Some Red State/Blue State Indicia

zitothebrave said:
This isn't a boon doggle.

45K per household for stable internet connection vs. 350 dollars for limited shit internet. is nothing. Also California could easily cost this out to make profit if they hit enough places. While buying everyone a star link just makes them more money.

Let's theory craft this, California spends 6 billion building this infrustructure that eventually connects, and signs up 20% of it's households to this service, that's about 2.5 million customers. If they're charged 50 bucks a month on average for internet that generates 125 million a month or 1.5 billion a year.

Making internet a public utility isn't necessarily a bad thing. I'm not saying it's th eright thing 100% of the time but we've seen this work in other places. Chatanooga for example has public utility fiber and it's a rousing success and makes enough money and provides up to 25 gigabits per second allowing power users and businesses to subsidize lower income folks.
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$45K per household charging $50 per month would be paid back in 75 years
 
Some states have been more successful at discouraging smoking than others. Overall, it has been an enormous public health success story. Anyone who values life and good health should find something worth celebrating in this outcome.

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sturg33 said:
Im happy to engage in good faith here. Are you? If so, would you agree with me that what is happening is not working? And if so, should be stopped?
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I do agree it's not working, I don't think trying to help the homeless needs to stop. I believe it could be retooled and refocused and treated as more of a rehabilitation and temporary aid than a permanent one. I think there is a concerted effort that can happen and we've seen cities deal with it but I would like to know your solution.
 

Of all the prevailing media narratives around Gavin Newsom, the one that is most conspicuous by its absence is how under its two-term governor California became the top performing economy not just among its 49 siblings but also any developed nation. No wonder Elon Musk quietly sought Newsom’s help when the world’s richest man sought to move a bunch of Tesla Inc. engineers back to the state after relocating them to Texas.

Amid the thousands of headlines referencing California failings with wildfires, droughts, floods, mass transportation, aging roads, education, homelessness, unaffordable housing, widening inequality and poverty along with the exodus of billionaires, corporate headquarters and longtime residents -- never mind the “slick” label whenever the betting favorite for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination is mentioned in the press – the Golden State (population 39 million people), just supplanted Japan (123 million) as the fourth-largest economy.

Gross domestic product surged 40% to more than $4 trillion, accounting for more than 14% of US output, after Newsom took office in January 2019. China’s, the world’s second-largest economy, expanded 32% and No. 3 Germany increased 16%, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

The US is an also-ran competing with California's prosperity, based on indexes compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia that take state level nonfarm payroll employment, average hours worked in manufacturing by production employees, the unemployment rate and wage and salary disbursements that are then deflated by the consumer price index.

California's not-so-secret sauce happens to be the diversity between its citizens' ears instead of the fossil fuels generating the biggest share of Texas growth. Of the 10,000 companies in the Bloomberg World Large, Mid & Small Cap Index, the technology sector’s 20% share of their total value is the largest of any sector. And within that subset of technology, California leads with 41-based firms producing a 603% total return (income plus appreciation) over the past decade. That’s almost four times the gain of their global peers the past two, three and five years. Tech’s contribution to California’s GDP increased 59% since 2019, outperforming the 40% gain for states overall.

Healthcare shows a similar trajectory. The industry's contribution to California GDP increased by 52% since 2019 and including 2025, a year when President Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans enacted major cuts to Medicaid and reduced Affordable Care Act premium tax credits, resulting in an estimated 15 million people losing health coverage. California's uninsured rate declined to a record-low 6.4% in 2023, the largest drop in the US, from more than 17% a decade ago, helped by the Covered California and Medi-Cal expanded coverage programs.
Although “some of California's most prominent venture capitalists have a proclivity for slamming their state, arguing that fiscal mismanagement and high taxes will cause startups to form elsewhere,” the opposite is happening, according to Axios. “California startups raised a whopping 62% of all U.S. venture capital dollars in 2025,'' Axios notes, citing the PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor, more than either 2024 (54.2%) or 2023 (46.9%), as well as the decade-earlier mark of 47.2%.

Even accounting for less than 12% of the US population, California contributed more than 40% of the growth in the value of nation's publicly traded equities as measured by the companies in the Russell 3000 Index, which returned 182% for investors since 2019. California accounted for 70 percentage points, more than triple No. 2 Washington (20 points), almost five times No. 3 Texas (15 points) and No. 4 New York (13 points) and almost 12 times No. 5 Ohio (6 points), according to data compiled by Bloomberg. California-based companies overall returned 328% to investors, crushing the equity returns from the world's largest economies: US, 182%; China, 89%; Germany, 110%; Japan, 96%; and India, 63%, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

None of this is accidental. Sixteen years after it became a state in 1850, California passed its first compulsory education law, requiring children aged eight to 14 to attend school. With more than 600 colleges and universities, California today has no peers in higher education, whether in the US or any of the world's developed economies. No. 2 New York has 423, Germany 420 and the UK no more than 300. California graduates more engineers than any state and pays the highest wages when they join the workforce.
 
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