Gavin Newsom admits California is failing
Washington Examiner
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California Gov. Gavin Newsom put on a brave face to talk with Sean Hannity on Fox News last week, avidly defending the Golden State’s liberal policies. But when he recently sat down to pitch his modest permitting reforms to the New York Times, he admitted California is no longer the great state it once was.
“I watched as a mayor and then a lieutenant governor and now a governor as years become decades on high-speed rail,” Newsom said, referring to the state project first approved in 2008 with a budget of $33 billion, but which has now grown to $128 billion without laying a single piece of track.
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“People are losing trust and confidence in our ability to build things,” Newsom continued. “People look at me and ask, ‘What the hell happened to the California of the ‘50s and ‘60s?’”
It’s a good question. What did happen to the once-great California of the 50s and 60s? What happened to the California that once built millions of acre-feet of water storage, thousands of miles of highways, and millions of new homes? What happened to the California in which the population grew by 53% in the 1950s and by 49% in the 1960s?
That California is gone. For decades, millions of working families flooded into California for good weather and strong economic growth. Now they can’t escape California fast enough. While big warm weather states such as Florida and Texas add hundreds of thousands of new residents each year, California has lost population in each of the last two years. That’s the first time in history.
As people apparently ask Gov. Newsom all the time, “What the hell happened to California?”
The Democratic Party is what happened to California.
Except for a two-year stretch in the mid-1990s, Democrats have maintained solid control of both chambers of California’s legislature since 1970. That is more than 50 years of Democratic rule.
During that time, they passed a slew of environmental, labor, and health regulations that turned a middle-class family paradise into a neo-feudal state dominated by a wealthy class of Hollywood and tech entrepreneurs served by a much more numerous, and largely foreign, rentier servant class.
Where California used to complete new water projects every year, no new dam has been finished in the state since 1980. Where California used to build roads and invest in oil production, its Democrats are now at war with oil companies and have banned the sale of new combustion engines by 2030. Where California once led the nation in home construction, now a web of environmental and labor laws makes the state the most expensive place in America to build a house, let alone buy the land.
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Pressed by Hannity to explain why California is losing population, Newsom pivoted to asking why West Virginia and Mississippi were losing population, too. Think of it. The governor of California now compares his state to Mississippi in order to avoid looking too bad.
California is a cautionary tale to those who believe that politics is a distant and ugly game to which they need not pay much attention. Even if ordinary Americans are not interested in politics, politics is interested in them. It never stops coming for them. So it matters who wins elections. California once elected leaders who knew that land had to be transformed to suit a growing population. Now California’s elected leaders value fish over farmers. Democrats like Newsom want to use the power of the federal government to remake the United States in California’s image. If Democrats keep winning the White House, that will happen, and then middle-class families will have no place to escape to.