LTP News Sharing:
AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli
California
has become a test case of the suicide of the West. Never
before has such a state, so rich in natural resources and endowed
with such a bountiful human inheritance, self-destructed so
rapidly.
How
and why did California so utterly consume its unmatched natural
and ancestral inheritance and end up as a warning to Western
civilization of what might be in store for anyone who followed its
nihilism?
The
symptoms of the state’s suicide are indisputable.
Governor
Gavin Newsom enjoyed a recent $98 billion budget surplus — gifted
from multibillion-dollar federal COVID-19 subsidies, the highest
income and gas taxes in the nation, and among the country’s
steepest sales and property taxes.
Yet
in a year, he turned it into a growing $45 billion budget
deficit.
At
a time of an over-regulated, overtaxed, and sputtering economy, Newsom
spent lavishly on new entitlements, illegal immigrants, and
untried and inefficient green projects.
Newsom
was endowed with two of the wettest years in recent California
history. Yet he and radical environmentalists squandered the water
bounty — as snowmelts and runoff long designated for agricultural
irrigation were drained from aqueducts and reservoirs to flow
out to sea.
Newsom
transferred millions of dollars designated by a voter referendum
to build dams and aqueducts for water storage and instead blew
up four historic dams on the Klamath River. For decades,
these now-destroyed scenic lakes provided clean, green
hydroelectric power, irrigation storage, flood control, and
recreation.
California
hosts one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients. Over a
fifth of the population lives below the property line. Nearly
half the nation’s homeless sleep on the streets of its major
cities.
The
state’s downtowns are dirty, dangerous, and increasingly
abandoned by businesses — most recently Google — that
cannot rely on a defunded and shackled police.
Newsom’s
California has spent billions on homeless relief and subsidizing
millions of new illegal migrant arrivals across the state’s porous
southern border.
The
result was predictably even more homeless and more illegal
immigrants, all front-loaded onto the state’s already overtaxed
and broken healthcare, housing, and welfare entitlements.
Newsom
raised the minimum wage for fast-food workers to $22 an hour.
The result was wage inflation rippling out to all service
areas, unaffordable food for the poor, and massive shut-downs and
bankruptcies of fast food outlets.
Twenty-seven
percent of Californians were born outside of the United States.
It is a minority-majority state. Yet California has long dropped
unifying civic education, while the bankrupt state funds
exploratory commissions to consider divisive racial
reparations.
California’s
universities are hotbeds of ethnic, religious, and racial
chauvinism and infighting. State officials, however, did little as
its campuses were plagued for months by rampant and violent
antisemitism.
Almost
nightly, the nation watches mass smash-and-grab attacks on
California retail stores. Carjackers and thieves own the night.
They are rarely caught, even more rarely arrested — and almost
never convicted.
Currently,
Newsom is fighting in the courts to stop the people’s
constitutional right to place on the ballot initiatives to
restore penalties for violent crime and theft.
Gas
prices are the highest in the continental United States, given
green mandate formulas and the nation’s highest, and still
raising, gasoline taxes — and are scheduled to go well over $6 a
gallon.
Yet
its ossified roads and highways are among the nation’s most
dangerous, as vast sums of transportation funding were
siphoned off to the multibillion-dollar high-speed rail
boondoggle.
The
state imports almost all the costly vitals of modern life, mostly
because it prohibits using California’s own vast petroleum,
natural gas, timber, and mineral resources.
As
California implodes, its embarrassed government turns to the
irrelevant, if not ludicrous.
It
now outlaws natural gas stoves in new homes. It is adding
new income-based surcharges for those who dutifully pay their
power bills — to help subsidize the 2.5 million Californians
who simply default on their energy bill with impunity.
What
happened to the once-beautiful California paradise?
Millions
of productive but frustrated, overtaxed, and underserved
middle-class residents have fled to low-crime, low-tax, and
well-served red states in disgust.
In
turn, millions of illegal migrants have swarmed the state, given
its sanctuary-city policies, refusal to enforce the law, and
generous entitlements.
Meanwhile,
a tiny coastal elite, empowered by $9 trillion in Silicon
Valley market capitalization, fiddled while their state burned.
California
became a medieval society of plutocratic barons, subsidized
peasants, and a shrinking and fleeing middle class. It is
now home to a few rich estates, subsidized apartments, and
unaffordable middle-class houses.
California
suffers from poorly ranked public schools — but brags about its
prestigious private academies. Its highways are lethal — but
it hosts the most private jets in the nation.
The
fantasies of a protected enclave of Gavin Newsom, Nancy Pelosi,
and the masters of the Silicon Valley universe have become the
abject nightmares of everyone else.
In
sum, a privileged Bay Area elite inherited a California paradise
and turned it into purgatory.
