The WSJ Editorial Page - Always good for a laugh...

Noah Smith brings the pain to the WSJ editorial page.
Mind you, that is somewhat unto shooting fish in a barrel, but it is still fun to read a comprehensive and thorough Fisking

He first calls attention to what appears to be a massive exodus from the Golden State:

Nearly four million more people have left the Golden State in the last two decades than have come from other states. This is a sharp reversal from the 1980s...

Wow, California must be well on its way to being a ghost town. Oh wait, no. Because during those past two decades, immigration more than made up the difference. California's population has risen from 29.8 million to 37.3 million.

[...]Next up, we have some pure unadulterated old-fashioned bullshit:

"[I]f you're a guy working for a Silicon Valley company and you're married and you're thinking about having your first kid, and your family makes 250-k a year, you can't buy a closet in the Bay Area," Mr. Kotkin says.

The median home price in the Bay Area is indeed high: about $358,000. For an income of $250,000, that gives a price-to-income ratio of about 1.4. This is lower than the average price-to-income ratio for housing in any major U.S. city, and far lower than the national average. In other words, while housing in the Bay Area is not cheap, if you have $250k you will easily be able to buy a house. I have friends and family in the Bay who make less than this and own very nice houses in Silicon Valley and North Berkeley. So Kotkin is just spewing forth falseness.

And it doesn't stop! This little jaw-dropper may be the most awe-inspiring of all:

As a result, California is turning into a two-and-a-half-class society. On top are the "entrenched incumbents" who inherited their wealth or came to California early and made their money... 

It's "a very scary political dynamic," he says. "One day somebody's going to put on the ballot, let's take every penny over $100,000 a year, and you'll get it through because there's no real restraint."

So California's decadent rich are intent upon having the state government take every penny of their riches, thus rendering themselves instantly non-rich? California is about to become a communist plutocracy?

Does Joel Kotkin even, you know, think before the words bounce trippingly forth from his tongue?

Theres more where this came from.  Go read it!