California State Capitol. (Photo: Kevin Sanders for California Globe).
Reparations, Bullet Train, 64% State Spending Increase: California’s Democrats Choose Power Over the People
We have no relief from the state’s out-of-touch politicians
By Katy Grimes, December 26, 2023 2:47 pm
California’s Democrat super-majority Legislature and governor are moving full-steam ahead with reparations for black descendants of slaves, high speed rail, and have increased spending a staggering 64% since Gavin Newsom was elected in 2019. But not on anything to make lives better for people – Democrats continually choose power over the people, treating taxpayers as a cash cow.
With 16 new laws starting January 1st “that cover everything from campsite reservations to child sex trafficking,” there is no tax relief, or crime relief, or relief from the homeless living on our streets, or relief from the criminals being let out of prison, or for that matter, no relief from the state’s out-of-touch politicians.
While California has plenty of very serious issues that need to be addressed by its elected lawmakers, the legislature and governor appear to have a very different agenda, and are not the least bit interested in correcting their own bad policies.
If it appears politicians don’t care about the people they convinced to elect them, you’d be right – because so many are wholly owned subsidiaries of their funders. Once they receive your vote, it’s on to their real agenda – for big labor unions, the environmental lobby, and myriad other well-funded special interest groups.
And that brings us to the crisis that is California.
We start with California’s $68 billion budget deficit – which notably does not include the state’s more than $1 trillion unfunded pension and health care liability for its retired government employees, or the massive debt California owes to the federal government for the EDD unemployment fraud during the COVID pandemic.
Could a California revenue shortfall mean furloughs for state employees? California went from a $100 Billion budget “surplus” to “we may need to layoff state workers.”
“General Fund Expenditures Per Capita have climbed 63.9% since Governor Newsom took office, growing at more than twice the annual rate at which those expenditures grew under Governor Brown (10.4% vs. 4.7%)” state finance expert David Crane reported at his Govern For California website.
“Of course, Mr. Newsom didn’t approve all that spending on his own,” Crane continued. “He was joined by a State Legislature led by former Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon and Senate President Pro-Tem Toni Atkins. Robert Rivas is the new Speaker and Mike McGuire will soon be the new Pro-Tem. Time will tell if they and Mr. Newsom are interested in spending reforms. They should be, not only because California is the rare state to forecast deficits despite economic growth but also because their General and Special Funds spent $1.3 trillion over the past five years yet residents would be hard-pressed to say how public services have improved and elected officials would be just as hard-pressed to account for the performance of those expenditures.”
As the Globe recently reported, when Governor Jerry Brown was elected in 2011, the state budget was $98 billion and the state’s population was a little over 38 million people. Brown doubled the budget up to $199.3 billion – with no measurable increase in population. Gov. Newsom inherited Brown’s $199.3 billion budget, and has grown it to $330 billion in 5 years – while losing population.
Where is all of that new spending going, and why are we still being gouged with high taxes?
New taxes are being imposed on January 1, 2024 to cover Newsom’s and Democrats’ deficit spending.
Across the state, cities are developing plans to electrify every building, creating all-electric cities to support the State’s goal of carbon neutrality by 2045.
This is not the goal of the people, any more than the people are demanding electric cars – they are not, and car dealers are stuck with lots full of unsold electric cars. GM is buying out Buick dealers who don’t want to sell electric cars, and Ford is also getting pushback from dealers.
Commensurately, in November, the California Utilities Commission granted Pacific Gas and Electric a 13% rate hike – ostensibly to pay for under grounding power lines.
Because Gov. Gavin Newsom appoints the commissioners to the CPUC, this is “Gavinomics.” Expect the other utilities to hike rates as well.
Residential electricity prices in California are already more than twice the national average.
Fast Food CEOs Warn Of Dire Consequences Coming over New $20 Fast Food Minimum Wage – we warned – expect to see fast food workers replaced by robots and kiosks. The new $20 an hour fast food minimum wage law set to begin in April 2024 was blasted by several fast food company leaders, who warned of huge consequences ahead, ranging from higher prices to possible location closures.
California’s high poverty rate is thanks to bad policies – Lawmakers recently voted to place on your ballots a measure to make it easier for local governments to raise taxes, and have further placed a measure to make it harder to prevent tax increases. Those were ACA 1 and ACA 13.
Higher taxes continue to discourage businesses from expanding or investing in California, which ultimately hurts working Californians.
Highest-in-the-nation gas prices also hurt families, small, medium and large business owners, and all working Californians. The national average today for a gallon of gas is $3.126 – California’s average price for a gallon of gas is coming in at $4.620, with the high at $5.755.
States tax fuel in several ways, including sales taxes, per-gallon excise taxes collected at the pump, taxes imposed on wholesalers (which are passed along to consumers in the form of higher prices), and a variety of operational taxes, such as underground storage tank fees, that are often charged to the retailer.
We add up all these different taxes and fees (not including carbon fees) to calculate a total tax rate on gas for each state.
As the Globe reported last week, California’s overall tax burden on middle– and lower-income folks is higher than nearly all other states.
The Tax Foundation compares all 50 states on over 40 measures of tax rates, collections, burdens, and more, and reports in its State Tax Collections per Capita, California is number #2, and in its State Individual Income Tax Collections per Capita, California is number #1. They also note that Florida and Texas have no individual income tax, along with Washington state, South Dakota, Wyoming, Tennessee, New Hampshire and Alaska – despite Gov. Newsom claiming otherwise.
California is a mess under the policies, edicts, executive orders and hiring decisions of Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Democrat Supermajority. Are the voters paying attention? Will they continue to support these disastrous policies and the politicians behind them?
Heading into 2024 is looking like it may be a real fight for the soul of the country, and the survival of California. How much worse does the state have to get before the people will act?
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While it looks like doom and gloom for the moment help is on the way (Listen to Toby Mac’s song Help is on the way”. The policies that you have accurately described are meant to literally enslave the citizens of California and bring the state and nation to our knees. If we stay on this course, we are sure to end up as slaves. Proverbs 22:7 states “The rich rule over the poor and the borrower is the slave to the lender”. With this crowd in leadership, we are moving from the potential richness that this state has to offer its residents to being poor. We are also moving towards being a slave to debt. We need to turn from this path of enslavement and move towards the freedom that God has to offer.
Thank you for writing this Katy.
Now if we can direct the attention of the moderately politically engaged to your article, we may have a chance.
I am afraid the answer to your question you ask is this; the people will awaken only when they are profoundly impacted such as noted below:
1. A victim of crime.
2. Having to choose pay their high tax bill or buyi groceries.
3. Getting their water cut off because they used their state allotted ration.
4. When their children turn against them due to the woke educational system polluting their minds.
I could keep going.
In other words people only act when the pebble in their own shoe is too big to ignore. Then change will happen.
However, only if our elections are cleaned up and decent people run for office.
As Hal has pointed out we need to get off the path toward enslavement. I think most people are already on that path and are so busy to keep up with obligation that they are oblivious to what is surrounding them.
Everything we need to live a free, fulfilled, life is written in the Bible.
We have been warned.
Apathy leads to ruination.
Yes Cali Girl. I’m not sure whether it’s apathy or stupidity but these political outcomes always remind me of Winston Churchill’s quote “The greatest argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”
Here in California all any Democrat candidate has to say is “We must protect democracy” and the election is as good as won. That sound bite is all the apathetic, ill-informed and just plain stupid voters need to hear to keep their oppressors in office. We all get to reap the whirlwind.
Yes, Fed Up, stupidity has it’s role in this mess. I can also say gullibility. They take the nice sounding narrative as you exampled, “Saving Democracy” and buy into it.
Our education system has been built to have kids believe everything that the government and bad actors tell them!
Great points already made above, but please allow me to add one that is personally affecting us :
When insurance rates become so unaffordably expensive that people’s assets are financially exposed to Califirnia’s inherent geographic risks, specifically earthquakes, wildfires and floods.
We had to drop our private homeowners insurance because it became too expensive in the aftermath of all the wildfires in the last decade or so…
All the bad policy out of Sacramento regarding solar rebuilding requirements and window specifications have driven competitive private insurers out og the state, leaving us with the California FAIR plan which we know will be mismanaged like it seems all California funds are…
Community organizers that have no formal business education or experience should be barred from public office…
Insurance costs is that which will probably eventually drive us out of California….
Great add!
Yes, it has become a heavy burden on most especially the retired.
This state I guess is now only attractive for the elites and those that serve them!
I think I am most concerned about the so-called “fast food minimum wage” increase, whose ramifications will only keep hurting and destroying and making everything worse, far beyond “fast food” businesses. This will have a huge economic and employment impact in California as jobs are lost, cold and alienating kiosks and robots proliferate, costs go up for all of us, including the worker “beneficiaries,” and extra dollars for those workers disappear because —- hello —- it’s ECON 101. What a wrecking ball Asm Chris Holden is who was actually willing to put his name on this wreckage. He knows what he has done here and that it won’t benefit anyone but Holden and his cronies. It’s not even necessary to look at the record to see the special interests he bows to. Disgusting, really DISGUSTING. And it comes at a time that foolishness like this cannot easily or semi-easily be absorbed as skyrocketing inflation and prices are still with us and bound to continue…. as Katy Grimes described so well above. Thanks a lot, California government leadership! NOT.
It’s ironic that California’s Democrat super-majority Legislature and Gov. Newsom are moving full-steam ahead with reparations for black descendants of slaves when it was Democrats who instituted slavery, segregation, Jim Crow laws and the KKK. The history of the Democrat party has gotten in their way so they’ve tried to rewrite history to make it fit into their current reparations narrative? Maybe it’s time they and other Democrats pay for the sins of their Democrat predecessors?
Meanwhile as huge multibillion-dollar state deficits loom for the state, Gov. Newsom and his fellow Democrats ignore that one-fifth of the state’s population is below the poverty line, the state has one third of all US welfare recipients, horribly crumbling infrastructure, dismal schools, a shrinking and fleeing middle class, exploding homeless, and soaring crime rates.
Katy Grimes asks how much worse does the state have to get before the people will act? Voters are waking up but unfortunately Democrat/RINO voter fraud and rigged voting machines helps keep the status quo?
CriticalDfence
May I add the cost of insurance going up because of the crime.
Business theft, vandalism, car break ins, all come out of the cost an insurance company bears.
When government policies favor equal out comes for ‘disadvantaged people’ regarding crime.
When insurance companies leave because of the State insurance commissioner past policies.
We all suffer from a diminished pool for insurance companies to spread the risk.
Re big problems with insurance: Some might remember the name of small Sherman Oaks restaurant owner Angela Marsden, whose attempts to keep her business open in the early days of “Covid” ‘went viral.” Her subsequent outspokenness and refusal to cave in to insanity netted her an hour on KABC 790 weekend radio. Heard her recently say on a business program that sanely-priced business insurance is impossible to get for her restaurant and those of her neighbors in the area. She was recently quoted $55K and was told she was lucky because other businesses in the area have been quoted $90K and up. The problem? A-hole vagrants who harass and assault customers, sleep on sidewalks in front of entrances, masturbate, do drugs, and create filth in front of and in back of the restaurants purposely in front of customers, come into the dining areas and break dishes, issue threats, refuse to leave, etc. In what was quite recently a very nice area of the San Fernando Valley by the way. Not to mention the issue of fires set in the alleys by vagrants that routinely endanger such businesses that we hear about from other sources. See recent video below:
“‘We’re losing money’ – Sherman Oaks small business owners plagued by homeless”
https://www.fox5ny.com/news/la-homeless-crisis-sherman-oaks-small-businesses
It is absolutely infuriating!
How can any small business survive in this state!
Can it be any more clear to people that this is state induced managed decline!
It is purposeful! They will come up with an AI solution that only the government can provide and they will tax you more to provide it!
The state capitol is full of soulless creatures.
“You will own nothing and be happy about it” ~Klaus Schwab, WEF
I know, Cali Girl. This is just one example of many many many. As you know.
It’s “spitting in the soup.” When someone spits in your soup (and you’re lucky enough to find out about it, ha) you toss the whole bowl and you may be turned off to all soup for awhile or even forever. How many hundreds or thousands of customers don’t return to Marsden’s restaurant or don’t go in the first place because of the vagrants and their nonsense and aggression? How many tourists don’t return to SoCal tourist spots in L.A. County after finding out they were sharing a hotel with the Meth Addicts Club next door or after being a victim of vagrant harassment or violence? Etc. I know I would avoid such places like the plague. Wouldn’t you? And how much CA tax revenue is lost because of this endless ridiculousness? It can’t be measured, but I would guess it’s a staggering amount. Then as you also know these problems snowball, and have even more negative effects the longer they go on. They don’t improve on their own.
So much of this can be directly blamed on DA George Gascon because of his inaction. Also Gavin Gruesome, of course. And throughout CA all the Soros-funded county DAs. It’s not the police’s fault. In fact it’s amazing they still hang in there when they can’t do their jobs and the situation is so entirely frustrating.
We actually stopped by the Pineapple Hill Saloon for breakfast back in July when we returned from an overseas trip. In my opinion Ms. Marsden is a rallying cry. In addition to standing up against the vagrants previously she stood up against the COVID nonsense when her restaurant’s outdoor eating area was closed and 50 feet away there was an outdoor eating area for a movie production that was legal. I anticipate big things for her in the not-so-distant future.
Hal – Interesting that you visited Pineapple Hill Saloon. Agree that Angela Marsden is a leader and a force. Thank you for adding what is was that first brought her to the public’s attention —- I could not remember the details. Instead of movie production being allowed to set up and go whole-hog while Marsden’s restaurant was entirely shut out, I thought it was a govt entity that was allowed to do it. You know, like an L.A. County pat-yourself-on-the-back luncheon replete with awards to be handed out to all. Shows you there’s not much difference between the two entities in my mind.
I wanted a coffee mug! Which I was graciously given.
How nice! Now you have an ‘inspiration mug.’
We ate breakfast at the Pineapple Bar and Saloon back in July on our way home from LAX. Not only has Ms. Marsden stood up against vagrants she stood up against the COVID police when her outdoor eating area and 50 feet away a movie production setup an outdoor eating area that was legal. I anticipate big things for Ms. Marsden in the not-so-distant future.
I’m strongly against this reparations stuff. California was never a slave state, to begin with. In fact, when the state constitution was written a year before California was admitted to the Union, Slavery was banned. Oregon and Washington aren’t doing this.
Slavery was formally abolished nationally in 1865 with the passage of the 13th Amendment (a million thanks to the GOP). That’s 158 years ago. Now, I don’t know why anyone living today should be monetarily responsible for this. The slave owners have long been dead, the former slaves have long been dead, the politicians who defended Slavery are long dead, and the Confederates who fought for the preservation of Slavery in the South are long dead.
I immigrated here from the Far East. Should I be financially responsible for this? Should immigrants from India, China, Norway, Italy, South Korea, the UK, Vietnam, Iran, Armenia, Sweden, Russia, Mexico, Poland,……… be on the hook for this as well?