Californington
Last fall, my wife Brittany and I drove to the central coast of California so I could learn to hurl myself off mountains with a thin piece of fabric suspending me in the air, more commonly described as paragliding. Lavishing the laid-back libertarian lifestyle of coastal California for the better part of a month left me questioning why anyone would ever move from California to Washington. A sobering assessment of my credit card statement reflecting the cost of the adventure answered the question. Most people can no longer afford to live in California.
In 2023 alone, fifty thousand people made the trek up Interstate 5, or simply "the five" in California speak, citing the high cost of housing, rising state taxes, and the state's political culture as the top three reasons. A UC Berkeley study revealed that over half of registered voters have considered moving out of the Golden State.
The wisdom of avoiding policies that compel people to flee their home state is as self-evident as the inconvenient but unavoidable fact that high taxes, large social programs, and overbearing business regulation are not a path to prosperity but a prescription for the class inequality that defines California and increasingly Washington State.
Understanding this axiom and witnessing failed experiments in California makes Washington's copy-and-paste approach to lawmaking distressing and puzzling.
Illustrating the point, a recent article in the Washington State Standard titled, Democrats propose new tax on real estate sales over $3M to fund affordable housing follows a 2022 article by Bloomberg, which queried, Can LA's "Mansion Tax" Unlock Affordable Housing Across California?
Unfortunately, in the two years since Los Angeles passed its so-called mansion tax, it doesn't appear that Washington lawmakers ever sought to answer whether additional real estate taxes did indeed "Unlock Affordable Housing Across California."
Washington's mimicking of bad policy is not confined to expensive housing sales; a wide array of routine commerce policies, including fuel taxes, road tolls, and worker wages, are imported from California. Long considered a progressive leader on minimum wage laws, California paved the way for initiatives in Bellingham to raise the minimum wage to be amongst the highest in Washington State.
Advocates of increasing the minimum wage confidently stated in the Whatcom County voters' pamphlet:
Empirical studies in dozens of jurisdictions find employment levels, business failure rates, local prices, non-profit staffing, and scheduled hours are not affected by small and moderate minimum wage increases.
Vague and bold assertions such as these ignore the unfortunate reality that the real minimum wage is always zero dollars per hour for people who lose their jobs. Covering California's recent minimum wage increase to $20 per hour for fast-food workers, a headline last month in the Wall Street Journal reported California Restaurants Cut Jobs as Fast-Food Wages Set to Rise. The article cites numerous real-world cases of restaurant closures and layoffs as a direct result of mandatory wage increases. The hard reality remains that in all decisions, whether personal, economic, or public policy, tradeoffs exist, lofty rhetoric notwithstanding.