From the Cheap Seats: Meltdown in California Continues

Tuesday, July 16 was another big day in state politics, as the ongoing meltdown in California was met with a sharp response from Elon Musk. Musk announced his intention to move the headquarters of both X (formerly Twitter) and SpaceX from California to new locations in Texas after passage of a controversial new law.

The event was triggered Assembly Bill 1955, which prohibits any school board, administrator, employee, or contractor from disclosing “any information related to a student’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression to any other person without the student’s consent.” This prohibition is pointedly intended to hide such matters from parents, who would normally want to be involved with their children as they navigate difficult currents in their young lives. 

The measure earlier passed the legislature on a party-line vote and was signed by Governor Newsom on Monday, July 15. No Democratic lawmakers voted against the measure. The bill was authored by Asm. Chris Ward (San Diego) and included San Diego County Senators Toni Atkins and Steve Padilla as co-sponsors, among others. 

Musk described AB 1955 as “causing massive destruction of parental rights and putting children at risk for permanent damage.” He said, “I did make it clear to Governor Newsom about a year ago that laws of this nature would force families and companies to leave California to protect their children.”

The measure was also condemned by Berkeley, CA, journalist Michael Shellenberger, who characterized the measure as “putting children at risk of permanent damage…It makes children vulnerable to irreversible and lifelong medical abuse and mistreatment. And it’s all based on the pseudo-scientific idea that some children are born into the wrong bodies and that we can change a person’s sex through drugs and surgery.”

Shellenberger contrasted California’s move with recent steps in the United Kingdom to stop similar abuses. After a thorough government-mandated study into the ethics and effectiveness of puberty blockers highlighted both their psychological and medical risks, the decision was made to ban their use. This followed the closure of Britain’s Tavistock Child Gender Identity Clinic in 2022 after the horrific effects of surgical procedures were revealed. California is going the other direction.

The move out of California announced by Musk will worsen the trend of outbound migration. Many individuals, families, and businesses have left the state for more hospitable locales, resulting in population declines or stagnation even in some areas that have seen an increase in the illegal immigrant population.

This negative trend naturally affects California’s economy, creating a more challenging environment for businesses, consumers, and government. According to a report by the Tax Policy Center, a joint project of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, in the fourth quarter of 2023 California suffered the sharpest decline in “real” tax revenues among the 50 states, corresponding with GDP growth below the median. 

Moves like Musk’s will make things worse, and we can’t afford that. The state government is bleeding red ink, profusely. Sacramento will have two options for dealing with the problem – cut spending materially or raise taxes. Which way do you think they’ll go? We are already seeing a push for higher taxes in San Diego County and some individual municipalities. At the risk of stating the obvious, high tax rates are destructive of economic enterprise and they diminish our standard of living. It’s not a direction we want to go.

Once again, California voters are faced with bad ideas passed into law by the Democratic supermajority. Unchallenged power always presents a temptation, but it is especially prone to abuse now that the party in power is dominated by its radical progressive wing. We’ve never seen anything like this. The inmates are running the asylum.

As we enter election season, it seems like a good time to remind people that “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” If measures like AB 1955 are what California voters really want, then they’re on the right path. But if they don’t want this kind of destructive legislation, they need to elect different people to represent them in Sacramento.