California today is the United States in a decade or two: its dysfunctions are the product of decades of poor policy decisions (often, the poor decision was to

California today is the United States in a decade or two: its dysfunctions are the product of decades of poor policy decisions (often, the poor decision was to have a policy in the first place) by voters and their elected officials alike. A huge problem is that people move from California to other states in order to escape Californian problems, but once they get to their new state they miss a few things about California, and agitate to make their new state more Californian in those few aspects. Multiply that across all the Californian emmigrants in a state, and suddenly that state has California-style problems again. The only solution I can see is to amend the Constitution (specifically, the Fourteenth Amendment) to provide that people who move to a state must be naturalised into it rather than immediately gain citizenship. Perhaps a decade-long waiting period would give folks time to acculturate. An advantage of this would be that Californians who have escaped to other states would still be voting in California, even as they are acculturating to a saner state government system: in effect, California would get wiser voters for free. You can substitute 'New Jersey', 'Massachusetts' or 'New York' for 'California' above and get much the same effect.