Texas Attracted California Techies. Now It's Losing Them
texasmonthly.com
texasmonthly.com
Once you remove politics from the picture, the reality is California and Texas are fairly similar with each other on an attitude, infrastructure, and diversity basis.
Both are states that were founded with a history distinct from the 13 colonies, a massive mix of state run services and pro-business measures (LBJ was a TX Dem, and the Great Society was sparked by his experiences as a poor teacher teaching the children of Mexican migrant workers), have very forward facing innovation cluster, and are almost pigheaded in their superiority and moralizing complexes.
As a Californian, I never feel culture shock in TX compared to NY, DC, MA, or IL.
...is doing a lot of lifting here.
Not having my loved ones' freedom and reproductive rights taken away was a huge plus for this native Texan fleeing Texas, for example.
A coworker still there talks about how the school board is being taken over by right-wing, book-banning, religious fundamentalists. He now homeschools his kids and has asked me about moving to my new home state.
In general, it's nice not being stomped on whenever the governor wants to score some cheap political points. It's weird when your government is acting like that friend that always starts fights (sometimes with you) when drunk and always seems to be drunk.
Granted, with the way things are going there, I'm also a climate refugee.
Compared to moving to a new state, wouldn't it be far easier to just use any of the available birth control methods? Take the pill, get the injection, get an IUD, use a Nuvaring, use condoms, etc.
The idea of moving to another state so that you can... not use birth control and instead just get abortions every time you get pregnant... seems unlikely to me?
https://powertodecide.org/what-we-do/contraceptive-deserts
If you are affluent, you won't have a problem, but if you are affluent you also won't have a problem traveling to California for an abortion either. Low-income women have a lot of economic and geographic barriers to finding effective contraception.
Birth control is not 100% effective and many people do not use birth control in a manner that ensures the highest effectiveness.
Some people utilize multiple birth control mechanisms but even this leads to accidental pregnancies.
If a combined effectiveness of birth control is 98%, that is still 2% of couples each year regularly having intercourse that encounter a pregnancy. I believe this is about the combined effective percentage of those using the pill combined with condoms.
Some may say to use an IUD, however some woman cannot use a IUD and there may be complications with those who can.
Even vasectomies have a failure rate.
If you combine the pill, a condom, pulling out, and cycle timing, it’s going to be 100% effective. Even just pulling out combined with cycle timing is likely enough to hit 100. These scare tactics didn’t work on the last generation except to delegitimize the credibility of US sex education teachers.
Unplanned pregnancies have been declining rapidly over time.
Bluntly speaking: “shit happens”
We shouldn’t assume pregnancies and abortions happen out of recklessness.
Birth control isn't fail proof.
Based on CDC stats, condoms are 82% effective with typical use, and 98% effective with perfect use.
IIRC, typical use includes when people intend to use the method but don’t always use it consistently.
98% effective use per year twice as bad as my 99.9% monthly example though. That's one pregnancy every 50 years, or 1 pregnancy every 5 years for each 10 women.
The Effective 82%... honestly it's so scary, that's 1 unwanted pregnancy every ~5.5 years.
The term "reproductive rights" is a good phrase because it's all encompassing. Many people think abortion just refers to terminating an "unwanted" pregnancy. But abortions are actually carried out in all kinds of situations. Sometimes the mother's life is threatened by a pregnancy. Sometimes the fetus is determined to have a condition where it will 100% suffer and die within days. Sometimes women choose abortion because they became pregnant after being sexually assaulted.
You don't hear about these situations much because they're so traumatic, people don't talk about them with anyone they don't have to. These decisions really should be left to women and their health care providers.
The people most fervently pushing "pro-life" legislation and policies are pushing to ban it for all of these situations. Women suffer in ways people can hardly imagine when these policies are put into place.
Elective abortions to kill a child that might die later (AKA mercy killing) have no legal analogue after birth (different from taking off life support after coma, for example).
Most, but not all, bans still allow abortions following rape.
Everything else is hysteria and justification for elective abortions, the fourth leading cause of death in the US (to the tune of 400,000 a year).
The conversation needs to change from women’s rights to human rights. The idea that a human has less rights because of its stage of development is such a regressive, barbarous concept that we need to move beyond as a society.
No, it is justification to allow doctors and the women who are pregnant to use the extremely complicated and specialized knowledge and unique circumstances of each pregnancy to decide to do what is best for the woman. Something that is impossible, and wholly unnecessary, to codify into law.
Until sufficient scientific consensus exists to substitute your rhetoric for the scientific terms, the scientific terms should be used. Unsurprisingly, when one does this, the resulting positions aren't very convincing.
Indeed, laws generally apply to "persons" and not "groups of 1+ human cells" for a reason, and the reason isn't mass hysteria. Likewise, scientific consensus has formed around the terms "fetus" and "abortion of a fetus" for a reason, and the reason isn't some grand conspiracy to "dehumanize" groups of cells.
I don’t mean to make light of the situation, and knowing your child will have a serious condition prior to birth is devastating and heartbreaking. Learning your child has a serious condition after birth is the same. Only in one of those situations is the option given to end the child’s life without further care.
Yes, there is the situation where conservatives try to get around open loopholes by saying “no abortion whatsoever” because liberals are always crying “but what about when the mother’s life is in danger?”. We all know what’s really going on.
Abortions happen people are careless or products fail. Americans can be quite careless in their use of contraceptives. I’ve seen it first hand.
Very few people use abortion as a primary method of birth control. It’s - if condoms fail, or she forgets to take her pill, or was raped, having to raise a whole child is a pretty massive consequence.
Personally, if I lived in Texas, I wouldn’t move either. I’d just get on a cheap flight out of state and get the abortion.
There are other things too though when conservative ideologies take over, two of them being the introduction of covert biblical teachings in public schools (teaching the “current debate” between creationism and evolution ) and a general dismissal of environmental stewardship.
They're trying to make that illegal too. They've already made it law in a couple of states (and are in a court case on whether it's constitutional), IIRC.
And if you can't afford a plane ticket then anyone who provides financial assistance or provides transportation themselves for the express purpose of getting an abortion, well they're accessories to the abortion too.
For example say you have a fetus that will not survive long enough to be born (or to live after a caesarean) and will almost certainly kill the mother long before then unless aborted.
In a few states their anti-abortion laws prohibit doing that abortion until the mother is actually facing imminent death. These cases may be accompanied by agonizing pain for the mother in the days or weeks leading up that imminent death and doctors may not be able to give pain treatments because those could harm the fetus.
Even in states that aren't that extreme many doctors are delaying medically necessary abortions out of fear that prosecutors would disagree with the doctor over what is medically necessary.
Here's a case from Texas that illustrates some of this [1].
[1] https://apnews.com/article/abortion-kate-cox-texas-exception...
Banning abortion in practice leads to banning miscarriages that might have been abortions. It leads to doctors being afraid to ask if you're pregnant and afraid to do any procedures for fear of accidentally inducing a miscarriage and thus running afoul of the anti-abortion laws.
Also, abortion laws are set to cause problems for in-vitro fertilization, too (which tends to produce excess viable fertilized eggs, and disposing of said excess eggs could legally be considered an abortion).
In other words, it is legally dangerous for a woman to get pregnant in an anti-abortion state.
Not all of these are available to everybody. Also, in states where abstinence-only education is the norm, teen pregnancies are commonplace; even if kids had access to such measures, they wouldn't know about them.
And, keep in mind that Republican politicians are gunning for birth control too. Banning abortion is just phase 1, and there are conservative supermajorities in both the district court and supreme court.
Contraception was widely illegal in the USA starting in the 1870s into the 1930s. but even then, some states continued to prohibit the use of contraception. It wasn't until 1965 that the Supreme Court ruled that the government ruled that states could not prevent married couples from using contraception, as was the case in Connecticut at the time. It wasn't until 1972 that the Supreme Court did the same for unmarried couples.
That's only one year before Roe vs. Wade legalized abortion nationwide.
The people who remember what it was like before these things were legal are aging, but they often warn that the overturn of abortion access is a slippery slope. The goals of many political movements opposed to abortion don't stop there. Many would also like to ban contraception.
In that sense, "reproductive rights" are synonymous with abortion because that's what's still contentious. After enough time has passed for illegal abortion to become the norm, that's when the slope can start slipping towards contraceptives. Reproductive rights supporters know this, and are fighting not just for abortion, but for many other rights as well.
And that includes the right to have children. In modern days, that's most commonly seen in the fight for IVF, but it also includes the right against forced sterilization.
"Reproductive rights" is a movement that doesn't say "we want to kill babies", but rather that "the government has no business whatsoever in individual reproductive decisions or health." It's not just about abortion.
Wait, what? What culture shock? I always feel a certain culture shock when visiting California but I'm from the Northeast originally.
I grew up in Davis, CA and then spent 4 years in San Diego as an adult before moving to the Bay Area. The biggest shock was how unhappy everyone seems to be here. I don't think Davis and San Diego residents are especially happy, but there was a very noticeable difference even just walking around on the streets in the Bay Area; there are a lot of people who seem to be down or depressed or upset a lot of the time.
The other thing that shocked me was the disparity in housing here. In Davis, some houses are bigger and some are smaller but the quality is (usually) relatively uniform. In a lot of Bay Area cities like Palo Alto and Menlo Park, you'll have neighborhoods with these obviously built-up, luxury single family homes, right next to houses that are literally falling apart to the point of probably being unsafe to live in. That was a shock by itself, but then the average quality is probably worse... I guess people here can't pay to repair their homes. Meanwhile, you can walk a couple blocks in some directions and be in the middle of gigantic mansions with gates and big hedges and the works. It's surreal.
The driving culture in the Bay Area is also unique (and not in a good way), but I'm guessing most people know that already.
On the positive side, the food here is unparalleled, especially in contrast to small-town Davis, where literally all of my favorite restaurants have closed. That town seems to struggle to keep its food scene alive, unfortunately.
All of this to say: I wonder how much people who get an impression of "California" are really responding to the particulars of the Bay Area culture specifically, and probably don't ever experience anything else.
Try the same story in Lemon Hill.
Stuff like Mexican representation, large first/second gen Asian population spread out across large and small towns, the lack of WASPs and visible Old Money (SMU excluded), and an American heritage built on top of a unique culture instead of the "13 colonies" makes TX feel more at home for me than NE.
Then again, I also pass as Latino so I don't get the same stink eye that I do on the Atlantic (though in my college days I'd pass as Jewish or Italian depending on the working class neighborhood or small town I was visiting)
I do not ever recall an emphasis on being in competition with California; the emphasis has always been on the difference with Washington, D.C.
Around 10-20% of Californians have "Oakie" heritage (in reality from northern Texas mostly) from the Dust Bowl era.
Working class white Californians who I went to elementary school with in the Bay and Central Valley acted very similar and talk similar to Texans from Dallas-Waco-Austin area (heck, y'all is fairly commonly used in CA as is "heck")
> the emphasis has always been on the difference with Washington, D.C.
We do the same when the GOP comes to power.
Yep!! And a lot of Californians who trace their ancestry to that migration were from Texas and Louisiana due to the Greyhound line.
Twitter is just reflecting a common linguistic pattern found in California that most East Coasters never realized.
People who grew up west of Dallas tend to stay west of Dallas, and people who grew up east of Dallas tend to stay east of Dallas.
Plenty of Westerners (like me) never traveled to the East until college or adulthood, and it's a similar story for East Coasters.
Flight travel has historically been expensive due to the distances.
I’ve lived in California for more than 45 years (periods in each the central part of the Central Valley, LA basin, Bay Area, and Delta), I’ve heard “y’all” a fair amount throughout that time, particularly from Southern transplants and African-Americans, though increasingly common outside that; its common to both Southern dialect and AAVE, and from about the 1990s there’s been more migration from AAVE to more general use in California, not just for that term. “Folks” as a generic collective noun has been even more common.
(Having had yankee parents, I never had habitual or completed aspects in my idiolect. my best attempt: "I don't be using habitual aspect")
The AAVE modals ("fixing to" et.al.) have definitely become less segregated in online discourse this century; are they also more common in oral use?
(english lost its second person plural when "you" replaced the original second person singular. "You all" fits that spot perfectly, which would also explain why L2 english speakers also like to use it.)
Two things I think english currently lacks: (a) a good way to distinguish "we" (including addressee) from "we" (excluding them), and (b) a gender-neutral word that could be the equivalent of australian "mate".
As a native Californian who left the state last century I don't even like to tell people where I grew up lest I be accused of 'stealing jobs' or 'bringing that liberal bullshit where it doesn't belong'.
If you don't agree with the politics and 'vote with your feet' you're apparently still responsible for the problem.
Of course your approach will lead to greater polarization between states.
One, that the people you want to impress are unimpressed by your effort to impress them.
Two, for the people you want to impress to accept you you have to hide truths of who you are as a person because they would rather discriminate against you for superficial reasons than get to know you.
And from that, you conclude that the people you left behind are to blame more so than these people you want to impress?
Suddenly, the texan stands up, throws his whiskey bottle up in the air, draws his Smith & Wesson, and shoots it. The other two ask, "what'd you do that for?", and he replies, "oh, I've got a thousand bottles just like that back home".
After a few minutes, the californian stands up, throws his Zinfandel bottle up in the air, draws his Glock, and shoots it. The other two ask, "what'd you do that for?", and he replies, "oh, there are a thousand wineries making more back home".
Then the oregonian stands up, throws his Hank's bottle up in the air, draws a ghost pistol, turns and shoots the californian, then catches the bottle. The texan asks, "wh-what'd you do that for?", and he replies, "oh, there are a thousand of those a month moving in back home, but this bottle's worth a nickel".
A Texan, a Californian, and a Utahnian are sitting around a campfire. The Texan stands up, pulls out an antique smith and Wesson and shoots a migrant. The californian asks, “why’d you do that?” And he responded “because god told me to.” So the utahnian stood up pulled out his fathers hand me down 12 gauge shotgun, and tortured a homosexual. The Californian asked “why’d you do that?” And the utahnian responded “because god told me to.”
So the California stood up and pulled out a stack of papers and handed them to each of the other men.
“What is this” they asked. The Californian responded, “it’s free full health coverage for the both of you.”
They asked, “why’d you do that?”
And the Californian responded “because I think every human alive deserves the dignity of good health.”
* it has wonderful ideals; have you heard the verses to "This Land" that they don't teach in school?
In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?
Completely asymmetrical, however. California does not define itself in terms of Texas.
>Technologists started picking up sticks in Taxifornia and moving to the Lone Star State in greater numbers.
>Meanwhile, Texas is not a low-tax, low-service state, as is commonly held. It’s a high-tax, low-service state: we may have no income tax, but at least one study found that we have one of the ten highest total tax burdens in the nation, with property taxes making up most of the gap. The quality of state services, however, has not improved commensurate with the growth of state budgets.
Imagine if this truth were more widely known, along with the fact that California pays federal taxes at a disproportionately higher rate than other states[0] and yet receives back less federal spending. California's degree of taxation without representation at the federal level is part of the reason why state taxes are so high, but this is never mentioned when discussing the topic.
[0]a middle income CA taxpayer on average pays more federal tax than a middle income taxpayer in the South because there is no tax rate and tax deduction adjustment for different cost of living regions -- simple example is business deduction for standard mileage, which does not reflect CA higher cost of gasoline.
I guess you can find "at least one study" to say almost anything, but for what it's worth, Wikipedia found different numbers placing them around #30.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/State_Ta...
And the first link on Google was WalletHub, who ranked them #37.
https://wallethub.com/edu/states-with-highest-lowest-tax-bur...
Right wing media controls all but a thin sliver of the airwaves, and the remainder is considered state propaganda. Red states are the welfare queens of the union, but the smallest tax on the rich riles up those media barons, who flog their flock into a frenzy. The truth just isn't profitable.
Social security is not taxed by California, so their only state income tax will be on those retirement account withdrawals. For a married couple the standard deduction in California is nearly $11k and the lowest tax bracket is 1% on the first ~$21k over that. That means they could take up to ~$11k/year out of their retirements accounts with no state tax, and up ~$32k/year out of their IRA/401k with that tax being less than ~$210.
I did some checking on Redfin and Zillow to check house prices and property taxes. Same sized houses and lots in California are more expensive than in Texas, so it looks like if your sold your house in Texas and moved to California and put all the money from the house sale into your new house you would have to downsize. A 2000 sq ft house on Texas might become a 1600 sq ft house in California, which would be acceptable to a lot of people. If that is acceptable then it appeared that moving to California could indeed lower your taxes.
I can’t imagine the pikachu faces there were on the many retirees that did that make that move, saw their tax bill, and then realized they’re 1000 miles away and can never get back their lower taxes…
In 2023 California was 41st in terms of paid federal tax vs benefit. It was lower than Florida, for example, which like Texas, doesn’t have an income tax. Per capita, California isn’t some huge outlier for GDP or even the top in the country, it just has the most people.
The idea that California is funding all the poors is inaccurate and an indicator of the states perceived hubris. Florida, Illinois, Minnesota, and several others have more reason to complain than California.
0 - https://www.moneygeek.com/living/states-most-reliant-federal...
PS: This is exactly my situation.