Gavin Newsom is Selling a California Success Story that Never Happened
Democratic Senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, when running for president in 1992, noted that Bill Clinton was “an unusually good liar”. But Big Dog has met more than his match in California Governor Gavin Newsom, rapidly emerging as a front-runner in some polls in the race for the Democratic nomination in 2028.
Far slicker than the ever-mendacious Donald Trump, Newsom is the new grand master of dissembling. He demonstrated his skill in his final “State of the State” address ahead of the gubernatorial elections later this year. He continued to insist that California was “the beacon” for states looking for an alternative to brutal Trumpism.
As is his wont, Newsom pointed to the huge size of the Golden State’s economy. Due largely to the massive valuation of a handful of established tech companies, and highly inflated real estate, the state does have the world’s fourth-largest GDP, helped by the weak yen in Japan.
Yet if California’s economy is big, it’s not one many Americans would see as exemplary. It displays massive wealth inequality, with roughly half the nation’s homeless population residing in the state. In his speech, the Governor hailed a slight reduction in homelessness as a triumph even though his first pledge to wipe it out — made in 2004 when he was mayor of San Francisco — has long since expired.
Newsom’s California is hardly a beacon for the upwardly mobile, with the highest unemployment rate in the country. It is also the single worst state when it comes to creating jobs that pay above average. In recent years the only jobs created in California were in government-financed healthcare and government itself. He took the time to lambast places like Texas and Florida as being unfair to the poor, yet they seem to be providing more opportunities for the working classes than Newsom’s own state.
The truth is that the common folk, and even some of the rich, are leaving for Arizona, Nevada, Texas, and Florida. More alarming still, migration to California is now, on a per capita basis, lower than that of virtually any state, while the numbers leaving have shot up since 2020.
Housing appears to drive much of this. The Governor claimed progress has been made on fixing the problem but, despite the passage of some 200 new bills, the state suffers from the highest housing prices in the country and the second-lowest homeownership rate (after similarly inegalitarian New York). Newsom’s reforms have been ineffective; the state has among the lowest per capita building permits.
Read the rest of this piece at UnHerd.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: Picryl, in Public Domain.
