California Retirees Flocking to Small Idaho Town Because of Liberal Baggage Concerns

With their pension funds, retired public workers from California are moving to Idaho in large numbers. They are becoming the “lifeblood” of at least one Idaho town’s economy, but some locals don’t like the “liberal baggage” of the newcomers.

This month, the Los Angeles Times reported that a lot of retired police officers and firemen have moved to Eagle, Idaho. Many of them say they are conservative, but the big pensions make them “seem practically socialist to the old guard.”

In the most recent mayoral race, two people who moved to New York from California ran against each other. The main problem between them was “who was the least Californian?”

Jason Pierce, the former mayor of Eagle, Idaho, moved to Idaho more than 20 years ago without any public pension. He lost an election to someone who had just moved there with a six-figure pension from being a fire chief in California. The news outlet said Pierce thought it was “ludicrous” that the new neighbors called themselves Republicans. “You find a lot of Californians who move here don’t realize how much [liberal] baggage they’re bringing with them,” said Pierce.

Pierce said he doesn’t get how people from California who have pensions that offer more money than Idaho workers make can move there and still call themselves conservative.

“They want to reward police officers and state workers in the same way,” Pierce told the news source. “And it’s like, ‘Wait a minute, you literally created a huge deficit in California, and now you want to do the same thing here?’” The actor Pierce told Fox News Digital this week that “there’s a bigger story happening in communities like ours.”

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“Californians have been programmed in a way that they think they’re conservative, but then they move to a place like Eagle, Idaho, and they start asking for the same things that the government was providing them in California,” said Pierce.

“They have no idea what they’re doing, but you have to ask yourself, ‘Wait a minute, so you want your taxes to go up?'” Wow, I’d be willing to pay a little more. But wait, you just left all this here.” Pierce said that when people from California move here and see trash on the street, they wonder why more isn’t being done to clean it up, which bothers him.

“So, you want your taxes to go up,” Pierce said he tells newcomers. “You want more government?” The new mayor of Eagle, Brad Pike, won a runoff election on December 6 by 10 points. He came to Idaho with a $123,000 pension and said that after 41 years as a Republican, he could finally “exhale” and “relax and enjoy life.”

“This country is free.” “You can go anywhere you want,” Pike told the news source. “I’m not embarrassed to say that I brought my CalPERS pension to Idaho.” “I came here looking for anything that’s not the liberal, socialistic view of the government in California.”

Pierce told Fox News Digital that between what people in California call a Republican and what people in Idaho call conservative when it comes to taxes, gun rights, and other things, there is a split. “We take care of ourselves,” Pierce said about Idaho to Fox News Digital. “We look out for our neighbors, and more and more people want someone else to do the same for them.” It seems strange.”

Pierce also said that about 60% of people who move to Idaho don’t take the time to get to know the people who live there and what makes a town unique, which is what he did when he moved from California to Idaho in 2003.