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Dark days lie ahead in the dystopia of California
Gerard Baker in The Times of London looks at California as some kind of dystopia, a malfunctioning place with rolling blackouts from PG&E the electricity company, drought and water shortages, housing costs soaring making it affordable only to the few at the top, and high taxes.
He cites an expert from Chapman University who compares it to some sort of medieval feudal place run by nobility at the top, the investors, lawyers and people in entertainment, with the academy and the media as a kind of clerisy who propagate the ideas that this nobility supports, a small middle and the rest as serfs or minimum wage workers in logistics, retail and farms.
Median costs of housing are about $613,000, and the affordability index of people who can afford housing is 32% compared to 56% in the country. Hispanic immigrants now prefer Texas, though with a loss of 6 million people in the last decade and gain of five million, it sees increase in population with high birthrates from the existing population to about 40 million. Half the population of homeless in the U.S. are now in California though it has only one eighth the population of the country.
High housing costs and high cost of living hurt people at the low end, the lower middle and the retired the most. With low wages at the bottom and extremes of wealth, homeless, housing zone restrictions, drought and rolling electricity blackouts, this is not what the future should look like.
California 2020 Utopia in Dystopia- Extremes of wealth, sky high housing prices, wildfires and the pandemic
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The California in the early postwar years during the presidency of Truman and Eisenhower when different values prevailed, when Jerry Brown says his mother studied "basically for free", and the California of 2020. A struggle for the lost soul of America- its lost values for what Carl Sandburg called "The People, Yes." The ideas that led to the shipping overseas of America's manufacturing industry with disastrous results were created in some pockets of California such as San Jose and San Francisco.
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