To borrow from Ronald Reagan: Are you better off than you were four years ago?
What Reagan asked of the nation in 1980, we can ask of California today.
Is the state more affordable? Is it safer? Are the schools better? Are the roads easier to navigate? Are taxes lower? Is energy cheaper and more abundant?
Put another way: Under the (eight-year) watch of Gavin Newsom & Co., the state has badly regressed.
Put another way: Under the (eight-year) watch of Gavin Newsom & Co., the state has badly regressed. Anadolu via Getty Images A just-released study from the Pacific Research Institute, a Pasadena-based think tank, adds an exclamation point:
Researchers found that Californians earn 20% more than the national average, yet have 35% less disposable income.
It’s also an indictment of this state and its elected officials — including Newsom, who incidentally wants a promotion.
In fact, it will take a starkly different leadership tack, and policies that defy an entrenched status quo, to ease California out of its current mess.
Consider the soaring costs here: housing, food, electricity, gasoline, taxes — life. Just about any good or service.
Newsom and the state’s leadership class did this.
They did it through exorbitant spending on pet causes — from political vendettas against the president to out-of-state abortions to health care for illegal immigrants, and more.
They did it through gluttonous, mostly-highest-in-the-nation taxation, including a billionaire tax — advanced by their union benefactors — that’s already driven some of the state’s top job creators out of California.
Newsom and the state’s leadership class did this. Getty Images They did it through insipid green-energy mandates that do little to shift the global climate yet enrich cronies through green pork — all while inflating the cost of gas and energy for all Californians.
In fact, they did it through an entire policy portfolio, on issues ranging from housing to health care to homelessness to education, that’s made their pals, unions and campaign donors richer … and California taxpayers poorer.
The Newsom crew will claim that everything’s great (cue the cheerleading), and what isn’t so swell is Trump’s fault, and Bush’s fault before that.
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But Trump doesn’t set policy in California.
The Iran war doesn’t explain why gasoline is $2 per gallon more expensive in California than in the rest of the country.
And presidential policy — and affordability concerns broadly — certainly can’t explain why Californians’ disposable income is 35% less than the national average.
This is a state that’s been driven backward, into regression, by years of destructive policy choices made by those elected to lead.
Indeed, implicit in Reagan’s iconic question were two more queries: Who’s responsible for the decline? And who can fix it?
There’s a reason US voters didn’t re-elect Jimmy Carter in 1980.
