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The kind of Orange County Republicans who would launch a recall of a Southern California politician from their own party tell you higher taxes are driving businesses out of California. They'll compare Cali's various tax rates with a backwater state like Nevada, or send their puppet officeholders (Assembly members Diane Harkey, R-Dana Point, and Jim Silva, R-Huntington Beach) to that desert hell hole to hear from whiners who used to ply their trades here but left because of the supposedly piss-poor business climate.
Boo-fucking-hoo!
What these Cali-haters never do is cite actual hard numbers, because they either don't exist or don't indicate what they tell their constituents.
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The Harris Poll does deal with hard numbers, and for the sixth year in a row they show that California is the No. 1 state Americans would live in other than the one they are living in now if they had a choice.
Gee, if all those people up and move here, hope there's still some businesses around to serve them! You know, since all 14 of the merchants the OC politicians met with in April moved to Nevada and all.
The poll, which you can feast your eyes on here, breaks down thusly:
1) California
2) Florida
3) Hawaii
4) Texas
5) Colorado
6) Arizona, North Carolina and Washington state (tie)
9) Tennessee
10) Oregon
11) New York
12) South Carolina and Massachusetts
14) Georgie Georgia
15) Montana
When it comes to cities, New York City tops the list, as it has ever year since 1997 except 1998, when San Francisco ranked No. 1. This year's breakdown:
1) New York City
2) San Francisco and Denver (tied)
4) San Diego
5) Seattle
6) Chicago
7) Boston
8) Las Vegas
9) Washington, DC
10) Dallas
11) Austin
12) Nashville
13) Atlanta
14) Orlando
15) Los Angeles
Where the hell is La Habra?
Seriously, Harris Interactive polled 2,498 U.S. adults online between August 10 and 18 of this year and they claim their findings are “much more than a beauty contest.”
“The most popular states and cities where large numbers of people would like to live tend to attract tourists and business,” says Harris. “They are places where people like to take vacations and where companies like to have their offices and factories.”
Gee, someone should tell that to those OC Republicans crapping all over the state they represent.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.