Is California Reaching Critical Mass? › American Greatness
Victor Davis Hanson
By any measure, California is a failed state—and a national embarrassment.
Taxes? It has the highest income and gas taxes in the nation.
Roads? A Reason Foundation survey ranks it 49th among the states.
Mass flight? Between 250,000 and 350,000 more Californians leave the state than move in each year. Housing, gas, insurance, and electricity prices? The highest in the continental U.S.
Illegal aliens, the poor, the homeless, the foreign-born, and welfare recipients? The largest numbers in the U.S.
Public K–12 schools? Test scores in the bottom quartile.
Poverty? Twenty percent live below the poverty line.
So, what happened to the nation’s most richly naturally endowed—and once best governed—state?
The Left took total control—after millions of the embattled middle class fled. Millions more impoverished immigrants, legal and illegal, took their place. Left-wing Silicon Valley spawned some of the wealthiest elite liberal enclaves in the world.
The result was a neo-feudal society that was hardly democratic.
Millions of subsidized poor compose the bottom. A beleaguered middle continues to shrink. An ultra-rich apparat of left-wing coastal professionals and investors rules from the top.
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https://amgreatness.com/2026/06/16/is-california-reaching-critical-mass/
