Like FLA and GA? California has higher taxes, california also has internationally ranked economies at the city level.

Of course things could be better, and like a previous commenter mentioned, there are missing investments in housing, transportation and more. That is however, because of the continuous specter of the right winning state offices and the "left" party basically being centerist.

FL and GA have grown phenomenally in the past decades. FL had 6.7M in 1970 [0] and 21.8M in 2020 [1].

It’s not as big as California, but has had substantial growth.

Georgia is similar.

[0] https://fcit.usf.edu/florida/docs/c/census/1970.htm [1] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/FL

Georgia faster than the country as a whole during that period. Georgia's per capita income grew from 70% as much as the national average in 1945 to 94% in 2000: https://cslf.gsu.edu/files/2014/06/historical_perspective_of...

FLA/GA are not major ports. They also do not have the farm land. Prosperity is not entirely location dependent, but it is one of the largest factors. CA has the climate (at least during that period) and natural resources very few places in the world do.

FLA/GA are absolutely major ports. Savannah is the fourth busiest port in the US, right behind combined New Jersey/New York.

People will say anything to avoid admitting that a higher tax, slightly center right state is doing well because of those policies and politics

Cognitive dissonance, just like the fact that all of the red states have way higher gun deaths per capita than any blue state yet they'll scream about Chicago without looking at the actual numbers

> Cognitive dissonance, just like the fact that all of the red states have way higher gun deaths per capita than any blue state yet they'll scream about Chicago without looking at the actual numbers

That's not cognitive dissonance, just different definitions. Red staters focus on total homicides. Age-adjusted homicide rates don't bear any clear pattern with red states versus blue states: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/homicide_mortality.... https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/gun-ownersh...

Some of the states with the highest levels of gun ownership, like Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Minnesota, and Maine, have the lowest levels of homicides. Rhode Island has far fewer guns than Maine and New Hampshire, but all three have similar homicide rates.

Focusing on homicides where guns weren't involved in a conversation about guns is disingenuous and distracts from the issue at hand