What’s Driving California’s Mass Exodus?
Just watched this fascinating and well-done story by CNBC on "What’s Driving California’s Mass Exodus?"
Now, I live and invest in California, so I'm definitely not a California hater. However, I'm also no California fanboy. I'm actually pretty open-minded and enjoy listening to something like this to perhaps get a different perspective.
There are certainly benefits to investing in California. Like I said, I do it and I do quite well by doing so. However, there's also no arguing there are downsides to doing business here.
We have the #1 highest state income tax in the entire country! It's also very business unfriendly here. According to a CNBC study (mentioned in the story), we are ranked DEAD LAST in the country when it comes to the cost of doing business.
This is probably the reason we've actually been seeing a net migration LOSS of residents in this state to other states. Not to mention the thousands of companies that have left (or are leaving) the state, including big name companies like Hewlett Packard (moving to Houston), Oracle (moving to Austin), and Tesla (Elon and the next Gigafactory will be in Austin).
(Anyone see a theme there with Texas?)
Anyway, not trying to convince anyone of anything. Except perhaps our state legislators better wake up if they want to stop this mass exodus. Unfortunately, I'm not sure they get it yet. At least the laws that continue to be proposed and passed in this state don't seem to signal (to me) that they do.
Thoughts?