If Chicago/Cook county were to secede, I suspect there would be a huge number of shovelers from every other county in the state pitching in to dig a moat.
Of course, the third generation of Californian citizens would largely not be entitled to citizenship, since their parents would not have been resident in or physically present in the US prior to the birth.
You don’t think that a huge, historical event who’s historical precedent prompted a war that killed more Americans than any other war in history and which draws into question the ability of the US to even function as a country might prompt some legislative changes to citizenship?
And especially you don’t think that a US congress that just got told ‘fuck you, we’re taking our ball and going home’ by California at the same time as 53 votes that used to belong to California suddenly turned pro-US-not-including-CA might not be entirely friendly to CA?
I don’t know what scenario you’re envisioning, but it really bears little relation to reality.
Has California left yet?
What’s taking so long?
Texas has been threatening similar nonsense for years, so you should probably ask them what the holdups are.
We’ve been discussing Texas for years. And even in this thread!
Last March, Secession was argued at the Texas Republican Convention (whose platform is usually Far Out–but not in the Keep Austin Weird way). An intrepid reporter from the Texas Observer observed:
They omitted Secession from the platform.
How do you think it works, exactly? Federal income taxes are paid by individuals and corporations. Some states have more rich people and corporations than others. Every state is paying its fair share; the reason Kentucky pays less in the aggregate than California is because in aggregate, Kentucky is poor, and California is rich.
I don’t know what it is about this issue that makes allegedly left-leaning people abandon the concept of progressive income taxes. How about the richest parts of California get to keep their state income taxes for themselves? What a progressive paradise it’d be, where the rich refuse to pay taxes that’d go to the poor!
I hope we can put a stake through the heart of the idea that some states are treated unfairly because of the extent to which they receive a dollar’s worth of services for a dollar’s worth of taxes.
The two major factors that decide whether a state is a debtor or creditor state to the Federal government are well-known: 1. How many retirees does the state have, which drives the inflow of Federal dollars through Social Security and Medicare? 2: How many high income people does the state have, which drives revenue from large income tax collections and similar taxes?
The idea that states are not getting enough attention from the Federal government because they have few retirees and many rich people is, when you think about it, the exact opposite of what some Calexit supporters think should happen. For example: they complain that an individual’s vote in California is diluted compared to the value of a voter in another state. “No no!” they say, “A voter in California should be valued exactly the same as a voter in Wyoming!”
That’s a fair stance to take. But when it comes to California being a donor state, it is perfectly clear that a Californian is treated exactly the same as a Wyomingan (?): they receive the same Social Security benefits, same Medicare benefits, are subject to the same tax rules – and because of this, California as a state ends up a little “worse” due to people across state lines being treated in a consistent manner. And this is unacceptable to some Calexit people – apparently the remedy should be that Californians should receive more benefits and pay less taxes than people in other states.
How is that fair? It isn’t. It is whining.
OK, then what?
The main negative effect of secession on the U.S. government would be to deny it the tax revenues of the citizens of the seceded states. Are they going to send jackbooted thugs door-to-door to make people fill out their tax returns? (Oh, the irony!)
Why even have states then? Let’s just be a country without states.
Maybe I’m just missing something, Ravenman, but I don’t see the ‘donor state’ argument being the motivation for secession, so much as a data point for evaluating the likely success of going it alone.
Still, I think your argument about donor states is worth a look. I think the ‘retirees’ part is on solid ground: if a state (e.g. Florida) has a lot of them, its full- and part-time residents are going to bring their Social Security checks and their Medicare benefits with them.
But ISTM that different states’ approach to governance can make a big difference in terms of high earners. California isn’t a donor state because a bunch of billionaires happen to live there, but because it’s an economically productive state that has produced a goodly number of billionaires, but not just that: overall, it’s got a very economically productive work force across the board. And that seems to have at least a decent connection with its having been at times a high-tax, high-services state that developed quite a network of state universities and community colleges.
Mississippi, by comparison, is poor in large part because it’s the sort of low-tax, low-services haven that does very little to create an economically productive citizenry.
IOW, I think California can make a good argument that its being a donor state isn’t just happenstance involving rich people and retirees.
In the case of California, people should also look at things like water usage rights (which have been mentioned already) and how much they might be worth in dollars, plus free access to the interstate highway system for shipping goods. California makes good money by driving trucks loaded with goods through sparsely populated ‘taker’ states, and it would be very easy for a CA-less US to charge usage fees to California vehicles that aren’t paying Federal tax anymore.
I kind of wonder what reality posters in this thread are writing from - the US government is not at all hesitant to send ‘jackbooted thugs’ to collect taxes when people don’t pay, though they usually start with sternly worded letters. It’s just weird hearing people say things like ‘why would California lose their access to water rights under an interstate compact if they decided to stop being a state’ or ‘what, do you think the US is going to use force to collect taxes if you refuse to pay them?’.
On a list titled “Things Unlikely To Occur” that is way at the bottom, well below even #CalExit.
again, being a net contributor is not the same thing as being self sufficient.
The thing is, that approach relies on all but a relative handful paying their taxes. If California secedes, and nobody in California is collecting the Fed’s share of income and sending it to the IRS, and nobody’s filling out their 1040s, that’s something like 16 million doors to send the jackbooted thugs to.
So what? Is the U.S. self-sufficient? ISTM that being a net contributor is a pretty good starting place for a prospective independent nation.
That’s ridiculous. Even California is not a liberal hive-mind.
:smack:
California can’t defend itself. That’s what matters. And what happens when the red portion of California does a West Virginia? What happens when Silicon Valley wants to be independent away from all the poors in the rest of California and wants to go alone as a city-state? Pro secessionist people don’t think very clearly.
Your approach relies on a bunch of people who have ‘prevent private citizens from owning firearms’ as a major point in favor of secession engaging in ongoing guerrilla warfare against the US government rather than saying ‘well, that was dumb, there’s an army occupying the State now, lets get on with your lives.’ This whole thing is deep in silly self-contradictory fantasy land territory.
It’s fairly optimistic to assume California would have beneficial trade deals right out of the gate. It’s not a stretch to say California would be reliant on trade with the remainder of the US, and what incentive would the other 49 have to agree to your terms? You just flipped us the bird and walked away, and you expect us to let you dictate terms?
This whole movement seems to be under the delusion that you can just secede from the US and assume everything will stay working the same.
The State of California currently enjoys a free trade market with 285 million Americans + treaties. The Republic of California forgoes all that.