In recent years, blue states have blundered repeatedly, taxing and regulating too much, pushing woke education on their failing schools, and driving productive citizens out with their reckless policies, as our exclusive report recently pointed out. California, led by its largest and wealthiest city, Los Angeles, is perhaps the prime example. But while some blue states are at least trying to correct course, no turnaround is in sight for the Golden State.

With recent disasters revealing the incompetence, greed and extreme politicization of its so-called leaders, California careens from crisis to calamity. The Los Angeles riots, entering a second week, are only the latest manifestation of the state’s steady decline, a symptom, not a cause.

We’re not new to this story. We’ve been writing about California’s decline since the early 2000s. But it’s growing worse, as two incisive critics of California’s political class and its insane “progressive” policies, Joel Kotkin and Victor Davis Hanson, separately have written. California is on the road to ruin, if not already there.

“Rather than a model for the future, Los Angeles today offers a masterclass in urban dysfunction,” Kotkin wrote last week in “Los Angeles has fallen.” “Drive through the streets of the South Side or along Central Avenue – historically black L.A.’s main thoroughfare, now predominantly Hispanic – and the ambience increasingly resembles that of Mexico City or Mumbai: cracked pavements, dilapidated buildings, outdoor swap-meet markets and food stalls serving customers, much as one would see in the developing world.”

Remember: This is the city slated to host both the World Cup (2026) and the Olympic Games (2028) over the next few years. What will visitors see?

Again, here’s Kotkin, in a devastating summation of the once-great city’s ills:

“Once a middle-class haven with a broad industrial base, L.A. now has the highest poverty rate in California – and among the worst nationwide. Failing schools, dilapidated parks and an exodus of residents and firms suggest the city’s long-term prospects could be bleak.”

So welcome to L.A.!

After the city’s (and state’s) incompetence in dealing with last winter’s devastating wildfires that swept the city, making thousands homeless, many of its wealthiest inhabitants are giving up. Not only are they not rebuilding (absurdly stringent regulations in many cases make it almost impossible), they’re moving elsewhere.

Meanwhile, in a recent commentary, Hanson zeroes in on the role that California’s “sanctuary state” status plays in the state’s and L.A.’s continuing decline.

“California’s elected officials seem clueless that the optics of illegal immigrants torching autos, attacking law enforcement, or pelting bystanders, while waving Mexican flags, are terrible,” Hanson writes. “What is the logic of waving the flag of the country to which one is violently opposed to returning, while assaulting the officers and infrastructure of the very nation in which one is demanding to remain?”

If Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom and far-left Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass think Americans will be sympathetic, they’re wrong. As Hanson notes, a recent CBS poll found that 54% of Americans support deporting those here illegally, particularly those who commit crimes.

Will this, too, pass? Or does it signal the end of the Golden State?

It’s painful to say, but after a century and a half of boom times, California’s best years are behind it. The state recently crowed about a reversal in its population shrinkage, but failed to note that the recent growth actually came from former President Joe Biden’s massive influx of illegal immigrants.

Meanwhile, California’s most productive citizens and major businesses are heading for the exits. No surprise: California has been ranked as having “the worst business climate in America.”

Its population decline is especially alarming. As the Public Policy Institute of California recently noted, “the primary driver of the state’s population slowdown has been California residents moving to other states. And while the most recent data suggest the flow out has abated somewhat, it remains at near record levels.”

Indeed, California has lost people to other states every year since 2000. All told, from 2010 to 2023, California showed a net loss of 2.5 million people who, fed up, moved elsewhere, according to data from the American Community Survey.

With California’s generous welfare and health benefits for illegals, and hands-off policy by local police, is it any surprise the state has a massive $10 billion to $20 billion “structural” deficit, despite the highest taxes in the nation?

Fires, riots, high taxes, out-of-control streets, rampant homelessness, drug abuse and a burgeoning illegal population are just a handful of the unaddressed problems that California and its No. 1 city face today.

Sadly, neither Los Angeles’ radical mayor (she was literally a Fidel Castro follower and member of the extremist Cuban Venceremos Brigade) nor the state’s slick-but-vapid pretty boy governor, is up to fixing the problems. In fact, after California’s sharp left political turn in the last two decades, things will only get worse.

With many disgruntled Californians already gone, the state can turn around only if its remaining voters stop putting hard-left politicians in office. Until then, Californians, don’t complain! Decline is a choice. You voted for decline. Now you’ve got it.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board