Reply #63: What I'm Saying... [View All]

[datavg]

...is that, having worked in the Bay Area off and on, I can tell you there's a bubble environment that exists there which makes it significantly economically and politically different from the rest of the country.

I've lived and worked in Texas, too. I lived in Plano for eight years, and even it doesn't have the same sense of isolation from reality that the Bay Area does.

I love San Francisco. I do...but it's very different from everywhere else I've ever been or worked or lived. Most of the food is a like a drug. I gained ten pounds when I worked there on a project. It's soooooo good. There's a pastry shop in Danville that I'm not allowed to visit without a guard. It's very upscale and very high income (with equally high expectations for education) but at the same time there's a tolerance for taxation and regulation that you won't match anywhere else in the country except for possibly the New England states and maybe not even then.

Yes, the Bay Area has a high living standard. No doubt, and that's because many people there want it that way and simply have the money to pay for it. Fine - but when people like Dennis Kucinich cite Northern California and the Bay Area as a benchmark, the first question I ask is where will the money come from? People in the Bay Area pay through the nose for gasoline, food, real estate (ridiculously), education...whatever the hell it is, everything's cranked up and they put up with it. Great...but you can't sell that way of life or way of governing or anything else they do to the country as a whole. Nobody else has their wealth! NOBODY!

This is the mistake Jennifer Granholm is making with Michigan right now. The auto industry is in the tank and what does she do? She raises taxes. And where is she originally from? She's originally Canadian but she spent quite a few years in (surprise, surprise) Northern California! She's even a Berkeley grad...but what she really is, is another liberal who doesn't seem to understand she's setting up Dick DeVos to become Michigan's next governor. When this is all over, Detroiters will be in the streets with torches and pitchforks!

The more things change, the more they stay the same.