Kalen,
California farmers are becoming less competitive every year. Business taxes, licensing, endless red tape - and competition for water with the population explosion. All those housing projects, approved with bribes (call it what it is), horrendously expensive health care (nice job Obama) that provides less every year (but the insurance rates still climb out of control) . . . . and then FUEL and petroleum products (which includes plastics).
The imbeciles in the statehouse have just about harassed and strangled our trucking companies out of business, which has made long-haul transportation mostly non-competitive. Depending on the item and time of year, Mexico, Eastern Canada and South America - due to the cost of running a business in California - can produce and deliver most items far cheaper than we can.
Our "break even" numbers out here have risen to astronomical levels - for example - a box of wrapped iceberg lettuce now costs well north of $10 a box to grow, pick, pack, cool and ship. Fuel costs have essentially doubled - and with the labor shortage (since Biden passed out printed money like it was Halloween candy, so nobody wants to work), freight rates have also nearly doubled.
So, let's use a box of romaine to do the exercise. If it costs me $11 to produce and ship 24 heads (assuming a $1 profit or I will be go out of business) and $10 a box in freight to New York, the delivered cost is $21, still with me?
But the Eastern Canadians (being subsidized and not being gouged to death on water) can produce the same thing through the growing season up there for $8.00 (US $'s) - but their freight costs are only $5, being much closer - that leaves an $8 disparity. Eastern French Canucks are not dummies. If CA product costs us $20 just to break even, they can sell comparable product for $18 delivered and make a $5 profit on every box.
Now, extrapolate that (in Winter, out of Mexico and south) for nearly every item they can grow to compete with us, California growers have been artificially made non-competitive, largely because of burdens imposed by the government. Every year, the noose gets tighter, every year the taxes get higher - and Estate taxes destroy thousands of family owned farming - which is easy pickings for corporate America, who snap up the entrails at wildly reduced prices.
Oh yeah, corporations don't pay "Death Taxes" - which is what I've been struggling with for the last 19 months and counting - selling chunks of real estate to pay taxes that took a lifetime to pay off. The bottom line, net net is this: No regulatory law is passed by our one-party state unless it further enriches our wasteful, jackbooted, incompetent government - and all the printed fiat money in the world is not going to solve these problems when the inevitable economic corrections start to detonate.
He who controls the water, he who controls the tax code and he who inflicts these increasingly onerous regulations makes the rules. And they can change the rules of the game anytime they want, because there is nobody to stop them. Most farmers are conservative, so the only way we stay afloat is to fight constant uphill battles against a hostile one-party government that is supposed to protect and encourage American commerce and our food supply - while companies like Nike wag a scolding finger with all this bullshit virtue signalling, making those $150 tennis shoes not in America, but by slave labor overseas.
As for golf communities, when the government cuts them off at the knees - since we don't build dams - their houses along the fairway are not going to be worth a nickel.