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California needs to be two states: Northern CA and Southern CA. It doesn't make sense for one state to have so much oomph, but to be such a disaster, financial

California needs to be two states: Northern CA and Southern CA. It doesn't make sense for one state to have so much oomph, but to be such a disaster, financially. Northern CA and Southern CA are completely different worlds; they have different agendas and different kinds of people flock to each one for different reasons. State taxes, government latency, budgeting. . . all of these things could be simplified and improved if the state were not such a behemoth.

jojopotato 16y ago
Where would you draw the line though? How would you resolve the water that gets shipped down to southern California?
- chroma 16y ago
  Have a war. Whoever loses has to keep Fresno. Disclaimer: I got this silly idea from someone else, but I don't remember who or where.
sabat 16y ago
all of these things could be simplified and improved if the state were not such a behemoth I'm skeptical of that. And since most states are in the same financial mess as CA, only on smaller scales, the argument that splitting the state up will somehow improve things seems weak.
- shawnee_ 16y ago
  The state is too big to manage doing what state governments were originally designed to manage. Because CA is such a large stage geographically and population-wise, and economically it has too much on its plate for one government to handle. It cannot even begin to sort its priorities, let alone get working on solving the top ones. Splitting the state would at the very least revive the local / participatory / "community organizer" role of people with respect to their government. When people are involved in their governments, their governments improve. Simple as that; I don't see how it wouldn't improve many areas that CA hasn't been able to manage for decades now.
  - j_baker 16y ago
    I'm not convinced you've thought this through properly. Beyond what geographic size, population count, and economic size does a state need to be split? And how do you know how many states it should be split into? I mean, Rome essentially split in half and ended up with two unmanageable nations. How do you know California doesn't need to be split into 3 or 4 states? Or for that matter, more states have more overhead (you need two legislatures, two cabinets, two of every cabinet position). How do you know the real solution isn't to combine California with Oregon and Washington?
  - cturner 16y ago
    Because CA is such a large stage geographically and population-wise Canada doesn't seem to have any of these problems despite having about the same population and far vaster land. Western Australia gets along fine. Sweden? Norway? Finland? Chile? The lower ratio of geographic area to population in California compared to something like Norway should make it easier to run California than others because the ration of taxpayers to infrastructure is better. When people are involved in their governments, their governments improve This is popular wisdom, but I disagree. That dynamic attracts different people, but a common stereotype is a divisive, intrusive egootist with grand plans. That dynamic forces good, middle of the road citizens into political participation just to avoid being overrun by the determined nutters. High participation of involvement is definitely not a prerequisite for a nice, functioning state. I don't see evidence indicating to believe that it could have worked if the state was larger or smaller.
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  Most states have some sort of financial mess, but CA is one of the worst. (NJ and Illinois have it beat, however.) http://blogs.sacbee.com/the-public-eye/2010/06/californias-budget-deficit-compares-poorly-to-other-states.html http://blogs.sacbee.com/the-public-eye/2010/06/californias-b...
jacoblyles 16y ago
I completely agree, and wrote at length about this topic in December: http://distributedrepublic.net/archives/2010/12/07/california-proposition-x http://distributedrepublic.net/archives/2010/12/07/californi...
bendmorris 16y ago
Many states have groups that want their state to be divided into two or more states; you just hear about California more in the news because they're bigger. One less prominent example is eastern vs. western Washington, where the farmers in the east feel dominated by the liberals in Seattle; I believe they even voted on it in the past. If we divide up states into homogeneous sections, pretty soon every neighborhood will be its own state. (Edit: Apparently it's so common there's a Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_partition_proposals http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_partition_pr...)
- endtime 16y ago
  >Many states have groups that want their state to be divided into two or more states; you just hear about California more in the news because they're bigger. Perhaps we should split the cries for California to be separated into two groups - arguments for it from northern Californians and arguments for it from Southern Californians. I'm kidding, of course, but I think that what you say vaguely supports shawnee_'s point.
- jerf 16y ago
  "If we divide up states into homogeneous sections, pretty soon every neighborhood will be its own state." Some science fiction writers have hypothesized about this for a while. Technology is trending towards empowering ever smaller groups to manage their affairs quite effectively, and enabling those groups to rapidly snap together with other groups on an as-needed basis. It isn't that hard to look out 50-100 years hence and ask what all these massive centralized governments are really doing for us that couldn't be done by much finer-grained bands of smaller ones. (Don't think something like every county fully a nation in the modern sense, think something more like the relation of states to the federal government, and counties doing things like perhaps buying into pre-existing health care plans or something, across a wide array of such issues.) There are days when the US government's current trend toward centralization seems downright anachronistic to me. I recall one science fiction story in Analog where after significant advances in nanotechnology, the minimum self-sustaining unit of civilization became a single house. It was literally possible to seal off a suburban house plot and it could survive solely on the incoming solar energy and the technologies it had. After the homeowner got in some trouble with the local law enforcement, he has the bright idea of simply seceding from the nation, though various legal handwavery and appeals to the ancient question of the social contract. It was one of those interesting, thought-provoking stories that at least made me think. Yes, I am well aware of the other tradeoffs involved and how important defense and preventing the tragedy of the commons is, the point is not that this is obviously a good idea, the point is that it is not unthinkable that we may indeed be trending towards smaller polities in the future. The outcome of the battle between centralization and decentralization haven't been written yet.
julius_geezer 16y ago
The once and present (or is it once and future?) governor's father made that proposal 40 years ago...
j_baker 16y ago
Why stop there? I live in the Mission in San Francisco. It's a completely different world from The Haight. Why not split the Haight and the Mission into different states? After all, smaller states are easier to manage, right? Besides that, I'm not convinced that smaller states are the answer. We could very well end up with two states who have a budget deficit that adds up to California's.
waterlesscloud 16y ago
San Francisco and Los Angeles have far more in common with each other than either does with Fresno, or Bakersfield, or the far north like Yreka.
- prodigal_erik 16y ago
  Ah, the premise of http://www.urbanarchipelago.com/ http://www.urbanarchipelago.com/, a stirring response to the backwards hellhole that seems to surround anywhere I'd want to live.
  - jergason 16y ago
    Wow. There is some intense vitriol in that link. Disagreeing with ideas is one thing, but demonizing people who thing differently is not healthy political discourse. Of course, maybe that is not the purpose of this article.
    - prodigal_erik 16y ago
      For some context, that was an alt-weekly editorial written immediately after the red states knowingly re-elected Bush. The cover led with "DO NOT DESPAIR": http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/CoverArt?oid=19811&year=2004 http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/CoverArt?oid=19811&ye... I wouldn't know whether it's good political strategy, but I found it comforting at the time.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- seasoup 16y ago
  So true, instead of North and South California, we need an East and West. The coast is liberal, the inland conservative.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
rdouble 16y ago
NorCal would get the worse deal, as it would be stuck with the huge and mostly economically useless part of the state between Oregon and Napa/Sonoma. In addition to the entertainment industry, SoCal would get all the farms and oil fields. A better option for California would be to secede from the rest of the United States. California could cut taxes and afford to pay its public service workers their inflated salaries (and then some), if it wasn't bailing out the rest of the country to the tune of $50B each year.
- gxs 16y ago
  Whenever I see comments to this effect, I always wonder if people are familiar with their history. Note, I'm not accusing you of this, just saying it makes me wonder. Silicon Valley, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Fairchild Semiconductor..HP..all these things were funded with federal defense money way back in the day. Just saying Ca may be "bailing out" the rest of the country, but the rest of the country invested a great deal in Ca as well. Don't get me wrong - I love this place and see where you're coming from.
  - natrius 16y ago
    My assumption is that California has been a donor state for much of its history, so much of that defense money "invested" in California was probably Californian tax money to begin with.
- tesseract 16y ago
  > A better option for California would be to secede from the rest of the United States. California could cut taxes and afford to pay its public service workers their inflated salaries (and then some), if it wasn't bailing out the rest of the country to the tune of $50B each year. Some states that paid more in federal taxes than they saw returned to them in federal spending have tried this before. It didn't exactly work out. (Of course circumstances are different now, in that it's the urbanized states on the losing side of the deal, plus there isn't a massive human-rights issue alongside the economic disparity.)
- flomo 16y ago
  Northern California has the water.
tastybites 16y ago
Northern CA and Southern CA are completely different worlds; they have different agendas and different kinds of people flock to each one for different reasons I have lived in SF and LA (as well as SD and some other spots) and completely disagree. The metro areas of SF and LA are nearly identical. Generally the people who have this viewpoint are people from northern California who for some irrational, childish reason hate southern California. West LA/SF East LA/Oakland Montana St./Fillmore St. Silverlake/Mission Palisades/Marin Inland Empire/East Bay Pasadena/Walnut Creek Ventura & SB Counties / South Bay & Peninsula Counties This list goes on. It's practically a mirror image.
- geebee 16y ago
  I grew up in SF, but I've spent a lot of time living in SoCal as well. I can't stand the kneejerk anti-socal mentality you sometimes find up north either (1). It seems to mainly be a mentality of northerners (though when I lived in LA, the LATimes did take the occasional potshot at the "boutique empire of san francisco", some of which were kind of amusing). The whole thing seems to be fading, though. There isn't nearly as much of a north/south gap as there used to be - now, the political rivalries in California tend to be more coastal/insland. Plus, LA has become far more urban in the last 20 years than it used to be. That said, I think you go too far in attributing this viewpoint to an irrational hatred of socal. I really like LA, and I just don't think you can find an equivalent of LA's beach towns (I'm thinking particularly of Manhattan, Hermosa, Santa Monica, or Venice) in San Francisco (including Santa Cruz, which I also like but has a very different vibe). You definitely lined up some similar areas. But a mirror image? No way, that's going way too far. (1) Some of this has its origins in the "water wars" of the mid 1970s.
smhinsey 16y ago
I feel like the secession/partition ideas you most frequently hear floated in the last 10 years or so are in a lot of ways the misguided desire to hold constitutional conventions. Splitting up gives you the chance to do that 'reset' and fix a lot of institutional problems that seem daunting otherwise, but you have the opportunity for the same 'reset' with a convention, although there's nothing to keep a convention from making it even worse.
tjogin 16y ago
The same can be said of many, most, or maybe even all countries.

jojopotato 16y ago

Where would you draw the line though? How would you resolve the water that gets shipped down to southern California?

chroma 16y ago
Have a war. Whoever loses has to keep Fresno. Disclaimer: I got this silly idea from someone else, but I don't remember who or where.

sabat 16y ago

all of these things could be simplified and improved if the state were not such a behemoth I'm skeptical of that. And since most states are in the same financial mess as CA, only on smaller scales, the argument that splitting the state up will somehow improve things seems weak.

shawnee_ 16y ago
The state is too big to manage doing what state governments were originally designed to manage. Because CA is such a large stage geographically and population-wise, and economically it has too much on its plate for one government to handle. It cannot even begin to sort its priorities, let alone get working on solving the top ones. Splitting the state would at the very least revive the local / participatory / "community organizer" role of people with respect to their government. When people are involved in their governments, their governments improve. Simple as that; I don't see how it wouldn't improve many areas that CA hasn't been able to manage for decades now.
- j_baker 16y ago
  I'm not convinced you've thought this through properly. Beyond what geographic size, population count, and economic size does a state need to be split? And how do you know how many states it should be split into? I mean, Rome essentially split in half and ended up with two unmanageable nations. How do you know California doesn't need to be split into 3 or 4 states? Or for that matter, more states have more overhead (you need two legislatures, two cabinets, two of every cabinet position). How do you know the real solution isn't to combine California with Oregon and Washington?
- cturner 16y ago
  Because CA is such a large stage geographically and population-wise Canada doesn't seem to have any of these problems despite having about the same population and far vaster land. Western Australia gets along fine. Sweden? Norway? Finland? Chile? The lower ratio of geographic area to population in California compared to something like Norway should make it easier to run California than others because the ration of taxpayers to infrastructure is better. When people are involved in their governments, their governments improve This is popular wisdom, but I disagree. That dynamic attracts different people, but a common stereotype is a divisive, intrusive egootist with grand plans. That dynamic forces good, middle of the road citizens into political participation just to avoid being overrun by the determined nutters. High participation of involvement is definitely not a prerequisite for a nice, functioning state. I don't see evidence indicating to believe that it could have worked if the state was larger or smaller.
yummyfajitas 16y ago
Most states have some sort of financial mess, but CA is one of the worst. (NJ and Illinois have it beat, however.) http://blogs.sacbee.com/the-public-eye/2010/06/californias-budget-deficit-compares-poorly-to-other-states.html http://blogs.sacbee.com/the-public-eye/2010/06/californias-b...

jacoblyles 16y ago

I completely agree, and wrote at length about this topic in December: http://distributedrepublic.net/archives/2010/12/07/california-proposition-x http://distributedrepublic.net/archives/2010/12/07/californi...

bendmorris 16y ago

Many states have groups that want their state to be divided into two or more states; you just hear about California more in the news because they're bigger. One less prominent example is eastern vs. western Washington, where the farmers in the east feel dominated by the liberals in Seattle; I believe they even voted on it in the past. If we divide up states into homogeneous sections, pretty soon every neighborhood will be its own state. (Edit: Apparently it's so common there's a Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_partition_proposals http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_partition_pr...)

endtime 16y ago
>Many states have groups that want their state to be divided into two or more states; you just hear about California more in the news because they're bigger. Perhaps we should split the cries for California to be separated into two groups - arguments for it from northern Californians and arguments for it from Southern Californians. I'm kidding, of course, but I think that what you say vaguely supports shawnee_'s point.
jerf 16y ago
"If we divide up states into homogeneous sections, pretty soon every neighborhood will be its own state." Some science fiction writers have hypothesized about this for a while. Technology is trending towards empowering ever smaller groups to manage their affairs quite effectively, and enabling those groups to rapidly snap together with other groups on an as-needed basis. It isn't that hard to look out 50-100 years hence and ask what all these massive centralized governments are really doing for us that couldn't be done by much finer-grained bands of smaller ones. (Don't think something like every county fully a nation in the modern sense, think something more like the relation of states to the federal government, and counties doing things like perhaps buying into pre-existing health care plans or something, across a wide array of such issues.) There are days when the US government's current trend toward centralization seems downright anachronistic to me. I recall one science fiction story in Analog where after significant advances in nanotechnology, the minimum self-sustaining unit of civilization became a single house. It was literally possible to seal off a suburban house plot and it could survive solely on the incoming solar energy and the technologies it had. After the homeowner got in some trouble with the local law enforcement, he has the bright idea of simply seceding from the nation, though various legal handwavery and appeals to the ancient question of the social contract. It was one of those interesting, thought-provoking stories that at least made me think. Yes, I am well aware of the other tradeoffs involved and how important defense and preventing the tragedy of the commons is, the point is not that this is obviously a good idea, the point is that it is not unthinkable that we may indeed be trending towards smaller polities in the future. The outcome of the battle between centralization and decentralization haven't been written yet.

julius_geezer 16y ago

The once and present (or is it once and future?) governor's father made that proposal 40 years ago...

j_baker 16y ago

Why stop there? I live in the Mission in San Francisco. It's a completely different world from The Haight. Why not split the Haight and the Mission into different states? After all, smaller states are easier to manage, right? Besides that, I'm not convinced that smaller states are the answer. We could very well end up with two states who have a budget deficit that adds up to California's.

waterlesscloud 16y ago

San Francisco and Los Angeles have far more in common with each other than either does with Fresno, or Bakersfield, or the far north like Yreka.

prodigal_erik 16y ago
Ah, the premise of http://www.urbanarchipelago.com/ http://www.urbanarchipelago.com/, a stirring response to the backwards hellhole that seems to surround anywhere I'd want to live.
- jergason 16y ago
  Wow. There is some intense vitriol in that link. Disagreeing with ideas is one thing, but demonizing people who thing differently is not healthy political discourse. Of course, maybe that is not the purpose of this article.
  - prodigal_erik 16y ago
    For some context, that was an alt-weekly editorial written immediately after the red states knowingly re-elected Bush. The cover led with "DO NOT DESPAIR": http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/CoverArt?oid=19811&year=2004 http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/CoverArt?oid=19811&ye... I wouldn't know whether it's good political strategy, but I found it comforting at the time.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
seasoup 16y ago
So true, instead of North and South California, we need an East and West. The coast is liberal, the inland conservative.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]

rdouble 16y ago

NorCal would get the worse deal, as it would be stuck with the huge and mostly economically useless part of the state between Oregon and Napa/Sonoma. In addition to the entertainment industry, SoCal would get all the farms and oil fields. A better option for California would be to secede from the rest of the United States. California could cut taxes and afford to pay its public service workers their inflated salaries (and then some), if it wasn't bailing out the rest of the country to the tune of $50B each year.

gxs 16y ago
Whenever I see comments to this effect, I always wonder if people are familiar with their history. Note, I'm not accusing you of this, just saying it makes me wonder. Silicon Valley, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Fairchild Semiconductor..HP..all these things were funded with federal defense money way back in the day. Just saying Ca may be "bailing out" the rest of the country, but the rest of the country invested a great deal in Ca as well. Don't get me wrong - I love this place and see where you're coming from.
- natrius 16y ago
  My assumption is that California has been a donor state for much of its history, so much of that defense money "invested" in California was probably Californian tax money to begin with.
tesseract 16y ago
> A better option for California would be to secede from the rest of the United States. California could cut taxes and afford to pay its public service workers their inflated salaries (and then some), if it wasn't bailing out the rest of the country to the tune of $50B each year. Some states that paid more in federal taxes than they saw returned to them in federal spending have tried this before. It didn't exactly work out. (Of course circumstances are different now, in that it's the urbanized states on the losing side of the deal, plus there isn't a massive human-rights issue alongside the economic disparity.)
flomo 16y ago
Northern California has the water.

tastybites 16y ago

Northern CA and Southern CA are completely different worlds; they have different agendas and different kinds of people flock to each one for different reasons I have lived in SF and LA (as well as SD and some other spots) and completely disagree. The metro areas of SF and LA are nearly identical. Generally the people who have this viewpoint are people from northern California who for some irrational, childish reason hate southern California. West LA/SF East LA/Oakland Montana St./Fillmore St. Silverlake/Mission Palisades/Marin Inland Empire/East Bay Pasadena/Walnut Creek Ventura & SB Counties / South Bay & Peninsula Counties This list goes on. It's practically a mirror image.

geebee 16y ago
I grew up in SF, but I've spent a lot of time living in SoCal as well. I can't stand the kneejerk anti-socal mentality you sometimes find up north either (1). It seems to mainly be a mentality of northerners (though when I lived in LA, the LATimes did take the occasional potshot at the "boutique empire of san francisco", some of which were kind of amusing). The whole thing seems to be fading, though. There isn't nearly as much of a north/south gap as there used to be - now, the political rivalries in California tend to be more coastal/insland. Plus, LA has become far more urban in the last 20 years than it used to be. That said, I think you go too far in attributing this viewpoint to an irrational hatred of socal. I really like LA, and I just don't think you can find an equivalent of LA's beach towns (I'm thinking particularly of Manhattan, Hermosa, Santa Monica, or Venice) in San Francisco (including Santa Cruz, which I also like but has a very different vibe). You definitely lined up some similar areas. But a mirror image? No way, that's going way too far. (1) Some of this has its origins in the "water wars" of the mid 1970s.

smhinsey 16y ago

I feel like the secession/partition ideas you most frequently hear floated in the last 10 years or so are in a lot of ways the misguided desire to hold constitutional conventions. Splitting up gives you the chance to do that 'reset' and fix a lot of institutional problems that seem daunting otherwise, but you have the opportunity for the same 'reset' with a convention, although there's nothing to keep a convention from making it even worse.

tjogin 16y ago

The same can be said of many, most, or maybe even all countries.