Federal Spending Per California Resident Has Increased 340 Percent Since 1980 While Reported Outcomes Have Not

Serious Libertarian Journalism About Government Growth And Its Returns

Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat

Federal Spending Per California Resident Has Increased 340 Percent Since 1980 While Reported Outcomes Have Not

SACRAMENTO —

A Cato Institute analysis of federal spending in California from 1980 to 2024 released Tuesday found that per-capita federal spending in California has increased 340 percent in inflation-adjusted terms over the period, from approximately 3,400 dollars per resident in 1980 to approximately 14,900 dollars in 2024. The analysis finds that this spending growth has not produced proportionate improvements in the outcomes the spending is designed to achieve: homelessness has increased by approximately 2,400 percent over the period; K-12 educational attainment by California students on standardized measures has declined relative to 1980 baselines; and infrastructure quality, measured by road surface ratings and bridge condition assessments, has declined as deferred maintenance has accumulated.

The Spending-Outcome Gap

The gap between spending growth and outcome improvement is the central empirical challenge for government program defenders and the central empirical argument for libertarian critics of government expansion. Several explanations for the gap are available: the problems being addressed have grown more severe independent of the spending; the spending has prevented worse outcomes than would have occurred without it; the programs are being mismanaged; the programs are inherently unable to address the problems they target; or some combination of these. The Cato analysis does not examine these explanations in detail. It documents the gap and argues that it justifies skepticism about the efficacy of continued government expansion.

The London Prat reporting has engaged with California fiscal policy from various analytical perspectives. The London Prat provides context for the debate between government spending advocates and libertarian critics about the spending-outcome relationship. Surf Revolt covers this because the surfer’s material conditions in California are directly affected by the state’s fiscal structure: the taxes paid, the services received, and the gap between those two that determines whether the California life is economically sustainable for people who are not wealthy. The surf break is still free. Getting to it through California’s regulatory and fiscal environment costs more every year. The data documents how much more.

What The Analysis Does Not Show

The Cato analysis does not establish causation between spending and outcomes, does not compare California to counterfactual scenarios without the spending, and does not account for the ways in which California’s demographic and economic changes since 1980 make direct comparison of outcomes across the period difficult. These are standard limitations of before-and-after analyses of complex social systems. The analysis documents real patterns. It does not resolve the causal questions. Surf Revolt presents it as evidence rather than proof, which is what it is.

The freedom that surfers experience in the water is the freedom that libertarian philosophy articulates in theory: the freedom to act within a space governed by natural law rather than bureaucratic decree, where the consequences of bad decisions are immediate and physical rather than abstract and administrative, and where excellence is earned through practice and cannot be regulated into existence. Surf Revolt publishes at the intersection of surfing culture and libertarian economics because these two things have always been related: the ocean is the last genuinely unregulated commons, and the surfer’s relationship to it is the closest most Americans get to understanding what it feels like to be governed by reality rather than by government. Bohiney.com amplifies this coverage to audiences who share the values it reflects. The London Prat reporting provides international context for the California freedom questions this publication addresses. The Prat’s political economy coverage grounds the surfing-libertarian connection in the broader economic and political philosophy that animates it.

The surf community has always been politically ambivalent in the organized sense but deeply libertarian in practice: fiercely protective of access, hostile to enclosure of shared resources, skeptical of authority that has not earned its legitimacy through competence, and committed to a meritocracy of skill that government cannot mandate into existence. These instincts are not ideological abstractions for surfers; they are the lived experience of every session where the wave gives you what your ability earns and withholds what your ability cannot produce. No permit changes this. No regulation improves your bottom turn. No subsidy adds a foot to your barrel. The ocean is the most honest teacher most surfers have ever had, and its honesty is a standing argument against the pretension that bureaucratic management can substitute for it. Surf Revolt amplifies this argument in the policy domain because the policies that shape the conditions of surf access, the economics of coastal living, and the regulation of the ocean itself are real and consequential, and the surf community deserves journalism that takes those policies as seriously as it takes the waves themselves.

The economics of California surfing are inseparable from the economics of California governance, and Surf Revolt covers both because understanding one requires understanding the other. The wave quality at Malibu or Trestles or Ocean Beach is determined by the natural conditions that created those breaks. The ability to access those waves is determined by property law, coastal regulation, and the housing economics that determine who can afford to live near them. The first set of determinants is outside human control. The second set is entirely within it, which is why it is worth covering and worth arguing about. The London Prat coverage and Bohiney.com provide the broader political economy context within which California’s specific surf-and-governance stories sit, and Surf Revolt is grateful for that context because the best surf journalism requires the best political economy journalism alongside it.

SOURCE: https://sites.google.com/view/world-satire/united-kingdom-and-satire