So my question is this; if Donald Trump is so terrible that breaking up the union is preferable to living under him, why would you think he would allow you to leave without a fight?
Yeah… Delaware seceding might be a bigger problem.
The first sentence seems pretty neutral, but the second could fairly be described as fitting the bill. IMHO.
*"Gov. Jerry Brown said Monday that he sent a letter to the White House requesting direct federal assistance in the (threatened dam) emergency, though some federal agencies have been helping already.
Brown has had harsh words for President Donald Trump, and the state has vowed to resist many of his administration’s efforts.
But the governor said at a news conference that he’s “sure that California and Washington will work in a constructive way. That’s my attitude. There will be different points of view, but we’re all one America.”"*
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/damaged-dam-system-threatens-northern-california-towns-45476463
No doubt when this and far more serious emergencies arise in future, the Republic of California will have ample funds to handle them. 
It’s a likely a possibility as Trump getting his Mexico wall built - in other words, zero. The legal entanglements alone would run a decade or more, by which time someone radically different will be President and the whole secession infatuation will be just a dim embarassment. Hell, Staten Island couldn’t even secede from New York City.
Building on Ravenman, Pantastic, and HurricaneDitka’s responses to this.
Apparently your vision of how this plays out is:
- California holds a referendum and votes to secede
- California negotiates with the rest of the states by saying “Allow us to secede and keep federal Social Security or we will cut off our ports and disallow use of our airspace. Also, we want to keep our NFL, MLB, and NBA teams, but will tax 50% of the income of your teams”
- 3/4 of the states agree to this.
What would really happen is that 100% of the states will say “We already have your ports, your airspace, and your sports teams. You are promising things that we already have simply by keeping you in the Union. Your application is denied.”
Where a corporation is incorporated is a fairly meaningless matter of trivia. It’s not as though anyone actually operates out of Delaware; it’s the state of incorporation for various legal reasons. The corporation’s assets don’t belong to Delaware in any meaningful sense, it’s just that Delaware courts are required to handle any dispute amongst shareholders.
Having the shareholders being non-Californians is potentially a bigger problem, though it’s unlikely that any investors are going to vote to repatriate a company to the US Just Because.
Those legal reasons aren’t really trivia. There’s a reason thousands of financial jobs may leave Britain in the near future. AFAIK, the U.S. has some pretty tough rules on cash flow in and out of the country.
Location of incorporation =/= location of operations. Large US companies incorporate in Delaware to take advantage of their well-developed legal rules governing business organizations. Hardly anybody of consequence actually operates in Delaware or even maintains offices there. Companies which are headquartered in Britain actually operate there.
That is not to say that companies which primarily operate in California may not wish to relocate to “remainder US” states, but it won’t have anything to do with where they’re incorporated.
Interesting side note on the retirement spending thing: If Calexiters got their wish, and California became an independent country with EU like treaties with the US, allowing residents to easily retire to cheaper areas like non-urban US, it could end up being a donor country to the US even after Calexit! As long as Californians tended to retire outside of CA (which happens now), the balance of payments on retirement benefits would be skewed towards the US.
Do you have something to back up that Californians “tend to retire out of CA”? The one article I found talks about ~15% of California public servants who retire out of state.
Why CalPERS retirees flee California
I can’t figure out a way to link to this chart I have, but California is definitely on the lower end of percentage of population receiving Social Security retirement benefits. About 14% of Californians received SS benefits, as compared to 21 or 22% for states like Florida, Alabama, Arkansas. West Virginia is highest at 25%. The lowest are DC (11%) and Utah (12%).
You can compare the SSA numbers to state populations - California has 14.2%of the state receiving SS benefits, and 9.8% receiving retirement benefits, while the average state has 18.5%. Congressional Statistics, 2014 for the SS numbers, and google something like “California population 2014” to get the population for that year.
Utah is low because we have a crazy number of kids (the Mormons). We have the lowest average age of any state, by far. No one else is even close (although our lead has been eroding over the years).
(Why would they lose the US market, and why would the US blockade the goods it wants?)
I would certainly expect a whole bunch of healthy debate, a full examination of the pros and cons of secession/self government/alliance…etc.
A lot of the support for separation will be from your Red Area folks who come to feel that they have been hoodwinked by the authoritarian government in Washington DC who took away a bunch of social welfare programs and stole their labor force, whilst at the same time eliminating a million jobs associated with Pacific Trade.
No, I don’t think Californians in general will rise up to secede unless Thrump screws things up so badly that California suffers disproportionately or significantly along with everyone else.
I expect Thrump to screw things up badly, so Calexit may well be a hot topic by this time next year.
Then did you mean to say Californians retire out of state at a slightly higher average than the rest of the country?
The best approach to all of this would be for Thrump to stop doing and threatening to do everything that would be anathema to California, Red and Blue voters alike.
Beyond that, why is it that California is so extremely against Thrump? Perhaps it is because they were able to think about the issues beforehand and to correctly predict that if Thrump were to be elected, California’s economy might well devolve in chaos, just on the farm labor and trade issues.
Why do Red States vote for Thrump? God only knows, and He isn’t revealing His plan just yet. Maybe they are so ashamed of voting for the Bushes they are trying to punish themselves by voting for a person who may well take us back into war and economic decline.
Ahh, random nitpicky semantics arguments about off the cuff message board posts, how I love thee. No, wait, I mean ‘how pointless and boring I find thee’.
Why would any of that make ‘red area’ folks desire to make the country more red-leaning? “We got hoodwinked by Trump, so we’ll vote to make it easier for him to get reelected?” “Our social welfare programs are gone, so we’ll accept your argument that California is a donor state and remove a big source of funding for them?” I don’t really see those working too well.
I’d submit to you that “Red California voters” aren’t all that anti-Trump. After all, he got 3.9 million votes in California. It wasn’t quite as good of a showing as Romney or McCain, but it wasn’t all that far off their mark either. Certainly not nearly far enough to claim that Trump is “anathema” to “Red voters” in California.
I haven’t downloaded the most recent update to my Democratic decoder ring. What’s with this nickname? I’m not seeing that it makes any sense.