My point is more subtle. California is currently sacrificing the futures of entire generations. Why? To protect the property wealth the previous generations. To protect ocean views. To protect vibes.

My point is that I'm a consequentialist. I honestly don't know which state is doing more harm. Texas' is open and obvious and mean spirited. At the same time I see what California is doing to it's young people. It has become normal for people in their 40s and 50s to be forced to live with roommates because housing attainability literally doesn't exist. A major problem is now schools lacking teacher because the they can't afford to live anywhere. Cities are now building company town-style dorms for teachers. It's crazy.

I have no idea why it gets a pass from the pearl clutchers on my side of the political spectrum.

I just wish we would have the same reaction when looking in the mirror, and say: "as a egalitarian dude I will never take a job in California. Homeowners may enjoy favorable tax laws, but there are many bright people who - for one of a NUMBER of reasons - will never move there. It is destroying young people's futures."

Austin is much cheaper than Seattle.

A “Red State” is a state where pretty much wherever you go, it’s Republican voters. Their election results statewide are R+15 or more. Oklahoma is R+34. Texas’s statewide elections are surprisingly close. Often R+5 or less, and occasionally R+2. That’s purple. That means that half the state are allies.

My point is that it’s easy to clutch pearls in a zero-sum economy like CA’s when you’re on top. The reason I still have a fondness for Texas is that despite some of the political change that I find frightening, it’s still a better place for most folks to go to build a life.

It’s not perfect, but when every single blue city in a blue state has an affordability crisis, I have to commend Austin for actually building the housing people need to actually own something, instead of just talking about it and doing mostly nothing like SF, LA, Seattle, Portland, NYC, and Boston have all done.

Good on Texas for not letting cities try to preserve themselves in amber. That just enriches incumbents by allowing them to engage in rent-seeking.

Texas is the world’s ninth largest economy if we include CA, and is projected to pass CA in population by 2050. Not really sure what your point is.

I obviously don’t love Texas. I moved away. I just think it’s a very reasonable place to live and we could do a lot to improve California by addressing our problems in way that Texas has successfully combatted them, especially housing and solar development.

Texas is draining their portion of the Ogallala, and are putting strain on Texas rivers, but California is literally a desert that moves water to its cities from hundreds of miles away... devastating communities and national parks in the process.

The property taxes are what keep Texas affordable. Texas's infrastructure is going the way of Southern California, when the politics on property taxes follow what Southern California did, the affordability will disappear too.

At the same time, you can't ignore the facts. Texas has high property taxes, which are de facto wealth taxes, so it shouldn't surprise anyone on that Texas has significantly lower wealth inequality than California does.

Again, unless you literally inherit a house with an inherited property tax assessment in CA or vest equity in a unicorn, you're probably going to be poorer in CA than in Texas.

We have to stop pretending the landed aristocracy that exist in California somehow "doesn't count" as inequality and injustice.

Texas is a gerrymandered purple state, not a red state. It's just that the state is the California's bogey-man, because Californians don't actually want to face the fact that we have major problems with long-term affordability and the ability to build a life for middle-class folks (perhaps less appreciated by the disproportionately high-income folks on this forum). Every single urban area in Texas is now heavily aligned with the Democratic party, and the vast majority of those areas are affordable places to build a life and build wealth.

When I was growing up in Austin, it had the second highest per-capita gay population in America after San Francisco. Houston had a lesbian mayor. In many cities Spanish is the dominant language spoken. Texas cities are not some place where minorities have to fear for their safety.

The reason not to move to Texas is that it's a suburban hellscape, and you'll be stuck in traffic for more hours a day than you'd like to admit. I left after pushing for transportation alternatives at Austin City Hall, and the result of that traffic mitigation was an express lane down the highway. Texas is, in large part, following the development pattern of Southern California.

Austin, San Antonio, and El Paso are all lovely towns, full of vibrancy, amazing culture, friendly people, reasonable weather most of the year, wonderful food, and reasonable cost of living. Politics are an issue, but again, that all hangs on a 2%-5% swing in a census year, and the entire state could end up redrawn as 50-50 split. I just want folks on the American coasts to remember that a big part of why Texas is branded as "that really bad place" is exactly because folks on the coast refuse to look in the mirror and fix the problems of affordability, wealth inequality, and clean energy that Texas has addressed. Instead, they've made Texas a bogey man that is "very bad" so that you can't point to things like rapid development of housing and renewables as actually the way to fix affordability.

I mentioned Texas 130, which was operated by Cintra, but was still technically operating under TxDOT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_State_Highway_130

Perhaps other parts of the world have privately operated roads, but I’m not aware of them.

They are public works, often in states that simply can’t afford to build or maintain their own infrastructure. But the point remains.

I’m not saying there is any wrong with the service, but I think it’s a worthwhile indicator of what life will be like as wealth inequality continues to accelerate.

“I mean’s it’s one banana, Michael. How much could it cost, ten dollars?”

If you look around the world, this is effectively the natural state of affairs: India, South Africa, Nigeria, Russia... they all have the same pattern. The US and the West was the outlier in the '50-'90 because we had a lot of wealth redistribution AND free markets. Then the boomers were like, fuck that, we want to all be rich... and they mostly are, but everyone else is fucked.

Government is hard, you need people to give a shit. We decided we don't care somewhere along the way.

Yes, Vienna's housing policy is effective... It's also the only place in the world that manages it. I would argue that it is ideal, but nearly impossible to implement. We can't escape the fact that Vienna operates what is effectively a sovereign wealth fund to create all that housing, which works with the subsidiaries of Austria's actual sovereign wealth fund in development. It's a nice system to be born into, it's nearly impossible to bootstrap.

>the highest birth rates globally occur...

Nobody is suggesting returning above replacement rate births. Falling below replacement rate is only a problem long term because it happens slowly, but exponentially. It will cause a displacement crisis that will rival climate change. Lowering world population would probably be a good idea, theoretically, but again, there's a difference between a linear decline and an exponential decline.

>In developed countries, the state can at least leverage accumulated wealth to bankroll healthcare and social services required by a rapidly aging population.

I don't see how this is relevant. One can be both for "abundance" and taxes on wealth.