Some interesting facts in this write up, and the 20% that can’t afford their PG&E energy bill is noteworthy. The wife’s former supervisor had mentioned to her in a conversation during the summer after a cooling spell that her power bill better be under $1,000 (What?). Back when I was in California years before leaving, I had heard people in my office were spending $400 plus for gas and electric when I was spending under $100 because we had municipal power with SMUD and PG&E for gas (at one point it was more economical to run electric room heaters instead of the HVAC using gas). But before we left, even SMUD was forced to charge more, charging power by time of day with higher rates when you needed power for air conditioning… And now homeowners and renters are getting squeezed by insurance costs, super high property taxes because of ridiculous home prices, not to mention that high state income tax… And to add insult to injury, they’re spending billions they don’t have for illegals to have medicaid coverage. Newsom’s scheme to get the $3 billion would only cover Medicaid for a short time. All this makes you ask why? Part of the plan is to actually force people to leave California and spread around the rest of the nation, hoping they’ll continue to vote blue (insanity is doing the same thing expecting a different result). Why else would they continue running the state into the ground this way?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
https:\/\/www.dailysignal.com\/2025\/03\/18\/gavin-newsoms-california-in-existential-freefall\/<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n By Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n\n\n\n Victor Davis Hanson, a senior contributor for The Daily Signal, is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and author of the book “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won.” You can reach him by emailing authorvdh@gmail.com.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Editor\u2019s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today\u2019s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. California Gov. Gavin Newsom<\/a>, as I had mentioned earlier, has had a series of podcast interviews and he\u2019s selected conservatives. Charlie Kirk, Michael Savage, and others have been meeting with him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Steve Bannon was the most recent and they\u2019re asking him a series of questions, but none of them seem to really get to the heart of the matter. And that is to ask Gov. Newsom why this state is a dysfunctional and unsustainable project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019m not talking just about the $100 to $200 billion high-speed rail debacle<\/a>. I\u2019m not even talking about Gov. Newsom\u2019s blowing up of four dams on the Klamath River. Took about a quarter of $1 trillion that he took out of a bond measures fund to do what? To build reservoirs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019m not even talking about his cancellation or delaying of three reservoirs\u2014 Los Banos Grande, the Sites Reservoir, and Temperance Flat\u2014which would have given us, in a year like this, where we have ample rainfall and snowmelt, about 5 million acre-feet of storage, which would have come in handy in August.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019m not talking about any of that. I\u2019m talking about the more dire catastrophes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Right now, the state started the year 2024 $76 billion in debt. We have the highest income tax rate at 13.3. We have the highest gas taxes at nearly 70 cents a gallon. We have among the highest sales taxes, property taxes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But here\u2019s my question. Right now, Gov. Newsom, half of all births in California are covered by Medi-Cal. We have spent almost $11 billion on indigent aid, mostly for people who are here illegally. You are now broke. Even that was not enough. You are asking to borrow $3.4 billion from the general fund, which was in arrears, to pay for the health care of people who were largely allowed to come into California illegally. More importantly, in addition to that, almost 20% of all the people who are PG&E\u2014Pacific Gas and Electric\u2014users have not paid their bills. It\u2019s a fantastic multibillion-dollar shortfall. What is your plan to address that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n If it\u2019s to raise rates, we already pay 70% to 80% higher electric bills than any other state, and in general, higher than the average American. We\u2019re up to German territory. What is your solution to that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Recently there have been surveys of roads and infrastructure. California<\/a> is either dead last or among the five worst states as far as the conditions of their freeways and general roads. How can that be when we have the highest gas taxes in the United States by far?<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, my question to you is, you\u2019re governor, you have this enormous tax base, you have a $9 trillion industry in Silicon Valley, and yet you will not address these existential needs that we don\u2019t have affordable power; we don\u2019t know what to do with the millions of people, 1 out of every 5, who won\u2019t or can\u2019t pay their power bill; we don\u2019t have enough money to give medical support for illegal aliens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Twenty-seven percent of the population of the state was not born in the United States. That\u2019s an enormous task of integration and assimilation and civic education in our schools, which we\u2019re not doing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Our school test scores are among the bottom 10 in the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And given all that, it\u2019s an abject disaster because what you have done, governor\u2014and you didn\u2019t do it all, you inherited a lot from your predecessor, Jerry Brown\u2014but you created a state which has the highest taxes and the worst social services.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And the result of that is three things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n No. 1, 10 to 15 million people said, \u201cIf I\u2019m going to pay the highest taxes and yet live in a state that has a high crime rate, poor social services, awful schools, I\u2019m out,\u201d and they have left. And that was our traditional middle-class entrepreneurial cohort.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Second, we have more illegal aliens<\/a> than any other state in the union. You have welcomed them in without any plan: how to assimilate, integrate, house, feed, take care of their health needs. So, we have a huge number of poor people; 1 out of every 3 people on public assistance in the United States lives in California. We\u2019re up to 20% of our population lives below the poverty rate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Third, the only reason that this country, this state is even in existence is that we have this global tech empire in Silicon Valley. But the result of it is we have a pyramidal medieval society in which we have a small billionaire class and 1% of Californians pay about 50% of the income tax that has utopian agendas about solar and wind power and diversity and equity, but they\u2019re not the majority of the population. They\u2019re not the minority of the\u2014they\u2019re a tiny little influential coastal elite who has become the richest group of people in history because of Silicon Valley.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And then you\u2019ve taken the middle class and driven them out of California. And then we have this large segment on the bottom of the pyramid that is poor. It cannot afford to pay its power bill. It has no access to health care because the system is broke, given the numbers of people who\u2019ve come here from southern Mexico and other places in dire poverty. And you have no plan, instead we\u2019re talking about transgender athletes and men participating in women\u2019s sports<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s nothing, that is, of all the great issues in the world, that\u2019s nothing compared to what\u2019s going on in California. We are in an existential freefall. And you as governor either can\u2019t or won\u2019t do anything about it. And if this continues, in another decade, this is going to be a completely medieval Third World society, if it isn\u2019t already.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Some interesting facts in this write up, and the 20% that can’t afford their PG&E energy bill is noteworthy. The wife’s former supervisor had mentioned to her in a conversation during the summer after a cooling spell that her power bill better be under $1,000 (What?). 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