This is something few would have predicted 20 years ago. Americans are now moving out of, not into, coastal California and South Florida, and in very large numbers they're moving out of our largest metro areas. They're fleeing hip Boston and San Francisco, and after eight decades of moving to Washington they're moving out. The domestic outflow from these metro areas is 3.9 million people, 650,000 a year. High housing costs, high taxes, a distaste in some cases for the burgeoning immigrant populations--these are driving many Americans elsewhere.
The result is that these Coastal Megalopolises are increasingly a two-tiered society, with large affluent populations happily contemplating (at least until recently) their rapidly rising housing values, and a large, mostly immigrant working class working at low wages and struggling to move up the economic ladder. The economic divide in New York and Los Angeles is starting to look like the economic divide in Mexico City and São Paulo.
The bottom line for Republicans is that as long as freedom still exists, people will generally move to where they can have what THEY see as the best life. The wealthy want to live in a class society with low income immigrants doing their menial work, and very few middle class families going to church and trying to provide them with family values. They have already achieved financial security, they want to limit the number of others that can achieve it, and live their lives with no moral rules applied to them. The limousine liberals -- Kerry, Edwards, Kennedy, Pelosi, etc. are examples.
The task will be to try to preserve as much freedom as possible against the coming onslaught. There are always many more well people than sick people, so national health seems like a great idea. It is much better when you don't have to use it! It may even help reduce the retirement problem since once all competition is removed from the medical system, the government will be free to go to lowest common denominator medicine. Early deaths aren't that bad a thing for reducing Social Security payments.Today it is clear that we live in a land of opportunity, look at the immigration problem that we have. We didn't see that level of problem until we got into the 80's and the economic boom. Not so many folks want to migrate to a country where it is time to put on a sweater, turn off the Christmas lights and hunker down for a cold future of decline with Jimmuh Carter!
The nice thing about being a lefty is that opportunity isn't all that hard to get rid of. Raise the tax rates, add some tariffs, make it harder for workers to be laid off (like in Europe and Japan, that is one of the big reasons their economies are in trouble) and before you know it, opportunity gone, immigration problem gone! Who says Democrats can't solve problems, there are two down without even thinking hard. Dead old folks don't collect payments, and nobody wants to immigrate if there aren't any jobs!
I suspect that Michael is right in the long term, but I'm guessing that we will do a slide to at least "Carter Depth", and unfortunately probably lower before we have a chance to pull out this time. We lucked out after Vietnam and only a few million Cambodians and Vietnamese had to pay with their tortured lives for our lack of national resolve. As we see in Iraq, Somalia, Rwanda and of course the holocaust, Americans can be pretty sanguine about the loss of "other folks" ... we wring our hands well after the fact, but stopping Saddam from killing 100's of thousands just isn't worth single digit thousands of US lives ... even with the supposed big "oil pay-off". I still enjoy the low oil prices that blood for oil as bought us. I gotta hand it to the left that they had it pegged there!
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