California is losing the flagship companies that made the state synonymous with American prosperity.
A report in The New York Post this week echoed what we here in California have been warning about: The Golden State’s biggest brands are leaving for friendlier business climates.
Even the California company that tracks the movements of other companies has left the state.
Chevron, the energy giant founded in the heyday of the California oil industry, left for Houston.
The reason: It wants to be near other energy companies — many of which also left California.
Charles Schwab, the company that made investment accessible to ordinary households, also left for Texas, citing the high cost of doing business in California.
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Oracle, the data giant helping to drive the AI boom, also left for Texas several years ago and is now based in Tennessee.
D-Wave, one of the pioneers in quantum computing, announced earlier this year that it is leaving for Florida.
And, of course, Elon Musk has moved his firms — Tesla, SpaceX, and X — to Texas.
He is one of many entrepreneurs who had their start in California, but whom California has chased away.
One of his fellow PayPal colleagues, Peter Thiel, moved his defense company, Palantir, to Colorado, and then to Florida.
Thiel infamously left California late last year due to the threat of the “billionaire tax,” which the SEIU is trying to use to fill the ever-growing demand for more spending on health care bills for public employees and retirees.
But it’s not just wealthy individuals who are leaving. It’s the companies that made them rich.
And when these companies leave California, they take tens of thousands of jobs — and billions of dollars in annual tax receipts — with them.
Gavin Newsom and his party love to boast about the size of California’s economy.
But enough with the happy talk. The reality is that the foundations of California’s prosperity are crumbling.
The warning signs were already apparent under Newsom’s predecessor, Jerry Brown, who arrogantly dismissed concerns about the state’s high-tax, high-regulation climate.
“We’ve got a few problems, we have lots of little burdens and regulations and taxes,” Brown said. “But smart people figure out how to make it.”
More than a decade later, the smart people are figuring out how to leave for Texas, Florida, and Tennessee.
What these states all have in common is no personal income tax, little red tape, and — for now — reliably Republican political leadership.
Growth used to be a nonpartisan issue. But Democrats have placed ideological priorities first — whether economic redistribution, or climate change.
Even the new apostles of Ezra Klein’s so-called “abundance” agenda don’t want to change the liberal model. They just want government to spend more aggressively.
California needs a reality check. Our great companies were founded at a time when our economy was less taxed, less regulated, less dependent on government welfare spending — and more free.
We are losing our economic legacy to places that still value economic freedom. Worse: We are losing our economic future.
