David BrewsterHere’s a glum appraisal of California politics and economy, where high taxes and high regulation may have crippled its prosperity and its ability to fix problems like water shortages and poor assimilation of migrants. The warning for Washington state is the creation of two polarized states. The author observes of the two antithetical Californias. “One is an elite, out-of-touch caste along the fashionable Pacific Ocean corridor that runs the state and has the money to escape the real-life consequences of its own unworkable agendas. The other is a huge underclass in central, rural and foothill California that cannot flee to the coast and suffers the bulk of the fallout from Byzantine state regulations, poor schools and the failure to assimilate recent immigrants from some of the poorest areas in the world. The result is Connecticut and Alabama combined in one state.”
