The Confirmation Californians Didn’t Need (But Got Anyway)

Most of us didn’t require a think tank to tell us California became a high-cost, high-friction experiment in which working people subsidize political theater.

The daily evidence was already plentiful: taxes that treated a middle-class salary like a moral failing, the “affordable” one-bedroom that required a dual-income household, the tent encampments that somehow persisted after billions spent, and the steady drip of businesses announcing they were moving elsewhere – anywhere elsewhere.

Still, the Cato Institute’s 2026 Freedom in the 50 States report arrived with the subtlety of a brick through a plate-glass window.

California ranks 44th overall, scoring a generous 1.95 out of 10 – and earning a solid F. It sits 48th in economic freedom and a slightly less humiliating 34th in personal freedom.

Governor Newsom himself places 48th among the nation’s governors – third from the bottom – for policies that have made the state less free. The governor rankings measure direction of travel. Is the state on the right track? Under Newsom, unsurprisingly, that direction has been reverse.

Arizona, Montana, Nevada, and Florida top the list in state rankings by leaving more money and more decisions with the people who earned the money and deal with the consequences daily. California’s approach has been to treat its residents like a series of problems requiring oversight, fees, and moral instruction.

Newsom has governed as if the state’s remaining natural advantages and residual private-sector energy constitute an inexhaustible subsidy for whatever combination of climate mandates, social spending, and regulatory expansion looks good on a press release. The result is a state that can somehow still generate impressive aggregate GDP figures while pricing out swaths of people who actually live here.

The consequences require no spreadsheet analysis.

Housing production has remained chronically short of demand for decades, even as Sacramento passed bill after bill promising to fix it. Homelessness numbers stay among the nation’s highest despite record outlays. Big employers continue to expand elsewhere, citing not only the top tax rates but the cumulative weight of compliance, energy costs, and litigation risk. These crushing burdens are frequently excused as the “price of progressive success.”

Residents watch their rents, gas, and electricity bills soar while public spaces deteriorate tend to describe the situation more simply as failure.

Along with Newsom, though, no serious accounting of failure can skip State Senator Scott Wiener. The San Francisco lawmaker (and frontrunner candidate to succeed Nancy Pelosi in Congress) has been among the most prolific authors of the housing legislation that was supposed to break the logjam. Streamlining rules, density bonuses, and transit-oriented upzoning bills have been marketed as fearless progressive challenges to local NIMBYism.

In practice, Wiener’s bills have repeatedly overridden local zoning authority while producing far fewer units than his press conferences suggest. Affordability has not improved for most households. Concerns about displacement and infrastructure overload have not disappeared. Yet political credit for just “doing something” has accrued regardless of the gap between the rhetoric and results.

San Francisco’s crunch has only grown more severe. The answers given tend to involve the claim that more of the same will eventually work.

The Cato report’s rankings, which penalize both economic restriction and the obessive centralization of power, simply register the cumulative effect.

Newsom’s near-bottom ranking and California’s overall placement are therefore not some abstract ideological scores. They measure the distance between the state’s governing theory and the outcomes we ordinary residents experience.

High scoring states demonstrate that lower tax burdens and fewer barriers to building and operating correlate with better results on the metrics people actually track: the ability to afford a home, start a business, or simply keep more of what we earn.

California has confirmed the opposite theory – at scale. The Cato report’s contribution is not the discovery of the problem, it is the refusal to accept selective metrics or comforting narratives about it.

Residents who have paid the highest taxes, faced the steepest housing costs, and watched public disorder persist already knew California’s (and Newsom’s) experiment was expensive. The score of 1.95 out of 10 merely confirms just how expensive it has been.