Slip Slidin' Away

Sadly accurate - brutally so - essay about the true state of affairs in Califrutopia from Steve Baldwin in American Spectator:

(CALIFRUTOPIA) Sure, the liberals like to claim California socialism is working by pointing to the much heralded statistic that “California’s economy is the 6^th largest in the world” as calculated by the state’s Department of Finance. Indeed, California’s $2.62 trillion economy is larger than that of France, Canada, Brazil, Russia, and Italy. However, that GDP stat does not factor in California’s cost of living, which is 36.2% higher than the national cost of living. As Carson Bruno writes in Real Clear Markets, “using the cost of living adjusted data from the International Monetary Fund and adjusting California’s GDP data provides a better snapshot of California’s economic standing in the world. Doing so shows that California is actually the 12^th largest economy - a drop of 6 spots - and actually puts the state below Mexico. 

Moreover, as Bruno points out, Silicon Valley “accounted for 50% of California’s private industry real GDP growth.” In other words, without a few dozen mega profitable high-tech Silicon Valley firms such as Apple, Google, and Facebook, California’s GDP would be significantly smaller.
However, as economic blogger Richard Rider points out, the aggregate GDP statistic is really not a good indicator of a state’s economic health, especially since one industry appears to be propping up the “6^th largest economy” myth. California has over 39 million people, more than any other state, so a far more accurate assessment of its economy, Rider writes, would be per capita GDP as compared to the rest of the country. After adjusting the GDP figures to account for the cost of living (COL), the Golden State ends up with a paltry 37^th place ranking within the U.S.A., with a $45,696 per capital GDP. Even rustbelt states, such as Michigan and Ohio, have a higher adjusted per capita GDP. Despite Silicon Valley’s high-tech giants, California barely squeezes past impoverished New Mexico. Rider also reports that when one looks at per capita GDP stats for the rest of the world, California ranks 19^th, but those stats don’t factor in the COL data; if they did, California would be even further down the rankings internationally.

And that's the cheery side.
Some dipshit in comments tried to spew the Chamber of Commerce talking points, hitting universities, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, San Diego, blah blah blah.

No sale for me, speaking from some wee knowledge whereof they speak.

"You're delusional.

The public universities have to offer eight years' remediation to bring the functional retard public high school grads (48th in the country, but we're sneaking up on Mississippi) up to bare community-college levels of basic function. 90% of the students in the UC and CSU systems should never have gotten past trade school, and cannot speak, read, write, or compute at even the 9th grade level of function. Those who go anyways are trapped in a politically-correct liberal rubbish indoctrination and re-education center, where the viewpoint that built this state, and of the parents that raised the kids there, is ruthlessly expunged, and they are brainwashed into believing every idiot moonbat idea that's poisoned the country for the last 50-70 years, which is pounded into their empty heads by the Useful Idiots of Socialism, from its last true bastion. 

Most (60-80%) Hollywood movie production has been outsourced to states (unlike CA) with a business-friendly attitude and tax subsidies (O, if only we'd had a governor who understood the movie business, or even just business), and only TV production hangs on in Hollywood, barely, but that's dwindling too, as people tune out the idiot box in droves, and it becomes easier to do shows anywhere but L.A.

Silicon Valley is outsourcing jobs out of state and overseas like a mofo, as daily trips to any newspaper would inform anyone who cared to read the writing on the wall. San Diego is an open sewer, overwhelmed by homeless and overrun by illegal aliens, while the last few retirees there wonder if they can sell out and move or die, before their McMansions in the north county 'burbs become completely untenable. Los Angleles looks more like Tijuana wall-to-wall, and the few enclaves of civilization along the coast are priced for the uber-rich, and served by the uber-poor, tending the overwhelmingly liberal coastal plantations like latter-day slaves. And when Jubilee comes, Whitey won't be invited.

The only thing growing in California is unpayable public pension liabilities, unreachable hordes of immigrant non-English speaking children, and welfare liabilities that will consume 200% of the state's budget, unless taxes are doubled in the next decade. And the population - mostly of largely uneducated, unemployable immigrants, legal and illegal - has doubled in a generation, while the state has built not a single power plant, reservoir, or freeway in 40 years, making it look more like Bangladesh than Bel Air, day after day after horrible day.

To deny that is to deny reality, from a position of total unhinged ignorance of it."

Bad enough hordes of frothing leftwing moonbats flocking here from the other 49 states, and hordes of ignorant housekeepers, busboys, car wash attendants, and their 47 children have ruined the state. There's no need to lie about what comes next on the hamster wheel of progress first laid out in Dante's Inferno.

My main goal in life is to live long enough to see it all pulled down, after this horrible experiment in Left-coast socialism ends up exactly like Venezuela, Cuba, the Soviet Union, and every place in between where another crop of braindead children tries the same old plan, expecting different results.

By any reasonable account, it could take a couple of decades, or kick off tomorrow.
The truth is liable to be a little of both.
But it should be fun to watch - from the bunker on the periphery, and safely behind defensive concertina and minefields.