It’s official. The Electoral College has spoken. Donald Trump is about to become the President of these United States of America.
Those last four words are important because they describe the nature of this country: individual states united into a nation.
But to hear the hysterical left carry on about it, you certainly wouldn’t know it.
In my last three columns I discussed how unglued they’ve become since Trump’s Trumanesque victory over Clinton, and I thought I was done with the subject.
Well, it turns out that just when I thought they couldn’t get any crazier, at least in California the left went ahead and proved me wrong.
Have you heard of #calexit? It seems that there’s a contingent here in this state that wants to collectively and figuratively stamp their feet in frustration, take their ball, and go home.
By that I mean they want this state to secede from the Union. The word “calexit” is obviously fashioned after the term “Brexit,” which resulted in the start of the withdrawal of Britain from the European Union.
A petition is in circulation for a California ballot proposition to advance the act of seceding from the Union.
With great sadness, however, I have to inform them that their plan is a non-starter. When a state joins the Union, it’s kind of like the Mafia: once in, never out.
It’s not a membership in a health spa or gym. In fact, we actually had a little event known as the Civil War back in the mid-1800s that made that point rather dramatically.
The Constitution goes to great lengths describing the process a state has to go through to join up. There’s not one single word about ever being able to pull out again. In fact, there have even been Supreme Court cases confirming that reality.
The crazies promoting this idea like to point out that if it were an independent country, California’s economy would be the eighth largest in the world. All well and good, but they also ignore other realities that attach to being an independent country.
About one-quarter of the illegal aliens in this country, approximately 3 million of them, live in this state. Additionally, about one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients live here, all while the state has only about one-eighth of the nation’s residents.
The only reason those demographics haven’t further bankrupted the state is that the costs of supporting these groups is defrayed and subsidized to a very large part by funding from the federal government, both directly and indirectly, through various grant, aid, and direct-funding programs.
But if California were to secede from the Union, that flow of money would stop dead in its tracks.
Then what? Jack up taxes on the already-overtaxed people in this state who already are subject to about the highest tax burden in the country?
Of course, this fantastical new Republic of California is going to have to be able to conduct foreign affairs and defend itself militarily, a huge new expense currently borne exclusively by the United States.
Where’s the money going to come from for all the new embassies everywhere, and professional diplomats? And for the new army, navy and air forces we’ll need, not to mention coastal security, meaning some form of Coast Guard?
Every country in the world has to have some kind of military capability to defend its existence and autonomy, at the very least, and the Republic of California is no different.
And don’t kid yourselves; in the eyes of ISIS and the rest of the Islamic jihadists, the new Republic of California will be just as much a “Great Satan” as the rest of the United States, meaning we’ll be participants in the “war on terror” whether we want to be or not. We don’t make that decision – they do.
So, how do we fund this stuff? Even more new taxes? I sure don’t see any other way to do it. Do you?
All of a sudden it starts to become clear that the only reason this state is “the eighth largest economy in the world” is because so many of the financial burdens of its very existence are borne by the country of which it’s a part.
But if that support goes away, and the already high tax burden on its remaining residents increases, not only will that economy collapse, but those remaining productive tax-paying residents will vote with their feet and start an exodus that will deplete this state of its last source of income.
The new Republic of California will turn into Venezuela North.
Brian Baker is a Saugus resident.
