Anyone taking Calexit seriously is either a goof on the internet or paid by the Russians as far as I can tell, so trying to dismiss something as ‘some goof on the internet’ doesn’t really work. When people post fantasies about things like mass deportation that are inherently violent, that’s a good indication that they’re not actually all that non-violent. When they post saying ‘oh yes, it will be a completely non-violent and legal movement’ but won’t even touch on how to convince the other people needed to go along with the legal part, it’s a pretty good indication that they really just want it to happen and don’t care about the means.
No one has said ‘you’ll be swinging from the lamp post’, there hasn’t (as far as I remember in this long mess of a thread) been anyone advocating lynching Calexiters, it’s only been ‘you’ll be arrested’ or ‘try to seize a military base and the military will fight back’. I’m not sure what’s nuts about the US using water for it’s own purposes if California leaves the interstate compact on water usage and fails to negotiate some new agreement, there are states that have sued to get the compact changed in living memory.
I disagree. The phrase “Tend to” is often used without connoting a majority, and even a small tendency can often be very significant.
In the case of California’s demographics, the tendency to retire out of state is very significant. According to this source
California’s 347k increase in population during 2015 is broken down as follows
births 504k, deaths -261k, international migration 181k, domestic migration -77k.
This doesn’t mean that numbers moving to another state were less than a third of those dying, but the net (movers-out minus movers-in) was more than a quarter of those dying!
Contrast this with Texas’ numbers:
births 398k, deaths -182k, international migration 102k, domestic migration 170k.
TL;DR: Yes, there is a tendency for Californians to retire to another state and it is a very significant tendency.
Do the SocSec and Medicare funds outflowing to California workers retired to states like Arizona constitute the major share of California’s alleged “donor status” ? I don’t know. I’ve only skimmed the thread,… But my guess is: Yes, if SocSec/Medicare are included at all, these demographic facts would swamp the numbers.
Yes, it’s actually a huge chunk of the federal money spent on a state, and is one of the things that makes all of the ‘donor state’ claims suspect. One of the things that is amusing is that, if the Calexit scenario of California exiting the US but keeping US citizenship (or some sort of EU-like open immigration policy) and running it’s own retirement program were to come to pass, Calexitfornia could easily end up a ‘Donor Country’ by the ‘Donor State’ logic.
As I understand it another thing that tends to misrepresent the donor state thing is that many western states have a large part of their land owned by the federal government. Many of those states would prefer to be able to use that land rather than having the feds tell them they can’t do anything with the land but since they own the land they spend some money to maintain it.
I am not sure that pointing out likely consequences of California leaving the U.S. is nutty.
If California leaves, the U.S. military would leave and the water rights would have to be renegotiated. Since one side of the negotiation would be unhappy with the situation it is unlikely that they would want to make simple, easy deals. When these issues were brought up the Pro-Calexiters basically said ‘Well, California would be its own country but everything else would stay the same!?!?!’. Which is not what would happen.
I do agree that the Calexit thing is a fantasy though.
Frankly, I think that once CalExit became a possibility it would embolden Conservative Areas to consider seceding also. They would feed on each other and make both more likely.
For one, they might want to secede from California. Calexit supporters have simply glossed over what to do about the significant conservative minority in the states, but 31% of CA’s votes were for Trump in the last election. Aside from Calexitexit, you’d have big shifts in the major parties. Some people have the idea that the Ds and Rs would continue exactly like before so the Republicans would automatically win national elections, but this isn’t the case. You’d see huge shifts in what the parties stand for, possibly new parties or a split of one of the old parties, and a new balance for where the ‘center’ lies. There’s still going to be significant differences between the really big cities and the rest of the country, between ‘flyover country’ and the east coast, between the north and south, and so on, and once ‘leave the union’ is an option it becomes tempting for other places to simply say ‘OK, I’m done with the rest of you idiots’.
And imagine the conservative parts splitting off and remaining in the US. Even if it was only 20% of the population, it would still be one of the larger states at around 8M people, ranking somewhere around 12th or 13th.
Isn’t the dam owned and “operated” (shit job they’re doing of it though) by the state of California today? What’s preventing them from fixing it without their independence?