Glenn Reynolds advises preemptively decalifornicating the low-tax destination states being invaded by high-tax migrants:
The world is in the grip of a vast migration. Seeking a better life for themselves and their families, people are abandoning their benighted homelands and moving to places that offer them more opportunity. But are they bringing their homelands’ problems with them?
No, I’m not talking about Mexicans coming to the United States, or Middle Easterners and Africans flooding into Europe. I’m talking about Americans moving from blue states to red states….
There are two things that might get in the way here. One is that high-tax, high-benefit states might lower their taxes and reduce their benefits. That does happen, though it’s difficult: Politicians extract a lot of power from high taxes (and from selectively reducing high taxes for favored constituencies) and high benefits are an effective way of buying votes. Generally, the situation has to be absolutely desperate (think Greece) before they’ll change.
The other thing that might happen is that the migrants from high tax states might bring their political attitudes with them, moving to new, low-tax states for the economic opportunity but then supporting the same policies that ruined the states they left. This seems quite plausible, alas, and I’ve heard Coloradans lament that the flow of Californians to their state involved a lot of people doing just that. (I suppose that migrants from lower-benefits states to higher-benefits states might support change the other way, but people who live on the dole seem to have pretty similar voting patterns regardless of location, which is why the dole is so popular with certain politicians).
If I were one of those conservative billionaires (hello, Koch brothers! hi, Sheldon Adelson!) who are always donating tens of millions to support Republican candidates, I think I might try spending some of the money on something more useful: A sort of welcome wagon for blue state migrants to red states. Something that would explain to them why the place they’re moving to is doing better than the place they left, and suggesting that they might not want to vote for the same policies that are driving their old home states into bankruptcy.
What I find encouraging about this is the way it shows how the Right is increasingly understanding that it has been routinely defeated for decades in a multi-generational cultural war, and is finally beginning to develop tacticians and strategists who think in multi-generational terms.
Generation X is far less susceptible to being influenced by Boomer rhetoric and our thinkers, under the influence of the few older mavericks who were able to successfully resist the siren song of social justice, are beginning to develop defensive strategies and even some basic counteroffensives.