“California has become a test case of the suicide of the West. Never before has such a state, so rich in natural resources and endowed with such a bountiful human inheritance, self-destructed so rapidly. . .. Gov. Gavin Newsom enjoyed a recent $98 billion budget surplus — gifted from multibillion-dollar federal COVID-19 subsidies, the highest income and gas taxes in the nation, and among the country’s steepest sales and property taxes. Yet in a year, he turned it into a growing $45 billion budget deficit. . .. The state’s downtowns are dirty, dangerous and increasingly abandoned by businesses — most recently Google [which is abandoning its San Francisco office] — that cannot rely on a defunded and shackled police. . .. Millions of productive but frustrated, over-taxed and under-served middle-class residents have fled to low-crime, low-tax and well-served red states in disgust [as have many businesses.] Read more of the column from this author, Victor Davis Hanson, a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness, here: https://nypost.com/2024/06/23/opinion/how-gavin-newsom-made-californias-paradise-into-purgatory/?utm_campaign=iphone_nyp&utm_source=mail_app
