California 'Hell-Hole' to Run $7 Billion Budget Surplus

[Mr. Smith]

Completely misleading for the reasons dead0man said. Also if it's so great how come there are homeless people everywhere and people leaving the state because they can't afford it. Not to mention the fact that Newsom has an approval rating in the 40s and the state legislature has an even worse approval rating than that.

The truth is we have massive bond debt and a massive pension problem that gets overlooked because muh surplus.

Overall the state isn't a hellhole. However major cities have a tendency to be, because they are filled with homeless people living on the street. I no longer take BART in the bay area because you're likely to get robbed or a homeless person will be pissing on the train. It's not a great place to live. Although there are still some good areas.

I don't know how anyone can look at the past years of democratic control in California and come away with the thought that yeah this has been good we're doing great.

The homeless people are there because the weather is good enough and the cities aren't complete a-holes to them...because of course, lots of homeless are simply those evicted out, and not the druggies that you and Smiling John seem to lurve portraying them all as.

Also it's very f*(king easy to praise Dem control after seeing the walking disaster things were when Der Sperminator was in charge, or the 16 years of prison build-up under Duke and Wilson.

But you have a point, I think it was Dem controlled and Dem majority even in the 70's when the DINOs crossed over to Jarvis and put through the most monstrous proposition ever passed. And boy howdy could so have been done if not for those tax freezes

[Mr. Smith]

Just going to conclude before I go play some computer games after taking off early for the weekend that it is particularly adorable to see California conservatives b**** and moan about what a horrible socialist it managed hellscape thirst aid is.

California conserva tards - - I hate California! The price of housing is immense. Taxes are high. Democrats have ruined this state!

Everyone else - - ok, the road to Oklahoma or Arkansas is that way. Need help packing?

Conserva tards - - um, well.....

Texas> California

As a someone whose lived in both, the answer to that is yes and no. And a lot the whining about the homeless is equally applicable in Houston.

And what's more, there don't seem to be a lot of navigation centers or shelters.

Just going to conclude before I go play some computer games after taking off early for the weekend that it is particularly adorable to see California conservatives b**** and moan about what a horrible socialist it managed hellscape thirst aid is.

California conserva tards - - I hate California! The price of housing is immense. Taxes are high. Democrats have ruined this state!

Everyone else - - ok, the road to Oklahoma or Arkansas is that way. Need help packing?

Conserva tards - - um, well.....

To be clear I don't hate California, but outside of a surplus how exactly can you look at it and say this is great? You'd have to be living under a rock to think that things are going great here. We have a pension crisis, massive bond debt, rising homelessness and increasing crime in inner cities. Not to mention how sh**t the DMV is, which the democrats blocked an audit of. Also every highway seems to be permanently under construction and again the cost of living is ridiculous.

I'd be saying this regardless of what party is in charge or what state I live in.

It's a better DMV than what passes for such in Virginia, and it's far less convoluted than the DPS/DMV divide in Texas.

Now, if I disagreed that there were blemishes, I wouldn't have moved over to Texas...that said, such issues are generally far more minor when looking at most of the country.

[Mr. Smith]

Conservatives label CA a hell hole because of demographics and nothing else. You never hear them complain about quality of life in WV, KY, OK, KS, ect.

No. We call it a hellhole because it's prohibitively expensive in most metropolitan areas due to terrible zoning laws and rent control, which traps the working poor in a situation where they spend a huge percentage of their earnings on rent and gas. Oh, and violent drug addicts wander the streets in the cities. I love my state, but the people in this thread trying to pretend that it's some sort of progressive Xanadu (just because the government collects a lot of revenue from techies) are definitely not well-informed with regards to what it's actually like to live here.

So awesome to see conservatives give a flying f*** about the Working Poor when used solely to dunk on a successful liberal state.

Badger, I have tried to take you seriously on multiple occasions. But your constant insistence on assuming the worst of everyone you argue with makes this impossible. You add nothing to this forum's discourse aside from cheap generalizations.

There's nothing generalized about it. It's a very specific indictment about Republican policies. Sorry if reality intrudes on your cool dunk on California.

The generalization is that conservatives only care about the working poor when they criticize liberal policies. Has it crossed your mind that people might be libertarians or conservatives because they genuinely think those policies will help the poor the most?

It's very hard to take such claims seriously when you hear a sh*& ton of rhetoric against the poor for "terrible individual choices" and for "not pulling themselves up by the bootstraps".

I don't recall anyone ever questioning if just maybe Dems actually think taxing the rich might actually end up being a benefit to them in the long term. Why exactly then should conservatives and libertarians be afforded that luxury then when most of their rhetoric towards the poor is so hateful at face value?

[Mr. Smith]

Conservatives label CA a hell hole because of demographics and nothing else. You never hear them complain about quality of life in WV, KY, OK, KS, ect.

No. We call it a hellhole because it's prohibitively expensive in most metropolitan areas due to terrible zoning laws and rent control, which traps the working poor in a situation where they spend a huge percentage of their earnings on rent and gas. Oh, and violent drug addicts wander the streets in the cities. I love my state, but the people in this thread trying to pretend that it's some sort of progressive Xanadu (just because the government collects a lot of revenue from techies) are definitely not well-informed with regards to what it's actually like to live here.

So awesome to see conservatives give a flying f*** about the Working Poor when used solely to dunk on a successful liberal state.

Badger, I have tried to take you seriously on multiple occasions. But your constant insistence on assuming the worst of everyone you argue with makes this impossible. You add nothing to this forum's discourse aside from cheap generalizations.

There's nothing generalized about it. It's a very specific indictment about Republican policies. Sorry if reality intrudes on your cool dunk on California.

The generalization is that conservatives only care about the working poor when they criticize liberal policies. Has it crossed your mind that people might be libertarians or conservatives because they genuinely think those policies will help the poor the most?

It's very hard to take such claims seriously when you hear a sh*& ton of rhetoric against the poor for "terrible individual choices" and for "not pulling themselves up by the bootstraps".

I don't recall anyone ever questioning if just maybe Dems actually think taxing the rich might actually end up being a benefit to them in the long term. Why exactly then should conservatives and libertarians be afforded that luxury then when most of their rhetoric towards the poor is so hateful at face value?

I've heard those phrases an order of magnitude more from Atlas progressives strawmanning than from conservatives.

You live in a state that believes in some kind of welfare state from all partisan sides, and you weren't around here and unlikely to be political in any way when the zenith of that thinking was there before The Recession.

So of course you'd think it's a strawman argument, rather than a verbatim argument amongst the GOP.