Elon Musk’s menace Tuesday to transfer the headquarters of Hawthorne-based SpaceX and X, the social media platform based mostly in San Francisco, to Texas is simply the newest instance of the wealthy and highly effective making an attempt to attain political factors by bashing the Golden State.
Musk blamed the transfer on the regulation signed the day earlier than by Gov. Gavin Newsom defending LGBTQ+ college students from being outed by banning faculty districts from requiring lecturers to inform their dad and mom about their gender identification or sexual orientation. He additionally embrace the oft-repeated canard in regards to the crime-ridden streets of San Francisco by saying he “had sufficient of dodging gangs of violent drug addicts simply to get out and in of the constructing” at X headquarters.
Trashing California has grow to be a go-to chorus for Republican politicians and rich enterprise tycoons who don’t like its liberal-leaning insurance policies. San Francisco enterprise capitalist David Sacks described his metropolis as a “cesspool” in a speech Tuesday on the Republican Nationwide Conference. Former President Trump continuously portrays California as a dystopian hellscape, calling the state “failing” and a “image of our nation’s decline.” The rhetoric is sinking in sufficient {that a} nationwide survey performed for The Occasions final 12 months discovered that almost half of Republicans consider California is “probably not American.”
However right here’s a query for Musk, Trump and different GOP politicians and supporters who like to rag on our state: If California is so horrible, why can’t you deliver your self to really kiss it goodbye?
Now we have a number of concepts why.
Let’s begin with our financial energy. California is the fifth largest economic system on the earth, mightier than India, Brazil or Canada. We’re an enormous market with greater than 39 million folks, whose customers and companies are chargeable for an outsize share of the nation’s financial development, commerce and innovation. We’re No. 1 in income from tourism and variety of enterprise startups. Now we have the nation’s largest tech trade by far, and lead the nation in manufacturing jobs and agricultural manufacturing.
California can be a piggy financial institution for politicians, who fly in to rake up marketing campaign money, even when they don’t do a lot precise campaigning right here. Trump’s disdain for California hasn’t stopped his journeys to mansions and estates in Beverly Hills, Newport Seaside and San Francisco to ask wealthy donors for cash. Trump has raised extra donations for his 2024 presidential run right here than from every other state, together with his personal.
We’re additionally a fount of cash to pink states resembling Texas, Kentucky and Mississippi that rely upon us as a result of Californians ship extra tax income to the federal authorities than we get again. The largesse is because of our massive, comparatively younger inhabitants and abundance of high-income earners.
And what about our universities, which Republican politicians have criticized as “woke” and for permitting college students to train their free speech rights by protesting the struggle in Gaza? Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA and Caltech and different world-renowned establishments have produced many dozens of Nobel Prize laureates and innovators who’ve began 1000’s of profitable companies which have formed the worldwide economic system.
California additionally units the agenda for environmental safety. And although detractors in huge enterprise and politics often assault our stringent guidelines as a pressure on their income, they ignore how continuously those self same rules spur funding and development in clear, renewable expertise that doesn’t wreck the planet.
Musk ought to know. His firms had been constructed utilizing billions of {dollars} in authorities subsidies. Tesla alone has obtained greater than $2.5 billion in California zero-emission automobile credit, and benefited from $436 million in client rebates for Tesla consumers and lots of of tens of millions extra in different state tax credit to assist eco-friendly companies that need to keep in California. The state’s local weather insurance policies are an enormous purpose why California leads the nation in electrical automobile gross sales, with greater than one-third of the nation’s EVs — lots of them Teslas — registered within the state.
It’s hardly the primary take-my-business-elsewhere menace that Musk, now a Trump endorser, has made, citing California’s labor protections, environmental requirements or its enforcement of pandemic well being restrictions. Whether or not it’s bluster or substance stays to be seen. Musk beforehand introduced he would transfer Tesla’s headquarters to Texas and shut down its Fremont, Calif., electrical automobile manufacturing unit solely to later broaden its operations within the Golden State.
In fact California faces the identical points as different locations, and our issues with reasonably priced housing, homelessness, drug abuse and air pollution are magnified due to our measurement. However we’re proud to reside in a spot that’s making an attempt to equitably handle our shortfalls and the place freedom isn’t outlined solely by the power of the rich and the enterprise pursuits to do what they need. In California, we all know that freedom additionally comes from different priorities we worth: secure workplaces, respectable pay (our $16 minimal wage is greater than twice Texas’), abortion entry, LGBTQ+ rights, a wholesome surroundings and security from gun violence.
The GOP’s California bashers will little question maintain spouting their supposed revulsion for our state for so long as they assume it’s to their profit. However they received’t ever stop us. Now we have an excessive amount of to supply.
