Sometimes, not always, I consider WSJ as the Seeking Alpha equivalent of the economic news media with some narrow minded conservative journalists with an agenda of propaganda. The WSJ could have also called Alabama the Iran of the United States. Obviously, neither statement is true but it does make for perpetuating stereotypes.
This was the old WSJ back in the early 90s. As the right became more radical, first the editorial section of the WSJ became more conservative, and now that Murdoch owns it, it's Fox News Light.
I haven't read the WSJ, except the occasional article online, in years, but my father has read it every day since before I was born. He's always been a Republican, but he was an Eisenhower Republican when I was growing up. He not impressed by the John Birch Society and even William F Buckley. Over the last couple of decades he's been sounding more and more like the extreme right, though Trump was too much for him. He admitted to me in the summer of 2016 he was thinking of voting for a Democrat for president for the first time since he started voting in 1944. His conversion from moderate to more extreme mirrored the shift in the WSJ.
Ah, Portland OR, I have a love/hate relationship with the place. We have three close cousins who live there and visit periodically. Beautiful area when it is sunny which isn't often. Most people have a pasty complexion. Solar power is not as effective in Portland. Cold/wet climate plays hell with my lumbago. No sales tax but property and income tax are relatively high (but not as high as California) and real estate is expensive. And the place feels isolated to me. Flight connections are a real hassle. But Portland does have Pink Martini which is one of my favs and will be on my model 3 playlist. And I find the people are not as friendly as Californicans. To repeat from another thread, I think the Ducks SUCK and I hate Tillamook cheese. As far as wine, preference is highly personal. I am not a fan of relatively "heavy" wines like Pinot, Merlot, and Cabernet except with "heavy" foods like red meat and dark chocolate which I rarely consume. They are not good for sipping "au natural." The best value in wine is "Three Buck Chuck" from Trader Joe's which are mostly blended varietals from California (my deceased father was in the Central Valley California wine business).
We live on the Washington side of the Columbia. We have sales tax, but no income tax. I've found people here are more friendly than anywhere I lived in California. It being a smaller metro area than LA, San Diego, the Bay Area, or Seattle, there are fewer destinations reachable from PDX than airports in those other cities.
I don't follow sports much, especially college sports. Ducks, Beavers, Cougars, or Huskies, meh? My SO's law partner is an ex-hockey player. He got an NCAA scholarship to play for North Dakota at age 14. He was a big kid and it paid for his bachelor's, he decided to do something else when he injured his knee. He's a rabid fan of Portland's minor league hockey team and we follow the team some with him. That's about the only sport I follow much.
Solar is not as potent here. Part of it is the latitude, solar energy gets weaker the closer you get to a pole, but the winters can be overcast a fair bit. With cheap hydro even wind farms are ordered to shut down sometimes when the snow melt fed power is overly abundant. We pay $0.08/KWH for electricity. Where Bonnie lives it's even cheaper.
I'm still thinking about solar though. We have about the best possible exposure for solar in the area. Our house is rectangular with a big slab of roof pointing SW. We have a lot of windows on that side of the house and when it's sunny in the winter we don't run the heat. We had to put in an extra large A/C for summer. To get my office down to 80F in the summer we had to run the house A/C so much we had to wear sweaters downstairs. The old A/C burned out from the load. We now have zoned A/C that works much better and a much larger compressor for really hot days (it does get over 100F here, though only for a few days a year usually).
As for pinot noir, it's one of the lightest reds you can get. My SO hates wines that are too "cabby" and pinot is her favorite. She has found most California pinots to be too cabby, though Trader Joe's had a really good, and cheap pinot from California for a while. The Oregon pinots tend to be lighter than CA pinots.
My highly skilled handymen are undocumented Hispanics who I pay $30 per hour. My barber is Viet Namese. My primary care doctor is Indian. My mechanic is Muslim. My father's care giver was Filipina. My best friends are Canuckistanis. Yes, if you don't want to mix with large numbers of the unwashed masses from abroad, the kind of people like our ancestors who originally made America Great for themselves and their progeny (but not so much for First Nation people), then some other place that is less cosmopolitan may be best for you. Portland, a beautiful great place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there.
I grew up in Monterey Park two block from East LA City College. By the time I graduated high school it had the largest percentage Asian population in the US and Hispanics were very common too. I never went to a school that was more than 15% white until college. For some reason there were a lot of Armenians around too. About half the non-Asian, non-Hispanic kids I knew were Armenian.
Portland is more white than anywhere I've lived, but it is generally open minded about ethnic minorities and while racists exist everywhere, they aren't very prominent around here. From my background, I never grokked racism. I grew up in such a polyglot culture that I just see people with different skin tones, hair color, and possibly cultural artifacts like foods and family traditions. Nothing is inherently superior to anything else. Some cultures are better equipped for the modern world, but people can also change if they have the opportunity and incentive.
I look at this as a good thing.
The intolerant people who can't stand the diversity, social justice and work ethic of California are leaving. This has two benefits. It improves the cultural environment and average intelligence of California by getting rid of misfits. These people also improve the average intelligence of the places they move to since those are generally below average.
Win-win!
The migration probably has some element of this, but economics is also probably driving it. One of the moderators here recommended a book called American Nations to me a year or so back. It looks at the history and values of the different cultures that make up North America. California has a couple of different cultures, but the "Left Coast" culture dominates. The same culture dominates Washington and Oregon too, even though those states have the "Far West" culture in the east.
In that book he pointed out that mobility and better awareness of the different cultures is causing people to voluntarily migrate to cultures that fit their own biases. I had a friend who grew up in Texas and Alabama, but hated the culture there. Her father was from Oregon and loved the South. She moved here and is much happier, but her father is still in Alabama.
You can also see it in the Congressional districts around the country. Over the last 30 years fewer and fewer Congressional districts are competitive. Gerrymandering is blamed for it, and that is a factor in some states, but California became more Democratically dominated when it adopted Washington's congressional mapping system which is non-partisan.
And...... Washington (Seattle) just shot themselves in the foot by enacting a $275/year/ employee tax on large employers (over 20 mil gross) IIRC to take care of their homeless population. Why would they enact a socialist tax that punishes the largest employers that give the city the prosperity that it has? If I was setting up a company with any large billings I sure would not choose Seattle!
Amazon and Starbucks employ ~ 60,000 people there. Whats keeping them from moving elsewhere that is not so regressive??
Washington has had a contentious relationship with Boeing for 40+ years. Boeing is stuck in the Puget Sound region, it would cost too much to move their facilities out and Washington knows it. They did move their corporate HQ to Chicago in part because the CEO was from there and wanted to move home, but also a poke in the eye to the state.
The other big employers in the Seattle area: Costco, Amazon, Starbucks, and Microsoft tend to be socially pretty liberal, especially the last two. Microsoft offered same sex partner benefits to its employees long before it was a trend. When I did a stint at Microsoft the number of rainbow bumper stickers I saw in the parking garage was pushing 50%.
To companies that run lean like Amazon, a tax like that will probably affect them. Boeing is so staggeringly inefficient they will complain about the tax, but it really won't affect them. When I was working at Boeing, I heard Boeing was the largest consumer of office supplies in the state by a huge margin. And even though the office spaces could be spartan, they still were spending something like $120 an hour per office worker in 1990. I know I wasn't seeing most of that. I, along with the other engineers, were paid well under market rate. When they started laying off people one engineer who was from Eastern Washington started looking around back home and landed a gig with Reynold Aluminum and got a 50% pay hike. He was over the moon.
