Does California Really Need a Bailout? (No. California Actually Bails Out America)

Here's a cheery financial column that finally shuts up all theNational Reviewidiots who only take masturbating-to-Reagan breaks long enough to type blog posts about how California will need a "Greek bailout" or whatever:

• "Are wealth creators fleeing? I keep hearing this. Did Apple Inc. and Google Inc. just relocate to Oklahoma? Is Twitter being run from Alabama? When Mark Zuckerberg left Harvard to run Facebook full-time, did he open shop in 'low cost' Utah?"

• "According to [the right-leaning Tax Foundation], as of 2008 (the most recent year analyzed) state and local taxes in the average state came to about 9.7% of the annual state economy. What was it in crazy, liberal, communistical, socialistical, un-American, soviet-style California? Er, 10.5%. That's right. The burden was all of 0.8 percentage points higher than the average."

• "California's a basket case? The state has one of the highest living standards in the country, yet over the past 10 years the economy has still grown much faster, per person, than the national average. According to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, it's up 15% — compared to 8.9% for the U.S. overall. It's grown faster than low tax neighbors like Arizona, Utah or New Mexico. It's grown three times faster than Texas."

• "Californians are so productive that every year they send billions of dollars in surplus dollars to the rest of America. Year after year they have sent vastly more in federal taxes than they ever get back in federal spending. California isn't our Greece, it's our Germany .... In the quarter century through 2005 (the most recent year for which we have data), Californians bailed out the rest of America to the tune of about $620 billion in today's dollars. In 2005 alone it came to nearly $50 billion."

Great stuff for anyone interested in the very confusing topic of California. [ Yahoo Finance ]