I’m a Californian, so I know — don’t let Gavin Newsom become president

Gavin Newsom is running for president.

He may not be appearing on the ballot in 2024, but he is running now with a future date in mind. He went so far during his most recent reelection campaign in 2022 to purchase billboards in other states, to poke at governors who might be future opponents in a presidential race. More recently, he moved $10 million from his campaign accounts to a national effort to support candidates in red and swing states that will be important in a future presidential election.

Newsom is a handsome and well-spoken man, which makes him an attractive candidate in one sense. What makes him much less attractive is California, a state whose mismanagement and inefficiency are unparalleled, and whose population continued to flee in 2023 – the fourth year in a row that California has lost residents on net.

Our state budget, under $100 billion in 2010, is now well over $300 billion just thirteen years later, despite very small population growth. Even accounting for inflation, per capita government spending in California has doubled in twelve years.

Where is the money going? Well, we now have a state-run bank, of all things. Our pension and healthcare systems for state government retirees are huge, grossly underfunded and badly managed.

Advances in computing technology have resulted in massive administrative savings on labor in the private sector over the last decade. Most of our state’s spending is on labor. Unfortunately, that technology revolution hasn’t yet had much effect in the government of what is (or at least once was) the leading technology state in the country.

As I detail very carefully in The Newsom Nightmare, California is the poster child for government dysfunction.

If you are very rich here, you enjoy the state and its many blessings — its wonderful weather and natural beauty, its cultural diversity, and its gateway to the Far East. But if you aren’t rich, California probably is not going to work out for you.

If you live here, you will likely struggle to make ends meet, with housing costs higher than any other state except Hawaii. You will probably watch as your children have to move away to pursue better opportunities and an affordable cost of living.

Even as the state’s homeless-industrial complex consumes tens of billions in taxpayer dollars, you will face an increasing and increasingly aggressive homeless population camping out in the parks and on the sidewalks of every major California city. News crews that attempt to cover the uncontrolled crime problem in California cities have been burglarized and robbed at gunpoint during live interviews. In fact, news crew robberies risk becoming commonplace.

In California, wildfires will threaten your life and property. Your children will have to endure an administrator-heavy educational system where kids don’t learn and even the worst teachers cannot be replaced.

In Newsom’s California, if you earn more than $68,000 a year (or $137,000 if married), you will pay a marginal income tax rate (9.3 percent) higher than millionaires pay in all but five other states. And not only will you pay the highest taxes in the country, but you will pay them while also enduring shortages of housing, water and energy, and paying some of the nation’s highest prices for life’s basic necessities.

All of these California problems can be solved. The state has the resources and brainpower to overcome our challenges. What it lacks is leadership dedicated to searching for answers that involve harnessing the good work of many and the freedom to pursue that good work. Former Gov. Ronald Reagan often said that government isn’t the solution to our problems; government is the problem.

Large and incompetent government is our problem in California. We don’t need Gavin Newsom spreading it over the entire country. If he does, then Californians will have nowhere to run.

John Cox, author of the new book “The Newsom Nightmare,” ran for governor as a Republican against Gavin Newsom in 2018.

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