Posted on by Californiacontrarian

No More Malcolm In the Middle …Class!


In just the last few months, I am aware of three different individuals leaving California, and all for different reasons. Just as interesting, all three are markedly different in terms of their ages … one about 37, one around 55, and the third in his upper seventies.

The thirty-seven year old basically said that it was just too expensive to live here. He and his girlfriend moved to Oregon with the hope that the less expensive cost of living up there would be their ticket to a more 

comfortable life style as well as a future.

The fifty-five year old was a native Californian, and because he could retire, he decided to leave. He basically felt that California was growing more and more evil, he decided to get away from that evil, namely to get away from California. At last report he was going to be headed to either Tennessee or West Virginia. Why he had narrowed his destination to those two states, I don’t know. Nonetheless, he is gone.

The seventy-eight year old was increasingly tired of worsening traffic and his more frequent encounters with homeless individuals. According to him, the fact that there was family in Missouri, “made my decision easy.”

What I find especially interesting with these three individuals is not only the diversity of the reasons as to why they left, but also the range in terms of their economic status … one was lower-middle class; one was smack-dab in the middle of the middle class; one was upper-middle class. The unifying concept with these three were that they were all middle class.

Do the stories of these three represent outliers or are they merely examples of what is happening to an increasing subset of Californians?

Around 367,000 people left California in the year leading up to July 2021, representing the highest domestic migration loss in the nation, according to Census data.

According to Terry Gilliam, founder of the Facebook groups “Leaving California” and “Life After California,”the reason people are moving is multifaceted. (Similar to the three personal examples noted above.) The cost of living, crime, homelessness, and climate policies are a few reasons families say they’re making the big move.

Gilliam continued, “What California is doing is they’re eliminating the middle class. There’s not going to be a middle class anymore,” he said. “You have the super wealthy who don’t care how much it costs to live here, because they love living here, and you’re going to have the poor who get everything subsidized.” (Again note the similarity to the three “used to live in California” middle class examples that I described above.)

What is going to be the ultimate outcome for California, of all those thousands of taxpayers now paying their taxes elsewhere? 

Me? … at this point, I am to old to use common sense and relocate out of state. At this point I do not know what holds for the future of California … but I do know that it will not be pretty!

9/1/22

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