This follows two years of losing a total of a half million residents.
Don't worry, though: Illegal aliens are helping to make up for the losses.
This year marked the fourth consecutive year of population loss for the Golden State. And although it's slowing from the previous two years, when California lost half a million residents, the federal estimates show that the exodus hasn't stopped. The state's projected net loss comes despite an uptick in foreign immigration that brought 126,000 people into California last year.
California has reached the point of diminishing returns in the socialist game of taking other people's money. The people with the money are fleeing for more hospitable states, and California will soon be begging the US government to tax its citizens and give that money to California.
The census analysis comes as California's Democratic leaders face a $68 billion deficit next year, exacerbated in part by high numbers of wealthy people leaving the state for lower taxes and cost of living. Government budget analysts have already warned that California will have to deal with $30 billion deficits for at least the three succeeding years.
"People are fleeing our state in droves," California GOP chairwoman Jessica Millan Patterson said in a statement regarding the latest projections. "While the red states [that Democratic governor Gavin] Newsom loves to hate continue to grow in population, California's sky-high cost of living, surging crime, homeless crisis, and failing schools aren't a very compelling case for why people should stay here."
While lower-income and middle-class Californians initially led the charge in fleeing the state's high cost of living, wealthy people are increasingly fleeing as well, the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California reported this year. More college graduates are leaving the state than entering, in a reversal of a longtime trend.
The loss of wealthy residents takes a particular toll on the state's finances, which depend on rich taxpayers. Last year, the top 1 percent of earners paid about 40 percent of California's income taxes.
The loss likely translates into diminished national political power as well. Following the 2020 census, California for the first time in its history lost a congressional seat. Analysts predict that in 2030, the state will lose up to five seats.
The LA Times, an organization which certainly knows who butters its bread, is alarmed at all the high-income Californians (read: the people whose parties they wish they were invited to) are fleeing the state, and taking their tax revenues with them.
Even though California has experienced lopsided out-migration for decades, the financial blow has been cushioned by the kinds of people moving into the state: The newcomers were generally better educated and earned more money than those who left.
Not now: That long-standing trend has reversed. New state-to-state migration data show that for the last several years, thousands more high-earning, well-educated workers have left California than have moved in.
The reversal, largely in response to the state's high taxes and soaring cost of living, has begun to damage California's overall economy. And, by cutting into tax revenues, has delivered punishing blows to state and local governments.
Who abducted the LA Times and forced them to admit that which they have always previously refused to admit?!!?
State budget analysts recently projected a record $68-billion deficit in the next fiscal year thanks to a 25% drop in personal income tax collection in 2023. Some city, county and other local taxing authorities, particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area, have also recorded revenue declines.
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[R]ising unemployment in the state and the growing flight of professionals, business operators and others making good salaries were... notable contributors. And those factors will be harder to reverse, at least in the foreseeable future.
"There's a price to pay for the movement of middle and upper-income people and corporations," said Joel Kotkin, a fellow at Chapman University who has researched the flight from California and the resulting threat to the state's fiscal outlook. "People who are leaving are taking their tax dollars with them."
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But it's not just the sheer numbers of people who have left. What's different is that in each of the prior two years, more than 250,000 Californians with at least a bachelor's degree moved out, while an average of 175,000 college graduates from other states settled in California, according to an analysis of census data by William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution.
In prior periods over the last two decades, that balance was about even or slightly in California's favor, even though the state consistently lost many more residents overall to other states than it gained from them. The recent out-migration has been particularly pronounced among Californians with graduate and professional degrees.
California is heavily dependent on high earners to meet government fiscal needs. Tax filers in the top 1% of income, earning around $1 million and above, have typically accounted for 40% to 45% of the state's total personal income tax revenue, said Brian Uhler, deputy legislative analyst at California's Legislative Analyst's Office, which estimated the $68-billion budget deficit.
The area of the country gaining the most in population is, as you'd guess, the south.
The vast majority of growth, 87%, came from the South, a region the Census Bureau defines as stretching from Texas to Maryland and Delaware. But the concentration of growth seen during the height of the pandemic in Texas, Florida, North Carolina and Georgia diminished in 2023.
"We peaked in the movement of people to those Sun Belt hotshots," Frey said. "It's tapering off a little bit."
South Carolina's 1.7% growth rate topped all other states, and its population rose by more than 90,000 residents. More than 90% of the growth came from domestic migration, or people moving from another U.S. state to South Carolina. Without domestic and international migration, the Palmetto State would have lost population in 2023 with almost 1,300 more deaths than births.
Florida had the next-highest growth rate at 1.6%, adding more than 365,000 residents. That was also the second-highest growth in terms of raw numbers. Only Texas surpassed it, gaining more than 473,000 people. More people moved to Florida than any other's U.S. state this year, with the almost 373,000 movers about evenly split between domestic and international. Significantly fewer residents died in Florida compared to last year, leading to a natural decrease of only around 7,600 people.
ABC "News," which reports this story, is totally stoked about all the immigration which is totally not replacing the native born population.
The number of immigrants to the U.S. jumped to the highest level in two decades this year, driving the nation's overall population growth, according to estimates released Tuesday by the U.S. Census Bureau.
The United States added 1.6 million people, more than two-thirds of which came from international migration, bringing the nation's population total to 334.9 million. It marks the second year in a row that immigration powered population gains.