I say that if you want to live somewhere else, live there. What's the big deal about always trying to take the shine off of CA.? Yeah, it has its problems. Without a doubt. It's the biggest state by such a large margin that you simply cannot compare it to states that have 1% of its population.
As for people leaving, that's always been the case. Even during boom times, something like 300,000 more people move here than leave. If 500k move here and 200k leave, some idiot could say,
Look! 200k people left CA. this year!" 
As for talent and money leaving, the exact opposite is true. The post showing homeless people and a google-searched smog day is the height of fly-over ignorance. Go to San Francisco some time and tell me about the "welfare state". It's the most vibrant, brains and money collection you've ever seen in your life. There is nothing in other places that even compares in any way. The conflation of Stanford, Cal Berkley, the Silicon Valley and the cross-traffic with the Pacific Rim makes for one super-heated collection of smart people and money. I just witnessed it yet again skiing at Heavenly in Tahoe this week. Nearly every chairlift ride was with some interesting and successful person from the Bay area. ANd absolutely none of the whining heard from the "tough luck" crowd here.
I love it here. I just drove down highway 395 through historical mining towns and past Mono Lake and Mammoth yesterday home to L.A. My traveling companion was a pal who grew up in England, went to college in the midwest and lives here. He knew every detail of the historical places, has climbed nearly every one of the highest mountains on earth, been everywhere and met everyone. I know tons of people like this in CA., and not too many where I came from. A few, to be fair. The people and the talent is what makes this place, something that people happy to live in Kentucky or Nebraska will never understand. A Harry Nilsson song comes on the radio and he has a great HN story about hanging out at Chris Blackwell's studio in Jamaica in 1972 or something when HN was producing Ringo's solo record and how fk'ed up HN was. He went to Sinatra's house when he was a little kid in the 1950s and played with his massive model train layout with Frank. I'm continuously enthralled by people here.
If you're thinking that I just hung out with some name-dropping BS artist, he's a good friend and none of these stories have ever come up until we were stuck in a car together for 16 hours total in a week. I know lots of people like him in L.A. There are no people like him in MN. And MN. is a lot more interesting than most places in the midwest, with its education and technology hubs. There is a magic, an actually quantifiable "multiplier effect" when talented, creative people are thrown together in one place. It's always been most pronounced in NYC, but Los Angeles and San Francisco are amazing as well, albeit with a different vibe.
The people I know here are not moving to Kentucky or Tennessee anytime soon. Probably not in this lifetime. Most of them are thriving in CA. and that part of the economy is booming. Not so much for the middle class, I'll agree.
