.
I can get bbq and TexMex right here in California. But I'd much rather have MexMex, which is also here in abundance.
I'm still holding out for Roscoe's to start offering Fried chicken n' pupusas as an alternative to the Fried chicken n' waffles.
Some years ago, my wife and I took her parents to a Oaxacan restaurant in LA. They were interested in trying "real" Mexican food, but were confused when they recognized approximately zero of the menu items.
Speaking of Virginia being for lovers... given the conventional wisdom that Yunkqins won the governorship in a double digit percentage rout on the basis of opposition to Critical Race Theory, what are the odds one of the Amandachasian members of the state legi will put up a bill to overturn Loving v. Virginia?
Youngkin won by 2%. Not double digits.
https://www.cnn.com/election/2021/results/virginia/governor
Monty, shoot, I reread your post and perhaps you are talking about what Virginian's think the results are. If so, ignore my post above.
Not so much Virginians -- outside of the SW hollers & the suburban mom Biden 2020 voters who returned to the GQP fold & then were profiled for WaPo --
but the lamestream media.
This is exactly it, where are the statistics on exactly who these people are who are leaving California?
I will bet virtually all of them are wingnuts.
You can move there for the white supremacy and the Jeebus.
Had friends who were temporarily stationed there many, many years ago and found the prevailing Jeebus Loves Ya chat throughout the office and all business transactions very comforting.
I feel for all the non-Christian Desis there who have to endure it.
Texas! Come for the lack of state income taxes, stay for the blackouts and fertilizer plant explosions!
Born in California, spent some years in Texas. Texas is the blank flat middle of a long drive from Irvine to New Orleans for dinner. Austin is that tiny insular bubble that tells you there is still a long ways to go. The benefit of Californians moving to Texas is that they will taking their ICE cars so EV have a place to park.
Thanks, Kevin. The people of your state applaud you.
Here's another data point in California's favor.
Percentage of Texans in population:
Texas ~100%
California ~0%*
* Includes some recovering Texans, but we can handle them.
Ignoring the politics, the natural disasters aspect of CA vs TX is difficult to quantify, or rather it's a matter of taste as to how you quantify it.
Yes, the earthquakes cause little damage most years -- but one day the Big One will come (overdue by 30 to 80 yrs now depending on to whom you listen). And it's anyone's guess as to how that plays out.
The modern buildings should be safe (or maybe not? There are claims by geologists that some detail I don't understand about the San Andreas fault having to do with part of it being extremely straight will result in a different type of earth movement against which most seismic engineering has not been validated.)
But how much land sliding? The San Gabriel Mountains north of Pasadena have been artifically kept at bay in terms of landslides since the 60s, but that may not survive a big quake?
How much fire damage, coupled with impassable freeways and broken water mains?
And the cost, ye gods!
What will quality of life be like for the next ten years or so (especially that first year)? Water+sewers? Gas? Electricity? NO INTERNET!!!!
Or the big one could happen in SF. Or "we" get lucky and it "only" takes out I5 and the Central Valley (and much of the water infrastructure feeding into LA?...)
It's unclear how to account for this. All of us living in LA know that one day it will come -- and live as though that day won't affect our lives. And of course we likewise live in the knowledge that one day we will die. Perhaps ignoring the inevitable but unpredictable is more sensible than putting up with predictable annual heat and cold? Or perhaps not.
Whatever. And Texas is 1-2 major hurricanes away from becoming a massive disaster area too.
As the Eagles, who were experts on California, sang, "they called it paradise, I don't know why; you call some place paradise, kiss it goodbye".
But they also said, once checked into the Hotel California, you can never leave.
Kevin I think the chart you have labeled as household tax rate is really showing the share of total taxes collected broken down by income group. It's still meaningful, but the chart title isn't correct.
One more thing about Texas is the pollution. To my knowledge, CA does not have anything like like the area southeast of Houston down to the coast. I've been to La Porte a few times on business. It is amazing to drive mile after mile through forests of chemical towers, some flaring off gases a la Bladerunner.
Take a fly on Google airlines and view the SF bay region from east of the hwy 80 bridge over the Carquinez Strait to Antioch. Our cancer alley.
Then fly down south towards Torrance and view the Torrance Refining Co. Then fly a bit north to view the Chevron Refinery south of LAX. Turning south again towards North San Pedro to view another refinery.
Right. Texas is totally less polluted than California. Thanks for your input. Fuck off now.
Used to be that the loony op-eds in the WSJ were often refuted by news articles in the news section of the very same issue. Now it's happening at TFN--at least on-line.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/27/us/austin-texas-unaffordable-city.html?searchResultPosition=1
You could live somewhere else, but most of else recalls Phil Sheridan's "If I owned Hell and Texas, I'd rent out Texas and live in Hell."
+1 for the Sheridan quote.
I spent a week in Dallas for work once. It never got below 90, even at night, and there was so much air conditioning that I had to wear sweaters all week.
I think I'll stay in the cold and icy north. No hurricanes or earthquakes, the heating bill is more predictable, and the standard of living is pretty high.
I spent a summer working in Fort Worth - 100 days in a row of >100 degree highs, for the second year in a row. No thanks.
"The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco!"
"What do you call a sunny weekend in Seattle? Summer!"
I spend sone Texas each year. Hot as He!! In summer, rains like a lot n the fall ( and mean really rains), rains again in Spring. In between it’s pretty nice.
I have lived in Texas all my life.
The good news in this morning's Austin American-Statesman: social media users can sue if their rancid opinions are removed from Facebook et al; public school teachers are now told what they can and cannot teach about race and racism and current events (hint, don't make white parents cranky or they will bring their guns to school board meetings); no abortion-inducing drugs allowed after a woman is 7 weeks pregnant, in addition to the onerous bounties placed on the heads of pregnant women no matter what their circumstance.
Are you wondering what's good about all this? It's not good news for Texas. It's good news for Arkansas, which now looks like a more enlightened option for someone wanting to leave Texas, a measure of how low my state has sunk. Kevin has got it right. Texas wants to be as notoriously bad as the deep South.
As for me, I want to live in Katie Porter's congressional district so I can vote for her glorious self. But I can't afford it.
Some of this TX vs CA is being kicked up by Elon Musk's very public dissing of CA. He checks several of your boxes: vast income, no regard for safety regulations, general asshole-ness. He may be heartily sick of CA, but all the real innovative work being done by his underlings is happening there.
Don't mean so mean to Elon! He, like Matt Bruenig, is on the Spectrum, & that means sometimes they come across as pedantic, sniveling assholes.
Like Donald with brains.
Maybe I'm looking at it wrong, but it looks like the map showing incidence of people leaving their children in cars to die of the heat corresponds with the population of people who vote for Republicans.
I think it has more to do with average summer temperatures. But it does include most southern states which are more Republican.
Is it that hot in Idaho?
Methinks the pundit doth protest too much …
California's housing prices are high because the state doubled in population over 50 years, from 20 million to 40 million.
It was national policy to increase the country's population. I disagree with that but it's what both Democratic and Republican politicians wanted.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/states/texas-population
Texas doubled in 40 years. Kinda makes one wonder what your point is.
Shush. If enough upper middle class Californians move to Texas, the state could go blue. Don't talk them out of it.
Don't get me wrong: Texas can't hold a candle to California. But let's make sure the details are accurate:
* https://www.redbull.com/us-en/best-surfing-spots-in-texas
* Shouldn't we compare inland Dallas to, say, inland Palm Springs? And coastal L.A. to coastal Houston? Of course, Dallas and Houston are both farther south than L.A. Maybe San Diego would be the better comparable...*
* Texas has 9 protected areas that fall under the purview of the National Park Service.
Dallas has several million more people than Palm Springs does. So be sure to weight whatever you’re going to say about Dallas per capita.
"Texas is simply nowhere near the overall quality of California in higher education."
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure Texas views this as a feature, not a bug.
Ted Cruz reelected says it all.