Three Californias?
It's possible there will be a ballot proposition this November to break up California into three states. Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper announced this week that he has 600,000 signatures to qualify the measure for the ballot, well more than the minimum 365,880 required. The California Secretary of State will now verify the signatures. Example references: San Jose Mercury News article 4/12, CNN.com article 4/13, Wikipedia page on California ballot propositions.
The idea of splitting up California into multiple states is not new, with some political movements dating back to at least the 1940s. The idea isn't even new to Tim Draper. A few years before this "Three Californias" idea of his he proposed Six Californias (link: Wikipedia article). He tried and failed to qualify it for the 2016 ballot.
These split-the-state ideas are invariably couched in terms of making state government more responsive to the people: that California as it is, the most populous state in the country with over 35 million residents, is just too big to govern well, can't meet the needs of its people living in economically diverse areas, and its government is too controlled by special interests.
Here's the thing, though, about these split-up proposals: they don't solve any of the alleged problems they're supposed to fix.
To be sure, there are differences in California that are hard to bridge as part of a single state. The rural northern part of the state is economically challenged, having seen the decline of its main industry, the timber industry, over the past few decades. It's also a politically conservative area, with many residents angry about everything from environmental laws to civil rights laws to high taxes they think liberal urban centers (San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and Los Angeles) push on them. The rural eastern edges of the state, filled with mountains and deserts, often align with the northern third.
Compare what I wrote in the preceding paragraph to the map of the proposed split above. See the problem? The conservative, economically strapped areas that don't like the political status quo are grouped in with the liberal, wealthy population centers enough that they still won't get the political control they desire. And even if they did- guess what? Separating the poor conservatives from the wealthy liberals doesn't mean the conservatives get to throw off the yoke of oppressive taxes. The fact is the poor areas are being supported by the wealthy, not the other way around. Spinning off the rural areas into their own state(s), as Draper's previous Six California plan and various other plans have proposed, would turn these areas into economic basket cases.
I'll vote a strong No on this proposition if it makes it to the ballot, and I urge you to do the same.
The idea of splitting up California into multiple states is not new, with some political movements dating back to at least the 1940s. The idea isn't even new to Tim Draper. A few years before this "Three Californias" idea of his he proposed Six Californias (link: Wikipedia article). He tried and failed to qualify it for the 2016 ballot.
These split-the-state ideas are invariably couched in terms of making state government more responsive to the people: that California as it is, the most populous state in the country with over 35 million residents, is just too big to govern well, can't meet the needs of its people living in economically diverse areas, and its government is too controlled by special interests.
Here's the thing, though, about these split-up proposals: they don't solve any of the alleged problems they're supposed to fix.
To be sure, there are differences in California that are hard to bridge as part of a single state. The rural northern part of the state is economically challenged, having seen the decline of its main industry, the timber industry, over the past few decades. It's also a politically conservative area, with many residents angry about everything from environmental laws to civil rights laws to high taxes they think liberal urban centers (San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and Los Angeles) push on them. The rural eastern edges of the state, filled with mountains and deserts, often align with the northern third.
Compare what I wrote in the preceding paragraph to the map of the proposed split above. See the problem? The conservative, economically strapped areas that don't like the political status quo are grouped in with the liberal, wealthy population centers enough that they still won't get the political control they desire. And even if they did- guess what? Separating the poor conservatives from the wealthy liberals doesn't mean the conservatives get to throw off the yoke of oppressive taxes. The fact is the poor areas are being supported by the wealthy, not the other way around. Spinning off the rural areas into their own state(s), as Draper's previous Six California plan and various other plans have proposed, would turn these areas into economic basket cases.
I'll vote a strong No on this proposition if it makes it to the ballot, and I urge you to do the same.