'New California' Movement Wants To Create a 51st State (wqad.com)

PolygamousRanchKid, Ayano, and an anonymous reader all shared the same story. Tribune Media reports: A group has launched a campaign to divide California into two states. It isn't the first attempt to split California, but unlike a failed campaign in 2016 to divide California into six states, the campaign to create New California would split the state into one made up of rural counties and another made up of coastal counties.
USA Today provides some context: Breaking up California remains no easy task: A formal secession means getting approval from both Congress and California's legislature itself. But that hasn't stopped folks from trying. Hundreds of times... Monday's declaration of "the State of New California" marked the latest in more than 200 long-shot efforts to split the Golden State. All so far have failed.

Comments

Re:Which billionaire is funding this one?

[ArmoredDragon]

As for New California, it would largely be an agricultural and natural resources state, while the science, technology, business, arts, shipping, R&D, tourism, and transportation would all be in the left-wing, high-growth, profitable "old" California.

You're overlooking a pretty big gaping hole here. If something like this happened, Calexit would happen first, and these counties would simply opt to remain in the US a la West Virginia. This is significant because one of every three people living in poverty in the US currently reside in what you'd later call old California:

http://beta.latimes.com/opinio...

Let that sink in for a second: Your old California now has an insanely high per capita poverty rate while at the same time shedding many of those in the middle. These poverty stricken people, by the way, are the same ones who work all day and night to serve lunch and carry out the garbage for Hollywood celebrities and Facebook employees...you know, the most outspoken of self-labeled progressives who claim to represent them...while being hopelessly dependent upon California's welfare system which works under the assumption that you solve poverty by giving more and more money to the poor, in spite of the fact that the local poverty rate just keeps growing every time this happens.

But that doesn't stop the rather progressive elite politicians, hollywood actors, and silicon valley billionaires from advocating UBI and increased minimum wages as if it will somehow work. No siree, because we can somehow solve homelessness and poverty by making sure that there is more money to go around, in spite of the fact that there simply isn't enough housing for them all to begin with. So who cares that rent is already the highest CPI line item, and who cares that rent nearly beats all of the other line items combined! (Except in California, where it exceeds all of the others combined.)

After all, the science, technology, business, arts, shipping, R&D, tourism, and transportation in the left-wing, high-growth, profitable "old" California has plenty of money that it can throw their way, so the fact that they all have to outbid one another for the same finite housing to perpetually keep raising rent prices doesn't matter! Hence, California's progressive elite, who represent these poor and downtrodden, can safely continue to refuse to make more housing available time and time again whenever the issue comes up.

But who needs those middle income no-good rednecks and their sparsely populated red counties? Old California sure doesn't!

That all aside, in all likelihood, no splits will happen. Nonetheless, I personally believe that California is currently in an unsustainable position in at least three major metro areas. By sheer necessity, the minimum wage will keep increasing, the welfare benefits will keep growing, hence the local money supply will grow along with it for quite some time, but only until the costs necessary to sustain those with low incomes exceeds that of the money brought in by the multi-billion dollar companies that reside there. This is when the homelessness problem starts looking more like a struggling to survive problem. At that point, people and companies just begin to leave, which begins a period of chronic negative growth and urban decay. We've seen this happen before in fact.