Victor Davis Hanson: Trouble in Paradise…Newsom’s California

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Welcome to The Daily Signal Podcast, where we provide intelligence for the intelligent. Now without further ado, here's today's take.

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**Victor Davis Hanson** (1:48)
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. People talk about the California disaster, but I don't think we fully appreciate the severity and the manifestations of it.
There are about, and the best barometer to discover that is how many people are leaving. It's estimated that somewhere between four and five hundred thousand Californians left in 25, 26
Now the problem with that is, they're not leaving a barren state. They're not leaving a cold Alaska. They're leaving the most beautiful state in the country that for years under a bipartisan system of Pat Brown, Ronald Reagan, George Dick Mason, Pete Wilson, and to some extent Arnold Schwarzenegger, it had wonderful governance. So why are they leaving? Why have 11 to 12 million people, a quarter of the present population, have left California?
Well, the Reason Foundation just did a comprehensive study of all the roads in all the states and ranked them according to congestion, quality of roads, bridges, everything. California was 49th, 49th in the country. In terms of school scores, it's down to about 40 to 41 in the nation, even though it's 13th in the amount of money it spends.
It's got one-third of all of the homeless people, maybe up to nearly a half in some studies. It's got a third of all the welfare recipients. 22% of the people live below the poverty line. Think of this, it has the highest gasoline taxes in the nation and the highest gas prices. That's a combination, it refuses to tap its considerable fifth in the nation oil and natural gas reserves to the full extent that it could. It's shut down the timber industry, it's shut down the mining industry. So we're paying because of our green fanaticism on oil blends and we've been driving out oil refineries and we have these high taxes, we're paying $7 to $8 a gallon right now for gas. We have the highest electricity rates in the continental United States. Only Hawaii has it higher. Think of that. We have some of the highest property crime rates in the country. San Francisco until recently was the highest property crime rate city per capita in the nation.
Our sales tax is among the top 10 We have the highest income taxes. Now we know why this is the problem. We know why this all happened. We haven't had a Republican government, governor in nearly 20 years since Arnold Schwarzenegger left. We have no statewide offices that are Republican. No Attorney General, no Lieutenant Governor, no state controller, nothing. We have 52 seats in the Congress. We only have seven, seven, seven, it's like 12%.
We only have seven Republican congressmen, and yet Donald Trump almost got 40% of the vote. So we have less than a third of what we should be proportionally represented in Congress. All of the state and local judges after 20 years of governance by our left wing themselves, so the judicial, the executive, and the legislative branches are all one party. Supermajority is in both legislatures, no statewide officer that's a Republican.
What do you do about it? Well, who is the iconic victim? Who has been at the center of this maelstorm for the last 30 years? One man, Gavin Newsom. He's never had a job outside the public sector since 1997, when Jerry Brown appointed him to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. He was there for eight years. Then where did he go? He went to San Francisco for eight years. Then where did he go? He went to Lieutenant Governor. Then where did he go? He was Governor for six years. And why did this happen? We see all the symptoms, but why did it happen? Why did we have a mono party state? I think it's pretty easy. Three things happened. Number one, one quarter of the present population, as I said, fled the country. And these weren't just anybody. These were the middle, upper middle, and upper middle class taxpayers, small businesses who couldn't take the high taxes and the poor infrastructure. And they left. And they left a beautiful, scenic California to places, I'll be frank, that are not so hospitable. Utah, Tennessee, Nevada. But they were, in other words, they left California that was a paradise, and they went to places that were manmade paradises, but had none of our natural advantages.