Idaho
A public service announcement for my fellow Idahoans.
Ben Page · August 15, 2026 · 14 min read
You've said it. California is a failed state. You said it with total confidence — maybe while leaning on a tailgate whose truck nuts come from a company in California called Bulls Balls. Everyone nodded, because everyone in your bubble says it too. Which is the entire basis of your confidence.
You're like the guy who "dominates" Saturday-morning pickup and is convinced he's better than half the NBA. That isn't confidence. It's pride running on ignorance — and it looks ridiculous to anyone who's watched the league. I know, because I'm from Idaho — raised on the same certainties. Here's the problem: you're wrong. The data's public, it isn't close, but you've never checked — not really.
Let's go through the things you actually say. Out loud. To other adults. (And if you're the kind who's looked up a few numbers — good. You're going to enjoy what's coming.)
The "failed state" produced $4.25 trillion in 2025 — up five percent from the year it passed Japan. The country. A hundred and twenty-three million people, lapped by one American state. California is running with the big boys — neck and neck with India and Japan. It grew again, by more than Idaho's entire economy. Failing states don't sit at the table of the top 10 biggest nations on earth — and post such big growth numbers, consistently. (A hot yen and revised books have since inched Japan back ahead.)
What about Idaho? It produced $135 billion that same year — sounds respectable, until you do the math: California generates one entire Idaho economy every twelve days. By the end of February, it's built five Idahos. It hasn't noticed. It's busy with the sixth. And before you reach for "of course — forty million people": ask why forty million people. States don't get handed populations; they attract them, one family at a time. The size isn't an excuse. The size is the verdict.
You've been calling a top-five economy on Earth a failed state. In public. For years. That's the stat line of the league you've never watched because you just know your game is better.
Half to three-quarters of a percent a year. That's the "mass exodus" — two to three hundred thousand net, out of 39.4 million. It would be far more accurate to say "everyone is staying."
The most famous leaver? Rogan went to Austin, loudly — and he sold his California house to someone who wanted it even more. And get the rest of their motives right. Some are genuinely done with the taxes or the politics — people leave places. But mostly they're not escaping California. They're cashing it out — a house sold at a price that doesn't exist in Idaho because fewer people want the house in Idaho, carried east to buy land that's cheap for exactly the same reason — less demand. Arbitrage — and you already know it: half of Meridian watched its neighborhoods get bought with Bay Area equity.
Your housing boom wasn't Idaho winning. It was California liquidity arriving.
Look at what the smart money actually does. The AI boom planted itself in San Francisco. OpenAI holds about a million square feet of it; Anthropic nearly as much, including one entire tower for its next headquarters. By mid-2026, San Francisco office leasing was on pace for its strongest year since 1996, and fourteen of America's hundred largest office leases of 2025 were in the Bay Area — led by AI. The most valuable young companies on Earth keep choosing the city you're eulogizing.
And if your answer is that AI is a bubble — maybe. You might even be right. But the last time everyone said that about California was 2000, and the crash came, and what grew out of the rubble was Google and the biggest companies on Earth — in the same three counties. Bubbles pop where things get built. The arena is there. The bleachers are here.
And Musk? He moved Tesla, X, and SpaceX to Texas, loudly — then quietly moved the real stuff back to Palo Alto: Tesla's engineers, fresh office space for xAI. The letterhead went to Austin. The engineering stayed home.
And the churn runs the same direction: of California's 53,000-plus corporate headquarters, relocations cost about a hundred a year net — while new ones were born at more than two thousand a year. Chevron and Oracle are real losses. They're also a rounding error.
Run down the roster of who signs the good paychecks in your own town. It's outside money top to bottom — companies from bigger economies walking in and showing Idaho how it's done. Costco starts everyone at twenty. Chobani of New York starts at $21 in Twin Falls — and in 2025 bet another half-billion dollars on expanding the plant. Glanbia of Ireland. (Simplot and WinCo are real homegrown giants — granted.) The rest bring the money and the jobs. They keep coming from the places you've been told are failing. None of that is a scandal — many healthy economies run on outside money. The only scandal is the story that says you don't.
Here is one you might know about. In-N-Out of California — when it opened in Meridian in December 2023, half the Treasure Valley stood in an eight-hour line, in the cold, for a hamburger. That burger stand pays $17.50 an hour against Idaho's going rate at the time of $11.25. Its store managers, promoted up from the fryer, average — by the company's own count — $180,000 a year. For running a burger stand. You've been waiting for trickle-down from tax-funded farm subsidies — but it's coming from the state you hate.
And the region that talks the loudest about self-reliance? Eastern Idaho's anchor employer is the Idaho National Laboratory — a federal nuclear facility, some 6,300 jobs and over $2 billion a year. The corner of the state most certain it built itself runs on Washington's payroll — and nobody funds that payroll like California. (Not a typo. California pays more into the federal pot than it takes out — receipts coming in a minute.) Here's the twist: Idaho ranks second in America in patents per resident — and they come off Micron's engineering floors and the lab's PhD benches. There are two Idahos: the university-trained people inventing things on federal money and outside capital — and everyone else, being told by the radio that universities are the problem.
No. The number one agricultural state in America is California — $61.2 billion in farm receipts, nearly half the nation's vegetables, three-quarters of its fruits and nuts — nearly 12 percent of America's entire farm output. The land of oat-milk and yoga pants out-farms Famous Potatoes five to one.
Farming is less than 1 percent of California's economy. It's their hobby farm. And it clobbers Idaho. It's not close. And your farming is real: first in potatoes, first in barley, third in milk. But in total farm receipts, Idaho is seventeenth — one spot behind Washington. Next time you're in the produce section, feel some pride for the potato — then notice more than half of everything else in the bins is California feeding you.
Laugh at the course catalog — perhaps some of it is laughable. You've been warned what comes out of those campuses: the communists, the furries, the whole imaginary onslaught. So name three courses you object to — actual ones, out of an actual catalog. Now judge the factory by what ships: the internet's first nodes, Google out of a PhD project, biotech born at UCSF, more Nobel Prizes on Berkeley's faculty than most countries have. The "failed socialist system" keeps minting trillion-dollar companies within bicycle distance of the quad — a trick no actual socialist economy has ever pulled off.
Your counter-model exports its sharpest kids — and they don't come back. The rest? Barely four in ten of your graduates go on to college at all — near the lowest rate in the nation, against your own state board's goal of six in ten.
Idaho is genuinely safe — you get that one. But the national story is backwards: by CDC mortality data, murder rates in Trump-voting states have beaten Biden-voting states every year on record this century — 2000 through 2022, the latest count — and across those years the gap holds even with red states' biggest cities removed. Shreveport, Louisiana, in 2023: 41 murders per 100,000. San Francisco — the hellscape, the b-roll: 6.6, and falling since — by 2025, the lowest since 1954. (And when the numbers got ugly, Californians corrected — recalled a DA, passed Prop 36 by 68 to 32. They checked their own numbers.)
Your safety is real, and it comes from small towns and open country, not from your legislature. Leaving the truck unlocked in a town of nine hundred isn't a policy achievement — and it doesn't earn Boise bragging rights. And the homeless? A conservative think tank tested 54 variables; the overwhelming predictor is housing price-to-income. Not drugs. Not Democrats. The lowest homelessness in America is in Mississippi — nobody moves to Mississippi for the governance.
Some of it is legitimate — and it changes nothing. Feeling superior to California because it has different problems is the guy on the bicycle feeling superior to the guy in the Lamborghini because the Lamborghini's service bill is outrageous. It is! And the bicycle is still a bicycle. High-performance machines have high-performance operating costs. The absence of those costs isn't virtue. It's the absence of the machine.
Even the tax tables run backwards from the story. For the millionaire it's true — California's top rate is the highest in the country. Notice what hasn't happened: after a decade-plus of it, the rich haven't fled — California still holds more millionaires than any other state, nearly double second-place Texas. The stampede to the Caymans keeps being predicted and keeps not showing up. For the waitress it flips: the poorest fifth of Texans pay 12.8 percent of their income in state and local taxes; the poorest fifth of Californians, 11.7. The property tax on a home? Texas charges double California's rate. "Low-tax state" depends entirely on your tax bracket.
Here's the funny part: Idaho, of all places, laughing at somebody's tax code. Your state taxes the waitress's groceries at the full six percent — one of the last states in America still doing it — then hands back a credit that roughly cancels it, provided you know to file. When your legislature scrapped the graduated income tax for a flat one, 58 percent of the benefit went to households above $113,000. And that's the joke inside the joke: California gets criticized for taxing its rich to give its little people a shot. In Idaho, the little people pay a bigger share than their own rich — the bottom fifth pays 9.5 percent; the top 1 percent pays 6.4 — and they cheer for it, because someday it's all going to trickle down.
And when the arithmetic finally breaks a low-wage family, it's Washington's earned-income credit that catches them — the one Boise declined to match. Idaho leaves its people in the dirt and keeps its boot planted right on their necks. You have strong opinions about who California's tax code serves. Check who yours serves.
California's worst problem — housing — is simple: everyone on Earth wants in, and for decades it chose not to build enough homes. That one choice drives nearly every ugly number it owns, including the worst: by the cost-adjusted Census measure, California's poverty ties for worst in the nation. It's real, it's damning — and it's the housing shortage wearing its true face.
And maybe, deep down, that's your actual position — you don't want the growth. You want the fishing hole to yourself, the trailhead empty, the state small and quiet and yours. Fine. Honestly — fine. But pick a story, because you only get one: the humble caretaker of an empty paradise, or the swaggering rival of a top-five economy. The caretaker doesn't trash-talk. The rival has to show up to the game. It's fine to love the empty land. But California deserves your respect — even your admiration — not your ignorant contempt.
Feel that heat in your face? That's not me — that's a belief meeting a fact. It has two cures: get angry at the messenger, or check the numbers. Every number above is public. Five seconds each. But don't stop reading, because the punchline of this piece isn't that you were wrong about California.
It's who needed you wrong — and what they were doing while you were pointing west.
Your real enemy isn't California. Your real enemies are behind closed doors in Boise — the statehouse and Big Ag, a crowd of politicians and a bunch of business people throwing a party as old as the state itself, catered by your tax dollars and by the federal money donor states like California keep sending. You're not invited. You get a Don't Tread On Me sticker and a radio station explaining that the problem is San Francisco.
Wait, this can't be right, can it? Idaho is the most conservative state in the union, right? They are fiscally conservative and they don't do corruption. Think again.
Idaho has been on the federal teat since before it was a state — chartered by Congress, homesteaded on federal land — the sacred potato heartland was sagebrush until Washington plumbed it. I have no problem with any of it — your great-grandfather earned his claim with his back. But the homestead defense covers the dead. It's the living arrangement that convicts: federal money is 37.2 percent of Idaho's state budget — over five billion dollars, per the Idaho Freedom Foundation itself. State budgets in Medicaid-era America run about a third federal on average — California's included, at about 33 percent.
The question is who fills the pot — and nobody in your bubble's barbecue will believe the answer. In 2023 the average Californian paid about $15,300 in federal taxes; the average Idahoan, about $10,300. California's 33 percent is drinking its own pour; Idaho's 37 is drinking somebody else's.
In the latest accounting — federal fiscal 2023, with pandemic money still washing through the books — every state Trump carried took out more than it put in. Idaho pulled $1.41 for every dollar it sent. And California? Strip out the pandemic checks and average the last nine years on the books, and it's the biggest net payer in America: $29 billion a year, subsidizing the states that despise it. Idaho is one of them. The state you've been taught to mock helps pay your state's bills.
Even Micron, the largest for-profit company headquartered in your state, took a $6.1 billion federal chip-subsidy award in 2024 — money for its new fabs in Boise and upstate New York — and here's the part that should make you put the beer down (root beer if you're in Rexburg): that money comes from a law your entire congressional delegation voted against. They knew it would pass. They wanted it to pass. They just wanted to look like they didn't. Then Risch showed up for the groundbreaking. And if you doubt the no was theater: all four put their names on a joint press release applauding the Micron expansion that the law they voted against paid for. Your state government sucks and sucks on that teat, coming up for air just long enough to pontificate about self-reliance.
Here's how you know the party is Boise's, not just Washington's: the baron money is automatic — no statehouse signature required. But every federal dollar aimed at a person needs Boise to say yes — and Boise keeps finding ways to say no. Medicaid expansion? Stonewalled six years, until you forced them. Summer lunch money? Refused, three years running. Nobody in Boise has ever refused a dollar headed for a feedlot. A no like that isn't thrift — the money was free. The no is a product. "We said no to Washington" is what wins a closed Republican primary in this state, and the primary is the only election that counts here. The lunch was the price of the billboard.
Meanwhile the local ag economy pays so little that Idaho's dairy industry — in one of the most stridently anti-immigration states in the union — runs on a workforce its own trade association calls roughly 90 percent foreign-born; its own commissioned study warns that losing the undocumented half alone would cut dairy output 45 percent — and that stripping out the state's foreign-born workforce would cost Idaho's economy $5.1 billion.
Say it out loud: the loudest immigration hawks in America can't milk a cow without immigrants. The barons get the subsidies, the immigrants get the poverty wages, and you get a bumper sticker and the tax bill — all while the politicians who coordinate it grin in your face, pat your back, and kiss your babies.
$5.9 billion in federal farm subsidies — all programs — has flowed into Idaho since 1995. In the commodity programs, the checks themselves, the top 10 percent of recipients collected 76 percent of the money. That top tier isn't the little guy feeding his cows and waiting on his check. It's crony ag capitalism — the big corporate operations, the ones in the room.
And that $5.9 billion is the small ledger — its crop-insurance line counts only the premium support, not what the government pays the private insurers to write the policies or the losses it eats when they go bad — and the names on those policies are sealed by law. And the structure isn't weather — it's authored: every Idaho member present voted yes on the 2014 and 2018 farm bills, and all four voted yes on the 2025 bill that raised the cap and multiplied the entities. Your senior senator helped write it as Finance chairman.
The checks work like this: grow wheat, corn, or barley, and when prices dip, Washington pays you — up to $164,000 a year per person, a cap Congress raised in 2025 and then indexed to inflation, so it climbs on its own now without anyone having to vote. Potatoes never show up in that program because the famous crop rides the other pipe — crop insurance: taxpayers paid about $6 million of Idaho potato growers' premiums in 2025, on half a billion dollars of coverage, no cap, no income test — premiums paid out of the federal pot, the one the average Californian fills half again faster than you do. And that cap on the checks is theater — a "person" can be a paper entity, and the big operations stack them: one farm, twenty-two LLCs, per GAO. Reviewed, and approved. Nobody broke a rule. That's the point. Grazing on public land runs $1.69 a month per cow and calf, against $20.50 for private pasture in Idaho — and the largest rancher on BLM land in America is Simplot, the homegrown giant itself.
The small farmer — the face on every brochure, the hero of every floor speech? He gets the trickle — the bottom 80 percent of recipients in the commodity programs have averaged about $355 a year. That was never enough to buy anybody. It isn't a bribe; it's a membership card — just enough to make him feel like a participant, defending the cap as though it were his cap and the subsidy as though it were his policy. He isn't a beneficiary of this system. He's its spokesmodel — paid mostly in identity, told he's the last self-reliant man in America by the same machine that holds his drip line. And the moment he starts doing the math on his own check, the machine changes the subject: have you heard what they're doing in California?
Want the whole "moral" flag-waving hypocritical system in one X-ray? Here.
In Idaho, the public underwrites a cow's dinner twice — subsidized grazing at one end, subsidized feed crops at the other — no questions asked. Nobody has ever risen in the Idaho Senate to warn that a heifer was developing a dependency mindset.
In 2024, the federal government offered Idaho $16.3 million to feed 136,000 poor kids through the summer — forty dollars a month, groceries only. Idaho's cost of admission: $545,300. Seven in ten of your senators voted no. A senator explained, into a microphone, on purpose, that feeding them would send "the wrong message" — that Idaho would be "providing for everybody without needing something in return."
Something in return. From children. For lunch.
And it wasn't a one-year flinch. Idaho has refused the money three summers running — 2024, 2025, 2026 — one of thirteen states still saying no. The same Senate funds zero public preschool — one of six states left that don't — and lets the fifth-highest share of little kids in America go uninsured.
In your state, it is settled doctrine that feeding a cow is a public good and feeding a child is a moral hazard. The dairy conglomerate cashes six figures, no collateral demanded. The single mom stacking two of the low-wage jobs Idaho's economy actually offers — in a state where MIT calculates a single parent with one child needs $39.34 an hour just to cover rent, food, and childcare — asks for forty dollars of groceries, and suddenly the Senate discovers austerity. His check is called "supporting agriculture." Her forty bucks is called "welfare," and she's called a cautionary tale. And the maze she's grinding through was built, plank by plank, by the men shaming her for being in it — men who declined the earned-income credit descended from Milton Friedman's own proposal and killed her kid's lunch to protect her character.
You pay Idaho taxes. What do you get? Your kids test above the national average — more than California's can say — on schools funded 51st in America in the 2024 federal count — never out of the bottom two in over a decade. Your kids perform on last-place money. Imagine them on median money.
And when you figured things out anyway — when you got a real ballot — look what happened. You passed term limits, 59 to 41; they repealed them over the governor's veto, first legislature in American history to do it, led by men about to be termed out. You passed Medicaid expansion, more than 60 percent, after they stonewalled it six years; they retaliated against the ballot itself, until the Idaho Supreme Court — five justices in one of the reddest states in America — struck it down for installing, their words, "an actual tyranny of the minority." That's the state's own supreme court describing the thing your legislature built. On purpose. To stop you.
Now more than two-thirds of you want medical cannabis — 68 percent in the last independent poll, 83 in the advocates' own — and their answer is HJR 4: a constitutional amendment reserving the question to "only the legislature of the state of Idaho." Forever. They polled you, discovered you disagree, and moved to constitutionally abolish your opinion. Idahoans gathered more than 150,000 signatures in the spring of 2026 to put medical cannabis in front of you anyway; that July, the Secretary of State's verification killed it — 58,024 valid, of the 70,725 required. So the question is not on the November 2026 ballot. HJR 4 is. It asks you to make sure no such question ever reaches you again.
You don't disable the ballot of a population you can fool. Your legislature isn't afraid of California. It's afraid of you, informed. The talking heads' entire job — the radio, the memes, the eagle-avatar Facebook pages — is making sure the five-second search never happens. It isn't personal; it's business — they've sized you up as the demographic that will never check, and they program accordingly. These are the same people, by the way, who had you checking school bathrooms for litter boxes. Curated ignorance is the one commodity Idaho produces entirely without a federal subsidy.
So here's where this leaves you, friend — and I mean friend, because you are not the punchline of this piece. You are the mark. The teat was never offered to you. Your job is to keep working — be a good boy or girl, work your guts out, pay your taxes, and don't ask what's happening behind that door in Boise. Keep waiting for the trickle-down to reach you. Keep waving the flag. Keep feeling superior to the states you might have something to learn from.
California isn't your enemy. It's your alibi — the thing they hand you so you'll never ask who wrote the tax bill, who killed the lunch, who's amending the constitution against you. Santa Clara's fortunes were won in daylight — competing for customers, talent, and federal contracts anyone could bid on — and show up in your town as a $17.50 wage. Boise's were written into law in the dark and show up as a canceled lunch.
And the money isn't even the biggest thing they took. The pride is. Idaho never needed a fake California to be proud of itself. The wilderness is real. The farming is real. Kids testing above the national average on last-place money — real. The people working their guts out — real. That's what the fake was for: pride propped on a fake needs someone to keep the fake alive. Pride in what's actually yours needs nobody. A man proud of real things is hard to farm.
You know California's problems now — you know its worst one cold. Criticize it all you like. Just give it a fair shake, and give credit where it's due — that's the whole ask. Because the point was never the numbers. The point is which man shows up at the barbecue: the well-informed one, or the one the algorithm is farming — certain of everything he's never checked.
I was you — same certainty, same contempt, same unchecked confidence. Then I checked one number. Then another.
And as you decide whether to do it, sit with this: They're betting you won't. Their careers, their subsidies, their amendment — the entire arrangement is a standing wager that you'd rather feel superior than be right.
It would be a shame to keep proving them right. Everything you've ever done with a real ballot in your hand says they're wrong.
Sources. Every figure above is public: BEA and the IMF (GDP); PPIC (headquarters); the state's own wage survey and reporting on In-N-Out (wages); Costco, Chobani, and company filings (the wage roster); the California Dept. of Finance and the Census Bureau (migration); USDA and CDFA (farm receipts); BEA (farm share of GDP); USDA ERS (farm receipts, state ranks); CDC data via Third Way (state murder rates); FBI/local (Shreveport, San Francisco); the California Secretary of State (Prop 36); AEI (homelessness); the Census Bureau (poverty); Phoenix Marketing International's household-wealth counts (millionaire households by state); the Idaho Freedom Foundation (the federal budget share); NASBO (state budgets); the Rockefeller Institute (donor states, per-person federal taxes); EWG (subsidies); GAO and USDA FSA (payment caps and stacking); USDA RMA (the potato crop-insurance rolls); congress.gov roll calls (the farm-bill and CHIPS votes); the delegation's own joint press release (the Micron applause); BLM and USDA (grazing); ProPublica and High Country News (Simplot's permits); the Idaho Dairymen's Association (the dairy workforce); Commerce (Micron's award); MIT's Living Wage Calculator; NEA/NCES and the Nation's Report Card (schools); NIEER and Georgetown University (preschool and uninsured kids); ITEP's Who Pays? (who pays what share of income, state by state); the Idaho Center for Fiscal Policy (the flat tax's arithmetic); Idaho Legislature H.B. 231 (the grocery tax and its credit); the Idaho Supreme Court in Reclaim Idaho v. Denney; Idaho Legislature roll calls (Summer EBT, term limits, HJR 4); the Idaho Secretary of State (the initiative's verification); the Idaho State Board of Education (the go-on rate); USPTO (patents per capita); The Real Deal, CBRE, and company filings (San Francisco office leasing); the historians of Silicon Valley's federal roots (O'Mara, The Code).
Check any of them. Five seconds. And if you find better numbers, bring them — I'd rather argue with a man who's looked.
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