It is not often when a politician speaks the unvarnished truth. Usually it is unintended, and the cynical types refer to these truthful moments as a gaffe. It is not often when a politician says something that is the truth when he does not even realize what he is saying, but Governor Gavin Newsom of California did recently and boy it was a doozy.
President Trump was visiting California on a recent trip to do a little work (the border wall) and raise a lot of money. It might be trite to refer to his visit as entering “enemy territory,” but the California attorney general has sued the Trump Administration more than 60 times over policy differences. Governor Newsom and President Trump have gone at it often as California has asserted that it is an independent operation from the other 49 states.
Governor Newsom was being interviewed by CNN when he made his statement. To make sure there are no charges of the quote being taken out of context, copy and paste the following URL: cnn.com/videos/politics/2019/09/17/trump-spars-with-california-governor-lah-pkg-lead-vpx.cnn. Newsom says: “So he (Trump) has got to find the areas where we are not performing — that is the issues of poverty, affordability and homelessness — and exploiting these as a way of tearing down a new governing philosophy.”
Forget the fact that Newsom and virtually the entire state government of California is at war with President Trump. It remains the responsibility of the President to confront the problems challenging all Americans and not just the ones who voted for him. Read Newsom’s statement a second time. These are truly existential threats (not the ones of which Trump is accused, but real ones) to the living standard and well-being of residents of this state. Newsom makes it seem like Trump is just picking on picayune issues. Why would Trump focus on these things when there are much more important issues like transgender bathrooms?
The poverty rate in the state of California is the highest in the nation. Newsom and his minions will argue it isn’t and they would be correct. That is before the cost of living adjustment. It costs a lot less money to be poor in Mississippi. Most of the costs are driven by the policies of Newsom and his political party. Gasoline is more than a dollar per gallon higher than almost the remainder of the country. Poor people need to get to work and they cannot afford a Tesla. Then there are the energy costs for heating or cooling their homes which are the highest in the country because of Newsom’s scheme to force renewable energy down the throats of residents while ignoring the natural gas boom and killing off clean nuclear energy.
There is the issue of affordability that the Governor mentions. He may be referring to the fact that according to Forbes magazine, 15 of the 20 least affordable areas in the U.S. are in California. And five of those are entire counties with large populations in addition to the state’s three largest cities. Most of these costs are driven by government decisions such as what is referred to above. Then there is housing which is beyond out of sight.
Unless you want to move to the poverty-ridden areas that Newsom’s friends ignore because they are too busy at their soirees in Pacific Heights philosophizing over the challenges of the underclasses, you cannot afford housing in California unless you are a tech millionaire or the offspring of a successful family. Many of those children are leaving the state as millennials are fleeing in droves. A little perspective: Housing the government is looking at building for the homeless costs (per unit) more than $330,000 in Los Angeles and $600,000 in San Francisco. These are costs for nice single-family residence or mansions in the rest of the country.
Newsom’s solution is to radically increase the minimum wage. This drives up costs for everyone for everything making it less affordable especially for lower income folks and putting many of them out of work or cutting back their work hours. Fewer work hours means they have less money to pay for ever more expensive things.
Last is the homeless problem. Let’s get this out of the way. Every human with even half a heart feels for these people. You walk by and you certainly must think “there but for the grace of God go I.” But that does not mean we should have to face walking over people to get somewhere, rat infestations, Medieval diseases and people defecating in front of us. Instead of fixing this the Leftist governments make things worse with their horrible policies and endanger our police by sending them into these areas. Almost all of the homeless are on drugs and many of them are mentally ill. In California, the Left likes to refer to the time almost 50 years ago that Ronald Reagan changed the rules on housing the mentally ill. Get over it. This is not his fault. Few people on the streets were even alive when Reagan did that.
Newsom likes to point to California’s low unemployment rate (.4% above the national average). Part of that is because they don’t count all the illegal immigrants here who are subsidized by his government. Nor does it count all the people leaving since there is more outflow of people from California than from any other state. How good are those jobs today? As stated by the noted urban demographer, Joel Kotkin, “California has created surprisingly few high-wage jobs over the past decade, with 86 percent below the median pay and some 40 percent paying under $40,000—in one of the nation’s most expensive states.”
That does not even address the issue of water which could easily be cured if the people who shared Newsom’s new governing philosophy would just address the issue with science instead of scare tactics and creating eras of limitations. We have this very long coastline where Newsom and his friends think the oceans are rising because of climate change. To kill two birds with one stone, they can build desalination plants which would provide all the water we need and lower the levels of the oceans. A win-win. Instead the farmers that feed the world will continue to curtail their production. Instead the people of California who already conserve water more than anyplace in the civilized world are going to have to cut back another 37% because of an arbitrary and stupid law put in place by members of the new governing philosophy. After that law goes into effect the homeless will not be the only people urinating on the streets.
The important things for Governor Newsom and his followers adhering to the new governing philosophy are that illegal immigrants have a safe place and are not uncomfortable when they break laws and get free medical care and funding for legal representation against the United States immigration laws or teaching seven-year-olds about transgenderism. Things like affordable housing, energy and food that has driven legal residents to have the highest poverty rate in the nation and our beautiful cities to be overrun with homeless those — are just annoyances.
Apparently, Mr. President, those issues are off the table for you.