God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy

by Mike Huckabee

  Chief Executive conceded that in recent years, California Governor Jerry Brown has improved the state’s situation somewhat by eliminating its staggering budget deficits. But that came at the cost of enacting even higher taxes. The editors noted that California’s top marginal tax rate of 33 percent “is the third-highest tax rate in the industrialized world, behind only Denmark and France. This situation creates a bias against savings, slows economic growth and harms competitiveness.”

  But it’s no great feat to get California legislators to agree to higher taxes and to get the state’s voters to approve them, providing they’re assured that only rich people—generally defined as “anyone with a dollar more than you”—will pay them. The second part of the equation for encouraging businesses to open and expand and create jobs is to eliminate burdensome regulations. That’s harder in California than talking a surfer dude into wearing a necktie and not using the word “dude” for more than an hour of waking time.

  For instance, the magazine found that in Texas, if you want to open a restaurant, complying with all the required regulations takes just six to eight weeks from first permit filing to grand opening. In California, it involves a descent into the Ninth Circle of Bureaucratic Hell that takes an average of three years to navigate, if you’re lucky enough to come out of it with enough money left over to open a restaurant. I hope your customers weren’t too hungry! No wonder people in California are skinnier than the rest of the country—they’re reduced to eating sunshine while the eating places are trying to get the government to give them a permit.

  And just try getting California politicians to cut the bloated public workforce or scale back the lavish union benefits and pensions that are driving cities as large as Stockton and even San Bernardino County to seek bankruptcy protection. It was a sweet deal while it lasted: Union negotiators hammered out ever-more-generous contracts with political officials who were dependent on union support for their reelections, and sent the bill to all the poor suckers—oops, sorry, “taxpayers and business owners”—who weren’t even allowed in the room. Then one day, the politicians found themselves deep in debt, looked around, and discovered that the taxpayers and businesses weren’t just out of the room, they’d moved out of the state entirely. Here’s a rule of thumb for governing from my personal experience: When two parties are negotiating a deal that neither has to pay for, it doesn’t end well for the sucker who does have to pay for it.

  A study by Dun & Bradstreet found that over 2,500 California businesses with three or more workers relocated to other states between 2007 and 2011, taking more than 109,000 jobs with them. Since then, the exodus has escalated. Texas Governor Rick Perry earned the scorn of liberals in California, New York, and other blue states for his unapologetic promotional tours, selling their states’ companies on the benefits of moving to Texas. He’s been accused of “poaching” their tax bases. But they should ask their buddies in the animal rights movement to define that term for them. Perry isn’t shooting anything, except maybe fish in a barrel. It’s not “poaching” when a free-range animal decides to move to a greener pasture. That’s just “migration.” Businesses and workers are migrating from a number of blue states, not just to Texas, but to Florida, Tennessee, the Carolinas, and other more business-friendly locales.

  Here’s my favorite shorthand way of determining how good a job a city or state is doing at encouraging people to stay there. Just go to www.uhaul.com and check out the going rate to rent a U-Haul truck to and from Dallas. As of this writing, renting a fourteen-foot truck, big enough to move a two-bedroom apartment, in Los Angeles and dropping it off in Dallas will cost you $1,602. Renting the same truck for the same time period from Dallas to LA costs just $946. U-Haul has so many moving vans heading one-way from California to Texas that they’ll subsidize your move by $656 (that’s a 41 percent discount) just to drive one back to LA for them.

  The tragedy is that there’s no good reason at all for Californians to have to update Horace Greeley’s famous advice and cry, “Go east, young Californians!” For most of the twentieth century, California was a solar-powered magnet, attracting people from across America and around the world. It earned its nickname the “Golden State” for more reasons than the gold nuggets in its mountains. And all of those assets are still there, in abundance: a near-perfect climate, gorgeous scenery, an 840-mile coastline offering both pristine beaches and busy seaports, vast mineral and timber resources, and some of the finest farmland in the world—if the environmentalists would just let farmers plow it without arresting them every time their tractors run over a field mouse. The great Backward California Gold Rush is best described by the euphemism that the Obama administration created to replace the word “terrorism.” California’s problems are a “man-caused disaster.” Gold flakes enticed settlers to rush to California, and now left-wing flakes are driving them out.

  Speaking frankly (and anonymously) to ChiefExecutive.net, a number of CEOs explained why their companies were fleeing California. Here are some of their comments:

  “The government is the worst in every possible way.”

  “California’s taxes and ongoing changes for regulations are devastating. One never knows from day to day what new interpretation of an existing regulation or new regulation will befall your small business.”

  “Too much government (with) nothing better to do than to harass businesses in the state. They need to cut the size of their regulatory bodies in half.”

  “State politicians feel business and commerce are ‘necessary evils’ that provide the funds to enable pursuit of their misguided agendas.”

  “California regulations, taxes and costs will leave only tech, life sciences and entertainment as viable.”

  That last comment is worth exploring in more detail. Whenever conservatives point out the ways in which California’s politicians are driving away businesses, jobs, and middle-class workers, liberals always point to Hollywood and Silicon Valley to refute it. They say that California is actually doing great because of the billions of dollars the entertainment and high-tech industries are bringing into the state. That’s true—for the moment—but it’s an economic foundation built on quicksand.

  California politicians have been very lucky that at this particular moment in history, events have converged to create an unprecedented business climate in which very young people can create a new piece of hardware or software that makes them wealthy overnight, before they’ve had enough life experience to knock their youthful flirtation with socialism and progressivism out of their heads. Nothing so thrills a liberal California politician as seeing a shaggy-haired young billionaire in a Che Guevara T-shirt. (And never mind that a naïve young billionaire is likely one of the first people that a Communist revolutionary like Che would put before a firing squad.)

  Of course, Hollywood has been a fundraising goldmine for left-wing politicians ever since the Young Turks overthrew the big studio system in the sixties and seventies. Barack Obama probably spends more time at Harvey Weinstein’s house than at the White House. Actors are particularly vulnerable to arguments about the unfairness of capitalism because in Hollywood, the “winners of life’s lottery” argument seems especially convincing. While some stars are making $10 million a movie, they know there are countless struggling actors with just as much talent who are still waiting tables. Some of these wealthy celebrities can even be persuaded by politicians to feel guilty about their success (Ka-ching!). Add to that the fact that these days, actors have to get started on their careers at such a tender age that many drop out of school before they’ve had a chance to take Econ 101. A few of those who achieve early success do take a break from making movies and complete their education, but they typically matriculate (enroll, for those in Bubba-ville) at very expensive bastions of liberal indoctrination such as Harvard, Yale, or Brown.

  But there are ominous signs for California liberals that the Hollywood/Silicon Valley gravy train might be slowly pulling out of the station. Hollywood still chu
rns out countless movies portraying business people as heartless villains who want to shaft the workers and avoid paying their “fair share.” But if you sit through the end credits, you’ll notice how many Hollywood movies and TV shows are now shot in states such as Texas and Louisiana that offer nonunion labor and tax breaks to filmmakers—even New York offers enticing tax incentives—or in cheaper, less regulation-bound locations outside the United States such as Canada, Mexico, or Australia. Hollywood likes lecturing the rest of us about how greedy we are to want to keep more of our own money, but they don’t like having to pay a lot of taxes for the privilege.

  These movies and TV shows have been very aptly dubbed “runaway productions.” They’re increasing so rapidly that Chris Baugh, location manager for the Oscar-winning film Argo (which actually was shot in Hollywood—but then, it was made by Ben Affleck, a liberal actor with reported political ambitions) was quoted in Variety as saying, “I am starting to see people who have never made a feature film in Los Angeles. In fact, they are afraid to. They are concerned that it is too expensive and too difficult.”

  In 2013, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti declared the outbound stampede of movie and TV productions to be a “state of emergency” and called on California officials to do something to combat the incentives being offered by out-of-state shooting locations. But the trend is only accelerating. A 2014 study by FilmL.A. found that for the first time, the number of TV pilots filmed in Los Angeles had dropped below the halfway mark, to just 44 percent. These days, “green-lighting a pilot” means hiring someone to fly the plane that takes the entire production out of California.

  One thing that’s making it easier than ever to shoot a movie or TV show outside of LA is the advent of cheap, top-quality digital, audio, and video equipment and computer software to handle the video editing and special effects. These days, a teenager with a video camera and a laptop can part the Red Sea faster and more convincingly than Cecil B. DeMille did.

  It’s ironic that much of the high-tech innovation that’s making Hollywood studios obsolete is the product of California’s other liberal cash cow, Silicon Valley. But as those tech companies grow from garage start-ups to global giants, even some of them are starting to notice that intrusive government and high taxes are bad for their businesses, not to mention a real buzzkill, dude.

  When you get rich overnight from a piece of software you created in your bedroom, and you’re used to being able to reach anyone in the world instantly by cell phone or to access any data online within seconds, you eventually start to chafe at the type of regulatory restraints on innovation that make it impossible even to open a hot dog stand in under three years. The information superhighway is speeding up while the bureaucracy is stuck in a traffic jam.

  Likewise, the founders of Internet companies that lavished money, adoration, and free publicity on Obama in 2008 are finally starting to realize that no matter how cool the figurehead may seem, oppressive government is not the friend of those who make a living off the free flow of information (though the NSA has used a little “friendly persuasion” to get them to let private information about their users flow into government data banks). Sure, it’s nice to have cronies in D.C. who’ll stifle your domestic competitors. But in a rapidly changing global industry, getting fat and complacent is a ticket to oblivion. Once those hip, young CEOs mature a bit, it’s very likely that many will get tired of paying the bill for their own straitjackets and start looking for greener pastures. After all, who is more aware that people in the tech industry who have computers and the Internet can work from anywhere?

  Some early sounds of dissent are already starting to be heard from Silicon Valley. After Governor Brown got his big package of tax hikes, including Prop 30, a retroactive tax hike on income dating back to 2012, ex-Google executive and Redbeacon co-founder Ethan Anderson penned an angry op-ed for AllThingsD.com. He wrote, “Given the inherent risks entrepreneurs take just to start a new company, will they want to now take on additional tax and regulatory risk?” He said that tech founders won’t quit starting new businesses, they’ll just do it somewhere else, and California will lose “the wealthy and productive classes we need to stay and rebuild the Golden State to its former glory.”

  Anderson’s warning, like the warnings about Obamacare suppressing hiring, were dismissed as nonsense by the left-leaning media. New York magazine’s Kevin Roose said it was the “same kind of veiled threat—‘If you raise our taxes, we’ll move’—that Wall Street millionaires and billionaires have been making for years.” And The Huffington Post quoted Mark Cuban as once saying, “Entrepreneurs who create something out of nothing don’t care what tax rates are,” and scoffed that studies have shown “there is little evidence that the rich flee high-tax states.”

  Maybe they were out drinking with Harvey the giant invisible rabbit and missed the study of IRS data by the nonprofit Tax Foundation. It showed that between 2000 and 2010, high-income earners fleeing New York took $45.6 billion in personal income out of the state’s economy. The second biggest loser was California, whose wealthy expatriates took $29.4 billion with them. Illinois was third, with a loss of $20.4 billion. Where did they all go? Some moved to Arizona or Texas, but most moved to the Sunshine State, Florida, bringing along carpetbags filled with flip-flops, sunscreen, and $67.3 billion worth of personal income. As someone who makes part of my living by having to go to New York City, I often wonder why any business domiciles there. The cost of relocation would be recovered fairly soon with lower taxes and lower cost of living.

  The wealth migration deniers might also check out the Bank of America–Merrill Lynch analysis of the results of Maryland’s 2008 “millionaires’ tax.” Even though Maryland has a high percentage of wealthy residents, thanks to its proximity to the ultimate money trough, Washington, D.C., its deep-blue leaders couldn’t think of any way to bring down their budget deficit other than raising taxes on higher incomes. But the expected revenues from the millionaires’ tax never materialized. Instead, revenues tumbled as wealthy people moved out, reducing Maryland’s net tax base by $1 billion.

  To those who insist the tech industry will never leave Silicon Valley because that’s where all the best talent is, I’d respond that the best talent migrates to where the best jobs are, and the best jobs tend to be in places that don’t punish the people who figured out how to create the jobs. If you don’t believe it’s possible that California’s high taxes and onerous regulations could eventually drive away even the tech industry, then I invite you to tour the construction site of Apple’s planned $300 million “America’s Operations Center.” When finished, it will be a million square feet in size and serve as headquarters for 3,600 employees. And it’s in … wait for it … Austin, Texas.

  Those of you who happen to be reading this book in California—or, more likely, listening to the audiobook while stuck in traffic—please understand: I am not wishing ill on your state. Like most Americans of my generation, I still get a thrill hearing The Mamas & the Papas sing “California Dreamin’,” or thinking about my teen years listening to the Beach Boys and wishing they “all could be California Girls.” I love the Golden Gate Bridge, Disneyland, Palm Springs, the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Monterey and Carmel, the great music and friendly people of Bakersfield, the forests, the beaches, the rugged coastline, the high desert. From the mountains to the prairies to the ocean white with foam (or in some places, Styrofoam), God bless California! (Also those giant redwoods you can drive a car through. Can you imagine drilling a tunnel through a redwood tree today? Environmentalists’ heads would explode!) Most of us here in God, guns, grits, and gravy territory aren’t pulling for California to fail. We’re praying that its people will wake up to the way their elected officials and unelected bureaucrats have misled and mismanaged the state, toss the bums out, and turn California back into the Golden State we all grew up dreaming about moving to.

  In the meantime, if you find yourself forced to leave California—or New York or Illinois or wherev
er—and move to our states to find a job (or even if you’re a liberal Hollywood actor who’s only here temporarily because your hit TV series about the zombie apocalypse is filmed in Georgia), please rest assured that we’ll greet you with open arms and Southern hospitality. We ask only three things in return:

  1. Please don’t move here and start voting for the same failed leftist policies that made you flee the last place you lived. We don’t want to be the next Colorado.

  2. Don’t ask Lurleen down at the truck stop to bring you a kale salad, unless you want it deep-fried. No, come to think of it, not even then. Ask for the grits. And if it’s dinner, ask for them with shrimp, garlic, and cheese. And get gravy for your biscuits.

  3. Before you eat, bow your head and thank God for your food. You don’t have to do it out loud. But if you do it, you won’t stand out like some outsider who wasn’t brought up right.

  16

  The United States Is Falling Behind Other Nations

  Posterity! you will never know how much it cost the present Generation to preserve your Freedom! I hope you will make good use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in Heaven, that I ever took half the Pains to preserve it.

  —JOHN ADAMS

  MY WIFE, JANET, AND I celebrated our fortieth wedding anniversary in May 2014 by taking a trip to China. It was a fantastic tour: the Great Wall, Forbidden City, and Tiananmen Square in Beijing; the Terra Cotta Warriors near Xi’an; the stunning skyline of Shanghai; the Sichuan Province and Chengdu. It was there Janet held and fed a baby panda. And no, I didn’t bring a real one home for the grandkids!