This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, November 30, 2020:
When Ben Shapiro, founder of the Los Angeles-based conservative website Daily Wire, announced in September that he and his company were leaving for Nashville, he made a noisy exit. He wrote:
We’re leaving because all the benefits of California have steadily eroded — and then suddenly collapsed….
All the costs of California have steadily increased — and then suddenly skyrocketed….
Nearly every public space in Los Angeles has become a repository for open waste, needles and trash….
Looters were allowed free reign … during the Black Lives Matter riots….
To combat these trends, local and state governments have gamed the statistics, reclassifying offenses and letting prisoners go free.… In July, the city of Los Angeles slashed police funding, cutting the force to its lowest levels in over a decade….
California’s top marginal income tax rate is now 13.3%; legislators what to raise it to 16.8%….
California has the worst regulatory climate in America….
The state legislature is dominated by Democrats. California is not on a trajectory toward recovery; it is on a trajectory toward oblivion. Taxpayers are moving out — now including my family and my company. In 2019, before the pandemic and the widespread rioting and looting, outmigration jumped 38%, rising for the seventh straight year. That number will increase again this year.
I want my kids to grow up sate. I want them to grow up in a community with a future, with more freedom and safety that I grew up with.
California makes that impossible. So, goodbye, Golden State. Thanks for the memories.
Shapiro took nearly all of his company’s 75 employees with him. And they’re not alone. In July, Joe Rogan, host of The Joe Rogan Experience, announced he was moving to Texas, citing the need for “a little more freedom” and decrying “the traffic … the economic despair … [and] the homelessness problem that’s accelerated radically” in Los Angeles over the last decade.
A locally prominent developer, Paul Petrovich, is headed for
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