If there’s one thing the Governor of California loves to talk about, it's the size of his state’s economy – if it were an independent country, it would be the fifth largest in the world, Gavin Newsom loves to say. Well, it’s not an independent country; it’s a state – a state in complete disarray that is teetering on the edge of collapse. It was already hard to build anything there, and the aftermath of the wildfires in 2024 has shown it’s even harder to rebuild anything there. To say the business environment is less than friendly is an understatement, as businesses flee the Golden State as the atmosphere there turns to tin.
Tesla famously fled the state in 2021; SpaceX followed in 2024. While both of those companies are run by Elon Musk, the world’s first trillionaire is not alone in the economic exodus. In addition to Musk’s companies, Hewlett Packard, Chevron and Charles Schwab all moved their headquarters from various parts of California to Texas in the past few years, while even the famous In-N-Out Burger left the coast for Tennessee. This doesn’t happen in healthy economies.
Now comes word that Paramount, the legendary movie studio, is considering packing up and moving east. While you can see how the environmental, regulatory and tax atmosphere in the state could lead those other businesses to leave, California is the home of Hollywood – movie studios and tax credits for them are almost as old as the state is. Why would Paramount even consider leaving?
Well, the state government is opposed to the company’s proposed merger with Warner Brothers Discovery. You really have to wonder why – it’s not like there aren’t literally hundreds of content producers, streaming services and platforms, so the idea of a monopoly is off the table. It likely has to do with the politics of Paramount’s owner, David Ellison’s, relationship with President Donald Trump.
California is leading a coalition of 12 states – including Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, and Washington – in filing suit against the merger because, according to California Attorney General Rob Bonta, it creates “red flags in the air everywhere.”
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What kind of red flags could the merger of two entertainment companies present? According to Bonta, “The unlawful merger of these two entertainment behemoths would lead to higher prices, lower quality, and less content for film and television, harming movie theaters, basic cable distributors, and ultimately, audiences on every sofa and movie theater seat in the U.S.”
Having seen Supergirl, I’m not sure how the current situation in Hollywood isn’t harming audiences, but no one is suing over that.
The fact is, California is simply not a good place to do business. They tax you, they regulate you, they let your city burn down, and they don’t let you rebuild your home. The state has regulated the cost of goat herding to the point that goats used to clear away brush – THE fuel of wildfires – would see the salaries of herders increase from $64,000 per year to $240,000, thereby killing the industry and making wildfires more likely. You can’t make this up.
The state is so burdensome that even providing municipal services is becoming impossible. The Los Angeles Times laments the inability of the city to stop using landfills to dispose of garbage, something they’ve mandated, to fight “climate change.”
Things have gotten so bad, with lawyers and lawsuits flying around so freely, that the Chiquita Canyon landfill, which services LA County, closed, not because it wasn’t needed, but because it’s not worth operating. The local regulators created so much confusion that the company operating it threw up their hands and was forced to cease operations. That hasn’t stopped the plaintiffs' attorneys from flocking to the region in what the LA Times called in a recent investigation the “Val Verde Hunger Games.“ Things got so out of hand that a Las Vegas actor was paid $5,000 by a law firm named Downtown LA Law Group to pose as a local "cowboy" and solicit residents to sue the landfill for health damages due to claims of aggressive odors, claims that have been refuted by many independent studies performed at the landfill.
In true California fashion, the local representatives and state officials have used all of the attention surrounding these legal claims to try and extort as much money and control over the situation as possible.
The landfill could handle up to 7,000 tons of trash a day and now…nothing. They can’t send all that trash to Washington, D.C.; they already send 54 Members of Congress. That’s enough.
I’ve never heard of a state unable to dispose of its trash, but California is known for not wanting to. The biggest growth in real estate is tent cities, and city streets are not only open-air drug markets, but they’re roofless toilets.
California is in decline – economically, thanks to incompetent leadership; they are already in decline. They currently have $265 billion in unfunded liabilities related to the state’s pension plans, and there is no plan to get out of that hole other than keep digging.
While the Trump administration, specifically the EPA, has attempted to pull California back from the precipice, it might be a lost cause. I’d ask the last person out of California to turn off the lights, but if they don’t make significant course corrections very soon, there won’t be any electricity left to turn off. It’ll be the most beautiful ghost town in history. What a waste.
Derek Hunter is the host of the Derek Hunter Show on WMAL in Washington, D.C., and has a free daily podcast (subscribe!) and author of the book, Outrage, INC., which exposes how liberals use fear and hatred to manipulate the masses, and host of the weekly “Week in F*cking Review” podcast where the news is spoken about the way it deserves to be. Follow him on Twitter at @DerekAHunter.
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