Much of the blame is on the media which will not report truly nasty, hateful, outrageous remarks (and lies) and actions of Democrats the way they gleefully do with Republicans.
The media would have you’d think Republicans are your enemy and Democrats are your angels. (Hells angels are more like it.)

If all one hears is continuous hyped-up comments with the intent to inflame, is it any wonder many people will simply begin to believe it, rather than investigate the truth for themselves?

The companies you mention are but a fraction of the once great power of the US economy, but examined closely both Apple and Intel have little more than a token presence in this country, HP is struggling to survive and also does much/most of its manufacturing overseas.

Ebay is nothing more than a glorified local “garage sale” which produces no product at all. Facebook and Yahoo are a “flash in the pan” that produce nothing of value either. And most of the aerospace industry that once called California home is no longer there, with Boeing now being the largest aerospace company and is mainly located in Seattle.

What you describe is what California is best known for worldwide — glitz and fantasy.

You are right to focus on tax policy – it is at the center of the debate. Republican “mythical thinking” on economics (Ronald Reagan), taxes (Howard Jarvis), fiscal policy, and ham-strung government were at first so appealing because it seemed to offer us the ultimate free lunch – pay no taxes, yet enjoy have all the comforts of a first-world society.

That was a misconception – we were really only living off our reserves. Now after 30 years of liquidating our national assets, eroding our infrastructure, shortchanging our schools, and degrading our entire society, the mask has come off, and we are no longer confronted by benign myth-tellers.

Today, we stand face-to-face opposite hard-core fanatics from the hedge funds and casinos of Wall Street and Las Vegas, leveraged takeover artists (Mitt Romney), Washington D.C. con men like Grover Norquist, and an assortment of snake-oil salesmen and radical pundits from Rush Limbaugh to the clown cast of Fox “News” brazenly pursuing their “starve government, then drown it in the bathtub” philosophy.

What a difference 30 years of experience can make! We now see how Republican policy drove us headlong into non-functional government, dilapidated cities, broken infrastructure, run-down schools, failing education, unaffordable public universities, and a wealth gap between the average working citizen and the 1%, or 0.1%, that is unknown in the rest of the industrial world, common only in third-world conditions of Africa and Latin America.

The one thing I find amazing is that this idea-bankrupt Republican Party can still get 53% of white voters to support them. Fortunately, the divisive, barely coded appeals to racism, ethnic hatred, misogyny, and sexual discrimination used to mobilize large parts of this “base” have also begun to backfire.

Today, the backward-looking Republican Party is losing ground in California, and increasingly across the country, because the real consequences of its hard-core economic policies have become transparent to us, and we reject them.

But Republicanism is also losing its grip on America because its divisive culture wars are finally creating enough blow-back to help us to meld a new, progressive, forward-moving coalition throughout our society and across our country.

We are in the process of remaking America, and it will be a great country we build — more just and more equal, with more liberty and freedom for all, than anything the Republican Party will ever have to offer.

A long time ago there used to be a popular saying (at least in the Midwest) that was both dismissive of, and accurately portrayed California for what it really is.

“A land of fruits and nuts”.

It has gotten a lot worse since then.