With: Tucker Carlson

On: Fox News

Who lives in America’s most “progressive” cities these days? A combination of transient “hipsters” who stay just a few years, some “very, very wealthy people” and the poor “who are dependent on the welfare state,” Chapman University fellow Joel Kotkin told Fox News’ Tucker Carlson on Wednesday.

“The middle class” Kotkin added, “is literally becoming extinct, as is the family, in much of urban America today.”

Read the entire article at Fox News

Read Joel’s related article here

This article first appeared in the Times of San Diego

Last month, the Los Angeles Times reported that the Metro system “is hemorrhaging bus riders.” The news was presented as, if not a crisis, at least an urgent matter that needs to be promptly addressed. Yet that’s hardly the case.

It’s troubling, we’re supposed to infer, that “passengers have fled” public transportation “for more convenient options — mostly, driving.” According to the Times headline writer, this bloody mess is “worsening traffic and hurting climate goals.”

“The bus exodus poses a serious threat to California’s ambitious climate and transportation goals,” says the Times. “Reducing traffic congestion and greenhouse gas emissions will be next to impossible, experts say, unless more people start taking public transit.”

It’s been clear for some time policymakers across the state want to pull drivers out of their cars and push them into mass transit, no matter how inconvenient and sometimes painful it can be. Joel Kotkin, Chapman University professor, has been telling us for years that Sacramento has trapped California on a “road diet” in an effort “to make congestion so terrible that people will be forced out of their cars and onto transit.”

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This article appeared in the Special report section of the print edition under the headline “State of the nation”

….In the coming decade California and Texas face three main challenges. First, they must remain desirable places to do business, ensuring the creation of well-paid jobs and prosperity for their citizens. On this front Texas is better placed than California, but it cannot take for granted that it will maintain its edge over other states that levy no income tax and offer even lower costs. Second, they must educate their children better. As the number of poor, English-language learners grows in both states, this task takes on even greater significance.

Third, they must be mindful of the gap between the haves and the have-nots and deal with the inequality of income and opportunity that exist in both states. Although it has become more expensive to live in Texas in the past decade, it is still much more affordable than California.

The Golden State’s economy used to be a rising tide lifting all sorts of boats, says Joel Kotkin of Chapman University. “Now it’s a rising tide lifting a few yachts.”

Both states will also have to confront the gap in services and opportunity between their declining rural and growing urban communities.