Calexit - The other side of the coin

So one of the biggest things to come out of the last few months since the 2016 Presidential Election of November 8th is that California started proceedings to make a secession from the United States, presumed to be intent on forming their own country.  There have been a lot of talking points that have been circulating this issue on both sides of the Aisle, but I think there are a lot of debate points that are being missed, whether deliberately, or inadvertently, on what will happen to the People's Republic of New California, should they get to their goal of leaving.  

I'm pretty sure it's pretty obvious to everyone in the world as to why this is happening.  The liberal/social justice bastion of Los Angeles is pretty mad that the person who was unelectable, simply because he had an R next to his name, is now the President of the United States.  All of this anger coming in spite of the fact that Mr. Trump is far from a Republican in his personal life, his personal politics, and pretty much everything other than fiscal responsibility.  And yet, the organization "Yes, California", stands up and yells that our President's ideals fall far away from their own.  I do have another article working at this time about the personal politics of our current President, and how the shift in ideals makes him still considerable as a Conservative, even though he is far from the Tea Party, so we'll stay on the topic at hand for now.  But YC swears up and down that the United States has elected someone that doesn't align with them and that means that it's time to pack up and leave.  

This isn't the first time that a state has considered packing it's bags over a presidential administration.  California tossed the idea around during the last Bush, even though it never really got any traction.  I mostly consider that to be in part because social media was still in it's infancy at the time.  Texas also brought up the idea on numerous occasions during the Obama years, and beyond while the media swore up and down that Hillary was going to be our current sitting Queen, but their idea was dismissed as radical right-wing extremism by most major news media outlets, and the majority of social media outlets called an excessive temper tantrum.  That's obviously not the case with Yes, California, which is being praised as highly heroic, and it stands, this time around to reason that it will have some traction.  Preliminary pollsters believe that the petition already has more than enough signatures to add the preliminary step to the ballot.  That preliminary step, of course, is to have a referendum on the ballot in an upcoming election to change the wording in the state's constitution so the state is no longer constitutionally required to be a part of the Union.  

In spite of waves of federal aid going to certain cities, along with disaster relief flowing in after a years long drought broke suddenly, causing sinkholes and mudslides, California, as it stands right now, brags the 6th largest economy in the world, standalone.  There are factors that affect that, but I'll cover them later on in the article.  However, that being said, one can see that the fledgling nation would stand a fighting chance on the world stage as it stands right now.  There are about 10 countries in the world similar in land area, and plenty that are smaller, and California is similar in population to Canada....yes, all of it.  So, it's not unreasonable to consider it standing by itself.  But it takes more than a population and land to make a country.  Just ask East Germany.  

The biggest reason for California's urge to exit our country is because it feels that it can no longer have an ideological alignment with the rest of the country that dared to freely elect Donald Trump in place of an open socialist, or a woman who was bullied by her constituents into embracing open socialism in order to get the votes (I'll cover this in a different article).  Therefore, it stands to reason, that a Californian government would adopt a very minimum of a mild democratically socialist platform, but more likely it would be a full on Marxist society of full on equality for all.  That sounds like a pretty sweet deal, especially with all that money coming from that massive economy, but let's stand back and look at the reality of what it would mean for a newly independent California.  

One of the biggest ideas that is perpetuated by Hollywood, Los Angeles, and by extension, the rest of California is that they know how to do a society better than the rest of us backwards idiots in flyover states.  So it stands to speculative reasoning that they will not experiment with a options for a socioeconomic structure and move right into their agenda driven platform.  They know best, and they are going to do it right.  Now, if I was President or a Congressman when all of this took place, the first thing that I would push would be that for a year or maybe two into the California Exit, there would be no immigration restrictions out of California.  I'd feel duty bound to protect my citizens from abduction by a foreign government.  Just the same, in order for California to stand by the agenda that they fought so hard to put in place in this country, they would be honor bound to have free immigration and open borders, letting all of the citizens of the US who don't align with the US into their borders completely restriction free.  I did some number crunching earlier, and found that in this past presidential election, about 4 and a half million people didn't feel like the left wing ideology represented them.  If you extrapolate these numbers to represent the total population that is eligible to vote, just by straight percentages, that gets you closer to 8 million people, and I'm not factoring anything for voter fraud or non citizen votes.  When you further calculate for these people's family members who might be underage, or a woman on a California Dairy farm who's husband might have a felony hanging over his head, we're probably talking, on a conservative side, about 10 million people, approximately, and all of them would be absolutely welcome back in the United States, and we'd be ready to find jobs and lives for them.   I'm sure the flyover states would welcome more people who can grow crops in the middle of a drought and be successful with it.  In exchange, a lot of young college students and recent college grads who have hearts in their eyes while they go to work at their entry level, or retail jobs will go running to the promised Golden State ready to make a difference in the world.  That's good, because they will need those hard workers to make a GDP, because a redistribution society is going to attract a lot of people who refuse to get a job in lieu of a government handout that many of them have based their lives around.  After hearing the left handed promises of this past election cycle, I feel like a California government would be honor bound to ensure that it's new constituents feel as comfortable as possible in their new society.  While these few items are going to have a major impact on the sixth largest economy in the world, there are a series of even bigger factors that are going to turn into major hurdles to overcome.  

One of the biggest factors that drives California's massive economy is the amount of things that get exported out of the state to other states in our union tax-free.  Wine, software, year-round crops, dairy, Hollywood movies are all big ticket items that California touts itself on exporting, for free, across our union.  We can't exactly enforce a tariff on them at this point, they are a part of us.  But what will happen when they are not.  Upon CalExit, all exported goods become foreign, and subject to any import fee or border fee that our government decides to impose on them, and trust me; in the name of putting US citizens back to work, our government has decided to get very, very tough on taxing things coming into this country.  Especially if it's something that a US worker could have made.  You Californians didn't think we'd be letting your stuff come into this country for free, did you?  Between tariffs and patriotism, I predict that it would quickly become very hard to sell something marked "Made in California" in the US, especially for the first few crucial, formative years.  As software becomes harder and harder to sell, more and more people with a need and a dream will start forming startups in US basements and taking the place of the Silicon Valley tech giants; those of whom didn't migrate during the free pass.  I can definitely see the entertainment industry making a massive migration to tax friendly US states, possibly even distributing itself throughout the country.  After all, it's easier to take advantage of doe-eyed Midwest actors if you don't have to import them from another country.  

The rapidly exporting industry from California in an attempt to find a consuming audience that doesn't have to pay a border tax to utilize it's product is only going to compounded by the massive amounts of natural resources that California the Nation would have to import in order to keep itself running.  Once the farms of Northern California are back to running, they are going to need a lot of fresh water that the small nation doesn't really produce.  There are desalination efforts, but they require a massive amount of energy to operate, especially on the scale that would be required.  Wind turbines will require steel that the nation doesn't have, along with coal from the eastern seaboard.  Yes, there is plenty of oil, but it doesn't come out of the ground ready to use.  They'll either have to create an auto industry, or import enough vehicles to support the infrastructure.  Meanwhile, the US, Canada, and Mexico have, or can find a way to manufacture just about anything that California had to offer back as a trading chip.  That leaves California to either fend for itself of try and strike a deal with Asia, or even pay the transport fees and tariffs to get things from Europe.  And on top of this all is defense.  While California State boasts some of the biggest, and often times most advanced military bases of all branches, California Nation, I feel based on ideology, would have a very very challenging time staffing and arming them, especially in a fledgling state.  Keep in mind, all of the armaments, and even all of the people on the bases are considered to be US Property, and would not go with the secession. 

In the end, all I can offer is advice.  If the people of California want to take their 55 Electoral Votes, 55 Congressmen, and the majority of our most liberal citizens, and go to do their own thing, then it's up to the people of that state to decide, and the elected officials to do what's best for their constituents.  If the people decide in a free and fair election, and the proper paperwork is filed, the Tenth Amendment, even in light of the Interstate Commerce Act, will hold reign and the Federal Government won't be able to stop it.  Nothing that I've laid out in this argument is an impossible hurdle to jump, just a series of very difficult ones that can be overcome by wise leadership and good trade deals.  It's more likely that a California Nation will crash and burn, but there's a chance we're watching the next great world power rise.  

Some thoughts on Free Community College in a Trump world

So there are a number of hot button topics that have been flowing all over the internet since 2015, and many of them are starting to come into fruition now.  Free this, free that, business market, jobs, trade deals, healthcare.  With social media being our top form of news, whether real, propaganda, or satire; it's impossible to avoid any of it, even if you're not on Facebook or Twitter.  There's always that one friend who will whip out his phone and show off that article that was meant to trigger an emotional rage from someone on one side or the other.  And the headline is always an emotional trigger meant to make one man feel triumph, and another feel hatred and rage.  Working on that, I did read an article that I ran across that is sure to divide people again.  I looked at it, and I can see merit and failure with it.  

Detroit has decided to offer it's community colleges tuition free.  Pretty sweet deal, right? Well, let's look at a couple things that go along with this.  Most conservatives are going to bring up the suffocating debt that Detroit still owes the Federal Government, along with several private banks.  Meanwhile the progressive movement will laud the city council of Detroit as heroes because they're giving away the promised free education.  But let's take a look from the center to see what the reality is.

Now, it's impossible to ignore the fact that companies are running over each other to start investing in the US.  Much of this can be attributed to our sitting president, even though the extremist media outlets are going out of their way to find reasons that it wasn't on him.  Realistically, there has been a promise of deregulation of labor, and a business friendly tax environment, and everyone knows it.  That includes democratic city council members, mayors, and pretty much every politician in this country.  In real life, tax and regulation cutbacks mean that it's easier to employ here, and that's gonna create tax revenue.  With that in mind, municipalities are gonna want that tax revenue, especially cities that are buried in debt.  

With all this in mind, one has to look at the final piece of the puzzle, incentivization.  Detroit knows that when the jobs come back, investors are going to be searching for markets full of trained workers.  With free community college, and a spattering of enough low level jobs to start drawing people in, Detroit seems like a paradise to be for workers who have been out of a job for years.  Our sitting Commander in Chief has promised to invest money in rebuilding Detroit by name, it's no wonder that Detroit is rushing to find workers.  In this writer's personal opinion, the free community college is a gimmick.  Yes, it's going to put the city further in debt, but I can see the city's council looking at it long term.  A working class family, who's been strapped by being out of good work for years, who's heard the Donald say for two years that he wants to invest money into Detroit.  Now the parents of that family hear that they can start sending their kids to get some basic classes that transfer to a 4 year college, for free, and save a couple years of tuition, they're going to see a move closer to the Detroit area as a viable move.  I see a lot of cities in the next four years doing things like that.  If the city can sustain it, it's a great idea.  We live in a digital age where every phone has a video camera, and airfare has never been lower.  People can move and not fear losing touch with family and friends.  So any perk that a city can hang on living there, it will exploit at any turn in an upcoming economic upturn.  

The conclusion.  I can see where the City of Detroit is going with their plan, but I ultimately think it will backfire.  The problem with having something for free is that it never attracts the people who want to put the work in.  The community colleges will be flooded out, an won't be able to take on the people who want to use them as a cost effective stepping stone into a a higher college experience, or even a trade school.  

A final note would be a suggestion.  If I was a City Planner, I'd move away from the free, and move in the direction of getting the community colleges and the potential employers together and working out a tuition break or scholarship for working at the manufacturing plant.  Don't offer anything for free, but definitely try to get people to come work for you.