Demographer/pundit Joel Kotkin, writing for
The Orange County Register, looks at the election results in CA and how those reflect deteriorating
political realities there.
Compared to the Bay Area, which now rules the state, the more blue-collar, Latino and African American interior, as well as much of Los Angeles, account for six of the 15 worst areas in terms of living standard out of 106 metropolitan areas, according to a recent report by Center for Opportunity Urbanism demographer Wendell Cox.
Forty percent of "worst areas" are in CA? That ranking puts them on a par with places like Detroit and Baltimore ... grim.
California is on the road to a bifurcated, almost feudal, society, divided by geography, race and class. As is clear from the most recent Internal Revenue Service data, it’s not just the poor and ill-educated, as Brown apologists suggest, but, rather, primarily young families and the middle-aged, who are leaving. What will be left is a state dominated by a growing, but relatively small, upper class, many of them boomers; young singles and a massive, growing, increasingly marginalized “precariat” of low wage, often occasional, workers.
Kotkin ignores the army of union-represented government employees - teachers, prison guards, LEOs, parole officers, social workers - who "manage" what he calls the precariat. To the extent a middle class remains in CA, they will be most of it, filling the "overseer" role in CA's "plantation" economy.
