In Malcolm Gladwell’s famous book, The Tipping Point his central thesis is how events collate together to form a “tipping point,” that changes individuals, companies, governments and society. Has California reached a tipping point? Seemingly it has, then why do voters keep electing the same Democrats, and allow the Republican Party to fade away into oblivion?
Moreover, apathetic voters don’t care that the Democratic Governor and Legislature say one thing, and do something completely opposite as long as the hot causes are in line with the media and Democratic Party’s narrative of gay marriage, abortion and global warming. Those three shibboleths of California public policy have overtaken the central tenets of state government:infrastructure, public safety and education – since all three are in shambles or disarray at best.
For Democratic voters, independents who lean conservative, but never hear an organized message, along with Republican voters who still long for Reagan, here are issues to consider along with our downward trajectory. Your apathy and unrealistic expectations are taking California to a brutal tipping point that could easily mirror the disaster being ignored by the mainstream media (LA Times, NY Times, ABC, CBS, NBC) about Venezuela since it doesn’t fit their false narrative that socialism espoused by Bernie Sanders should be emulated.
The next number of paragraphs will begin showing the current path for California this year and decades ahead. It is sobering to envision what California will look like for our children if changes in voting patterns and the domination of the Democratic Party aren’t broken.
Governor Brown and the Democratic-Super-Majority-Legislature raised taxes again, and openly misappropriated the funds giving middle class families and businesses additional reasons to flee the state. If these two trends push forward in the future and the CRP does nothing about this with candidates who can explain what’s taking place in California – versus not supporting a Republican President during election seasons – then the CRP will be relegated to the dustbin of history. Translated, California will remain having the worst environment in the nation for job creation and business friendliness.
Unfortunately, Democrats are now job killers and only believe in the above-mentioned public policy shibboleths along with hating Trump. The days of Governor Brown’s father, FDR, Truman, JFK and Scoop Jackson are over – Democrats who believed in strong defense, single-family homes, infrastructure, education and two-parent families as the backbone of stable, thriving societies. Imagine a California Democrat who didn’t back abortion-on-demand, gay marriage and global warming and was pro-life instead, questioned the sanctity of marriage and was against global warming – even doubted the veracity of the environmental movements claims? That person wouldn’t win a City Council race against a dead person in San Francisco.
Pensions as currently configured are 100% unsustainable, no matter what the stock market achieves in the near future using historical rates of return. Democrats and Republicans who don’t make a case for pension reform will bankrupt California, and don’t expect Trump or Pence to rescue us. Even Sacramento has ominous pension problems. Hundreds of billions, even trillions are owed, yet voters are only concerned about the three shibboleths?
Unions now run California’s education standards, and three new bills (AB 450, 1209 and SB 63) would further influence the destruction of our economy and labor practices all in the name of being progressive Democrats. Yet voters keep voting for these measures and legislators, instead of sensible, business-friendly, moderate Republicans like David Hadley (though I disagreed with him about not supporting Trump during the Presidential election).
Social issues that have nothing to do with California’s upward trajectory are en vogue by Democratic legislators and their supporters: a former teacher at Diablo Valley College was arrested for attacking a Trump supporter with a bike lock at the Berkeley protests and AB 1576 would tax items and their price equivalent based on gender for businesses who don’t price items exactly the same throughout California. Litigation for consumers and businesses will skyrocket costs.
Republicans who only want to be moderates and worry about taxes, business growth and strong defense should understand that gender, class and race are additional shibboleths added onto the social diagram of how Democrats beat Republicans in this state. The days of not articulating reasonable social policies are now over since President Obama introduced all three into public policy and the national media to win elections and fragment the United States (US).
While Governor Brown and the Democratic-controlled legislature obsess over nothing, Joel Kotkin states:
“In the coming years, California’s claim of being the economic exemplar of the country may be further undermined bylegislative overreach. The statewide rise in the minimum wage will hit the lower-wage sector, particularly outside the coastal enclaves. Various plans to boost the welfare state, such as a single-payer health care system (costs $400 billion annually) that includes the undocumented, and a host of union-driven initiatives, seem certain to drive up costs and impose an ever-heavier tax burden on the state’s struggling middle class. Perhaps most threatening, over time, may be a host of new environmental laws which will impose enormous burdens on affordable housing, energy prices and industrial growth.”
This warning is coming from a self-described, “Truman Democrat,” and not a Tea Party Republican or Trump supporter. Somehow, Los Angeles believes receiving an Olympic bid in 2024 or 2028 will alleviate these concerns, without considering what prior cities have done with billion dollar stadiums in bankruptcy, disrepair and out-of-use? What our society should care about and attempt to alleviate before the Olympics being awarded is dropping the homeless rate in Los Angeles – which surged 23% according to the Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count.
San Francisco has taken the illegal-immigrant debate to a new level. Mayor Ed Lee stated in his 2017 State of the City address, “We are a sanctuary city, now, tomorrow, forever,” without understanding the implications of HR 2431 that punishes sanctuary cities by withholding federal monies. In 2016 San Francisco received $509,260,129 in federal grants and direct payments. And Democrats who control all levers of state government want to burden businesses with immigration policy, which will only drive more of them out of the state.
California isn’t in a shots-fired civil war, but we are dangerously close to moving in that direction when the Mayor of California’s most prominent city so openly defies the federal government. The Civil War decided that federal laws supersede state laws whether we like it or not.
State, county and local monies for mobility are allocated towards public transportation that the public either doesn’t want or use commiserate to cost, or the cost-to-benefit ratio is negative when you consider as an example, the miniscule affect on traffic that bike sharing produces. Meaning, billions are wasted on transportation projects that don’t improve pedestrian safety or traffic mobility. Whereas a better use would be the construction of quality-of-life infrastructure: schools, roads, highways, sidewalks, bridges and water systems.
The biggest killers to California are environmental issues that strictly pertain to global warming as fact and the regulations that will kill this state. As an example, President Obama’s last year in office, he produced regulations that totaled $2 trillion according to the Competitive Enterprise Institute. The Clean Power Plan was just one type of environmental regulation that California wholeheartedly embraced along with the Paris Climate Agreement without understanding the costs or zero affect either would have on cleaner air, efficient use of environmental resources or how China and India wouldnegate any gains by California adhering to these onerous regulations and agreements since both are still building coal-fired power plants.
Moreover, renewable energy and electric vehicles (EVs) don’t currently work now or in the near future as envisioned by Governor Brown, and State Senator Kevin de Leon. Both (EVs and renewables) have vast unanswered questions and technologies that need to be solved before either is scalable the way fossil fuels and the combustible engine is at this time. Since all environmental strategy and policy is based on man-made global warming in California through the Democratic-controlled legislature then the questions raised here need to be answered before moving forward with global warming-centric political hysteria. That’s not how good policy is made, or to truly answer the questions about the climate changing and what that means for California, the US, industrialized nations and the developing world.
As a former Republican State Assembly nominee (43rd State District) I call on the CRP to begin soberly asking why they can’t win elections anymore? Particularly, Los Angeles County (as goes LA County so goes this state) when candidates like Pete Peterson should’ve been embraced, his campaign funded by the party, and should currently occupy a top CRP leadership position while gearing up to either run for Governor, Lieutenant Governor or Secretary of State again. Imagine if now, Dean Peterson (Pete is the Dean of Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy where I am a December 2015 graduate) were Secretary of State?
Dean Peterson ran on a platform of transparency, efficiency and effectiveness for the office, instead of the politicized entity it currently is that knowingly has illegal immigrants on its voter rolls. Anyone who believes there aren’t differences in a Democrat or Republican begin trying to clean up voter rolls, and the mess that brings up to find out the differences. Dean Peterson would’ve have accomplished that task, or at least wouldn’t have added to the disaster. The CRP and national party should embrace him and others vibrant candidates like him as well.
California has gotten lucky economically through Silicon Valley exploding, Los Angeles exploding home prices and the popular Presidency of Barack Obama protected by and prodded forward by the media. A narrative not unlike Pravda during the Soviet Union’s days, but still we have the highest poverty rates, welfare usage, income inequality and fleeing of citizens over the other 49 US states. We’ve created a system that is no longer sustainable in the long-run and unless voters change their minds, character or sources of voting information then the words of Samuel Johnson, in Oliver Goldsmith’s The Traveller, will come true: “How small, of all that human hearts endure, That part that laws or kings can cause or cure.”