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I don't see anyone telling you that you will be forced to live in a small place.

In fact, if you have $325k you can go buy the home of your lord and savior , although if that seems a little too small for you there may be larger homes for sale in the same area. Maybe with all the money you've made by not paying employees you could buy your Lord's place, turn it into a museum of his greatness, and then buy another place for yourself at the same time?

This is a rather different project. It is 636 condos, with some affordable housing and low-income apartments on 156-acres. They have plenty of room to work elsewhere while the paleontologists do their work. Most projects do not have that luxury.

IIRC, too many credit checks can impact a credit score

A credit check can be a "soft inquiry" or a "hard inquiry". Pulling your own credit report through a service like Annual Credit Report, Credit Karma, or Discover FICO is a soft inquiry, as is a lender sending you a "pre-selected" offer. They do not affect credit score. A hard inquiry happens when you've already applied for a loan and the bank is making a final decision on whether to lend. Though hard inquiries spread out over the course of several months indicate a risky borrower who overrelies on credit, multiple hard inquiries for a secured loan within two weeks are scored as one inquiry because they indicate shopping around.

The only standard of living that has increased is the access to cheap electronic goods made in china. Sure your desktop computer might be equivalent to to a 1980's supercomputer, but the cost of housing, healthcare, food and energy all have skyrocketed while wages have been stagnant for the past 30 years.

If that were true, food, for example, would be an ever increasing share of our income, yet the opposite is true:

http://corncorps.wordpress.com...

For housing, people have chosen larger and larger homes, which also tells you that the money they have available for housing has increased, not decreased:

http://activerain.com/blogsvie...

Ditto for energy.

And all of that despite increases in taxes and expensive regulations.

Health care, of course, really does consume a larger and larger fraction of our income, but that's for two reasons: (1) regulation and poor policy are driving up costs enormously, and (2) health care in the US today really is in a completely different category than what it was 2-3 decades ago.

So, again, your statements are complete and utter bullshit, as the data shows. We're far better off today than we used to be, and if it weren't for dumb government regulations and interference in the market, we'd be even better off.

Relatively speaking, it isn't hard to build public infrastructure. It's hard to maintain it.

California did a great job building a lot of that stuff when they were flush with cash. Now they're in the unglamorous 'keep the wheels turning' phase and people are fleeing the state in droves. My inlaws are leaving (also for Texas); I'm doing the same thing but on the East coast, leaving New York ... also for Texas. My business, and my inlaws' businesses, are coming with us. I don't expect our anecdotal evidence to persuade anyone, but the census ought to. Here's just one example (pardon the terrible wallpaper):

http://activerain.com/blogsview/1546143/the-mass-california-exodus

The UC system is a great example. It was the pride of the state, and rightfully so. Then it got about a billion in the hole, which is not really a whole heck of a lot, except that they have a good hundred billion in unfunded pension obligations and pay their public sector employees more than just about anywhere else. That's fine, too, but it's a zero-sum game. If you want to add enormous hurdles to firing public employees ($50k-$100k+ to fire a teacher in LA - http://lifeexaminations.wordpress.com/2011/03/31/tenure-problem/) -- for one employee! -- then that's going to have consequences elsewhere.

Texas has its share of problems, like a 2-year $27 billion defecit (which is about half of California's, since it's over two years, but still bad). But it's very difficult to fix California's problems, because the things that the state is spending money on are small things (like job protection) that effect huge numbers of people -- you can't even talk about them without being called a union-busting tyrant; look at LA's mayor, a former union boss himself, in hot water over the same issue.

It's a great irony that California is home to so many people who talk about sustainability in design and economics but who purposefully keep their eyes shut to the costs of their decisions and their priorities, because I think they're not necessarily wrong in several areas. But to ask 'do you think California misses you' is not only arrogant, it's ignorant: California is hemorrhaging people. There are still a lot of people there, and a lot of good ideas, to be sure -- but to look at what is happening in California and conclude that it's anything other than that it is very much in decline is pretty tough.

Explain then why it wasn't the "well intentioned" loans that blew up, but the $300K McMansions.

the overwhelming majority of bad, risky loans made during the real estate boom were originated by non-bank mortgage companies. That's right students. Entities not subject in any way, shape or form, to the requirements of the CRA. The problem loans, and the securities attached to them, that fueled the housing crisis.