Is Gov. Gavin Newsom Fiddling While California Burns

As Los Angeles faces a budget gap of nearly $600 million, the Mayor   will need to cut services “aggressively,” including potentially moving forward with layoffs, the city’s top budget adviser said in a report released Friday, Oct. 23, Los Angeles Daily News reported.

Disneyland’s ongoing closure is a $5 billion hit to Southern California’s economy;

With the Governor’s COVID-19 statewide shutdown, 284,000 creative jobs have been lost;

Public schools are not reopening leaving millions of school children “distance learning” from the dining room table in front of a computer screen – if the family has a computer.

Around the state:

Wildfires are burning throughout the state – many said to be the result of arson – with homes, businesses destroyed, and lives lost.

Millions of California residents have experienced power blackouts recently and  over the weekend, and are facing more power shutoffs;

The Employment Development Department still has a massive backlog of unemployment claims – down from 1.6 million to 1.2 million, even after a two-week closure;

The State Capitol is undergoing a nearly $1 billion renovation, while businesses around the state are closed, or forever closed due to Gov. Newsom’s orders. Why did this renovation continue during one of the most severe economic crises in state history?

Adding to those difficulties, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced a $200 million boost to his Project Homekey homeless housing fund in San Jose on Friday — a major cash infusion that will back several Bay Area projects, the San Jose Mercury News reported.

Project Homekey is the program the governor created to move homeless vagrants into renovated hotel rooms, calling it “long-term housing for homeless.”

It’s largely a jobs program for union construction workers and developers, as this is referred to as “a major cash infusion” for several cities.

Mental health experts say the homeless don’t need apartments with granite kitchen counters, they need extensive mental health counseling, drug addiction treatment, and many other important services they currently aren’t getting.

In January, Gov. Newsom promised, “You’ll start seeing real progress in the next few months,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said at his 2020 Budget Briefing, addressing California’s homeless crisis. “Mobile tents, medical units, FEMA trailers… as early as next week,” California Globe reported. 

But cities did not see progress. At all.

“We put $650 million emergency grants to cities and counties,” Newsom said at the January budget briefing, but he admitted the state did not release the money to cities and counties last year. “The $650 million hasn’t gone to cities and counties yet – but it’s going out as we speak. This is unprecedented in California history,” Newsom said in January. “The money is finally going out on homelessness.”

Where did the money go? The homeless vagrants are not only still living in tents on city streets, defecating and urinating in gutters and on sidewalks, there are more of them than in January.

Newsom’s homeless task force proposed forcing cities to provide housing, when housing is not the prevailing problem… mental illness and drug addiction is, as is the state’s policy of prison population reduction, early release programs, bail “reform,” and reducing felonies to misdemeanors and misdemeanors down to citations for a notable list of crimes under Propositions 47 and 57.

Notably, Los Angeles county and city governments collectively spend more than $1 billion annually on the costs of dealing with the growing homeless population, which continues to grow with their spending.

“I’m the Homeless Czar in the State of California,” Newsom added. “We’re going to start hitting on all cylinders.” That was January.

“Hitting on all cylinders” would be ending the dubious lockdown and opening the state up, allowing businesses to reopen and employees back to work. Sales tax revenues will begin to flow in again. Cancel the homeless task force. Send the Project Roomkey funding to counties so they may open up large shelter centers to house homeless, hire more mental health professionals, drug addiction specialists, and get the homeless triaged and treatment.

Newsom looks unserious putting drug-addicted street vagrants who have been using city sidewalks as their toilets, into newly renovated hotel apartments.

But remember, he bragged that the virus will provide the necessary fear and confusion to allow “opportunity for reimagining a [more] progressive era as it pertains to capitalism.”

What is the end goal? The distribution of taxpayer money to labor unions, campaign contributors, and favored Democrats.

As Victor Davis Hanson recently explained in an op ed, “California’s destruction can be summed up in the hypocrisies and paradoxes of its bankrupt elite, who believe that their money insulates them from their own toxic ideology, and their virtue-signaling squares the circle of feeling guilty that they want nothing to do with the millions of poor they invited in and are relieved that they drove out millions in the middle classes.”

Fiddling while California burns.