Hello, and welcome to our aerial Where It All Began tour of the late great state of California. We'll be flying low over many parts of what was once a great state. Please keep your hands and feet inside the plane at all times, but remember, if you do fall out, you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps at any time!
When did California die? Some place it as far back as 1978, although most historians agree it started dying on July 28, 2009, when the state ran out of both cash and options. I dunno. I'm a tour guide, not a historian.
For your entertainment, here's some old music to set the mood:
Yep, you call a place Paradise, you can kiss it good-bye.
On your left, that leaning tower is what's left of the University of California, Berkeley. The university struggled for a while after we got rid of the low-income California students by killing their grants, but made up for it by admitting out of state residents. Then when the state stopped paying university faculty and staff, the remaining students rioted. The end of the SETI program and the Mark Twain library. We got some books out before then the fires came. They're saying we're in a new dark age...not sure what that means, do you know?
Down south, UCLA ended up just fine. It's now a NBA team. Nobody learns there, but -- well, you people who remember USC can insert your own joke.
D'ya see some movement on the coast? That's in what used to be Big Sur, a now completely feral land. Might be a bear -- they're making a bit of a comeback -- or perhaps a grower. After the efforts to tax pot failed and the state closed the parks, the land either became a criminal fiefdom or went back to nature, depending on who you ask.
That's a nice shirt you're wearing. Made in China, right? -- what isn't, these days? Did it come in through the Seattle port or through the Panama Canal? After the Los Angeles-Long Beach port shut down, well, we had to get our stuff somehow. Some economist estimated that the longer shipping routes add about 20% to the cost of every item imported from China. First Seattle raised port taxes rather than tax its own residents, then that ungrateful little banana republic down there got some strange ideas after we built them a canal.
Now, California can't even afford enough bananas to be a banana republic!
The large collection of buildings on your right is Northkernprison, which used to be the town of Delano. Yup, the prison got bigger than the town, and well, ya see, we had all those nice empty buildings after we deported everyone with brown skin. It costs a million bucks to go to that prison, so youbetcha it's nice lookin'! During the 2009 Budget Breakdown, they tried letting people out of jail, and I'm sure you heard how the voters hated that one. Much better system now -- Blackwaterboard Co assesses the prisoners a fee (can't call it a tax, you know) for going to jail, and if the prisoner can't pay it, the prisoner can just work it off. Yep, a loaf of bread now costs 30 years of hard time. Privatization of prisons is a great system -- deters everyone except the starving people!
Someone died last week in the fields? I hadn't heard that. Well, what Blackwaterboard does in its prisons with its prisoners is its business. Just as long as taxpayers don't pay for the prisons. Besides, someone's got to pick the strawberries, you know.
We're now flying over the remnants of a public high school. It was supposed to be a very nice one, too -- made Newsweek's Top 100 list a couple of times, back when there was a Newsweek. We used to pay taxes, and they'd let anyone in -- can you imagine that, just anyone! Some parents tried to keep the high schools alive, even after we lost the colleges, but volunteer teachers and volunteer parents and volunteer janitors and volunteer firefighters only work for a couple of years. Besides, the kids learn everything they need to know in the prisons, or if they're fortunate, there's always the private schools.
Hollywood's still up and running, it's all private money of course, but they don't make 'em like they used to. Staffing problems. We just don't seem to have many skilled workers. It's almost like we've gotten stupider in California. A lot of kids don't seem very interested in going out of state for college, not when you need high school first, so they just take the low wage jobs -- Wal-Mart greeter, farmworker, reality show writer. Pixarversal's talking about going up to Canada along with the rest of them.
We'll stop in Beverly Hills for lunch. Can you afford a glass of milk? The prisons are still growing food in California -- our land has always been fertile -- but they're the only ones who can afford to do so. Without taxpayer-subsidized water, our arable land is down to a tenth of what it was. And, even after we can grow it, getting it to market over what used to be roads is dicey. That's why apricots are now worth their weight in gold. Do you remember strawberries?
On your right, this used to be Disneyland, and that was California Adventure. In 2011 we had a Taxpayer's Revolt, where some libruls started actually demanding higher taxes, of all things. The discrepancy between the two became a symbol -- see, thanks to Saint Jarvis, Disneyland hasn't had its taxes reassessed since 1978, so it was paying much less than Cal Adventure. A riot burned 'em both down. No point in rebuilding now, without water and without tourists.
Ahh, now we're at Ground Zero. The eucalyptus trees of UC San Diego. Now, you've all learned in your history books that a couple of places up north called Merced and Stockton were ground zero. They've long since been bulldozed over after the fires. Every once in a while, someone gets through the Sierras or on one the highways that we used to have and digs around until getting stuck in Lodi. However, on this Where It All Started Tour, you're learning the Truth. And the Truth has two parts.
Part One of the Truth is the road. You see that road down there? It's okay, I don't either. Once the state shut down road repairs, the roads went back to nature -- potholes, cracks, weeds. Do you remember a movie called The Road, came out way back in 2009? It was a documentary (although they didn't know it back then) and it was filmed right here in California. Without roads, it's hard to get stuff in or out of California. They call it infrastructure, which is a really boring word that voters never quite understood, so they didn't pay for it.
And Part Two is the eucalyptus, although it could have been just about any flammable tree. You see, San Diego County residents consistently refused to raise taxes to pay for a fire department. What heroes! Saint Ronnie blesses them from above! So when the eucalyptus groves of the former UCSD campus caught fire, they couldn't get fire trucks in or out along the roads, and of course the Governator had long since sold the water-dropping helicopters on Ebay. So the fire -- 20013, I think -- not only took out half the county, but destroyed all of the private biotech industry in the La Jolla area. California's infant billion dollar stem cell research efforts, gone! Other states have had a devil of a time just catching up.
Same story with so many other industries. They hadn't realized how much they depended on taxpayer-funded basics to get their feet off the ground, so when the state government shut down, the California industry withered away, and then the national industry took a hit along with it. You can drink New York state wine, it's not bad, but it doesn't have the benefit of UC Davis researchers in harmony with Napa vintners and the wonderful climate California used to have. And Silicon Valley -- do you remember Apple, HP, Adobe, Intel, and Ebay? When the 101 collapsed in the 2016 MOrgan Hill earthquake, they dispersed around the country. They're all more-or-less fine, but the venture capitalists scattered too, and with them went a decade's worth of innovation, and that's one reason why we're now so far behind the BRIC countries.
You remember the idea that green jobs were going to save us? Green jobs would save the economy and save the planet at the same time, they said in 2009. California led the nation in creating green jobs -- until the state shut down the universities and the infrastructure, and with them the jobs. When we went down, we dragged the rest of the country down too. Without California, without 12% of its population and 40% of its innovation, the United States never really recovered from the Great Recession, and now we're FUBAR thanks to global warming.
And that's your Truth, Where It All Started: Voters refusing to pay for roads, schools, and fire services. Democratic politicians knowing that two simple fixes to Prop 13 -- changing to a split roll, OR changing the 2/3 requirement, or both -- could have solved the budget crisis, but they were afraid to touch the third rail of California politics. Republican politicians who didn't realize, or care, that when you drown government in a bathtub, you kill its people too. Federal officials and voters in other states thinking that California could fall into the ocean and not drag the rest of the country with it. You could parse these causes more, if you could find the information (between the collapse of Google and the library shutdown, information is hard to dig up), but that's it in a nutshell. I hope you enjoyed your tour!