California Dreamin'

California has been called the "Golden State", partly because of the golden color of the central valley hills in summer, and partly because of the actual gold found in the state. The growth of Silicon Valley wealth during the late 90s added a new form of gold to the picture. Since then, though, the temptations for politicians to extract as much of that gold to serve their own purposes have proven too great to resist. Our current governor Newsom has been especially susceptible to temptation in matters of energy, immigration, and election manipulation. We can look at some of his temptations.

Energy

About forty years ago, some scientists put out the idea that the climate was changing and the world was heating up due to human use of fossil fuels and the release of carbon dioxide gas. According to them, the gas was trapping the sun's heat, causing the earth to heat up to catastrophic levels. Hot summers, cold winters, more severe storms, more fires, and a whole host of other problems were proposed as consequences of increases in carbon dioxide levels.

Politicians, sensing an opportunity, jumped on the bandwagon and started enacting laws restricting use of fossil fuels, mandating such things as carbon trading and carbon taxes, development of "green" energy sources including wind and solar, and generally working to eliminate an abundant source of energy that powered almost every aspect of our economy.

Our governor saw a perfect opportunity to virtue signal by mandating phase out of gas powered cars, funding solar and wind farms, and generally forcing transition to electricity that we didn't have the capacity to produce or distribute.

While their actions have had no effect on climate, they have had extreme consequences in terms of increasing expenses, job destruction, and huge wealth transfers from ordinary working folk to large government promoted and funded "green" projects that have enriched the connected few at the expense of the rest of us.

Instead of better transportation, we got a high-speed train to nowhere. Instead of clean energy, we got ugly wind farms and solar panels covering the landscape. After years of operating history, we now know that the energy that these windmills and solar panels produce will never exceed the energy used to manufacture, maintain, and ultimately retire them.

California has led the nation in its legislative fight against climate change, with nothing to show for it except a crippled economy, job killing regulations, an environmental mess, and not so much as a tenth of a degree reduction in the temperature.

In the years since, scientists have worked diligently to determine if those original ideas about fossil fuels and carbon dioxide were correct. There is a growing consensus that they weren't. Scientists are coming to understand that carbon dioxide has little or no effect on climate. Those early ideas were wrong. Climate will do what it will do regardless of whether or not we use fossil fuels. Scientists can admit when they are wrong. Politicians, though, have a hard time with that. Governor Newsom, in particular, is still resisting the truth, and still supporting the climate laws that are so destructive.

It is time to apply our own climate change to California's legislators, and turn up the heat on them. They need to get busy repealing these regulations that are destroying our economy and robbing our young citizens of the energy needed to create jobs, to start businesses, to build industries, and to build new affordable housing.

Rather than trying to control something beyond their control, the legislators need to remove the barriers to innovation that stand in the way of new ideas, of growth, and even of hope for the new generations of today and of the future. As one of our most famous governors said: " Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem".

Time to get the government out of the way, not to give it more power for destructive meddling.

Illegal Immigration:

Governor Newsom recently stated that illegal immigrants in our State contributed over nine billion dollars in taxes to our economy. I don't know where he got that number, and I doubt he does either. I don't recall there being a box on the tax form for someone to check if they were an illegal immigrant. It probably came from some staffer who calculated the amount of taxes that illegals might pay if they actually paid taxes.

Our governor believes that these illegals are hard-working contributors to our state economy who braved unimaginable hardships to come to this country in search of a better life where they could breathe free. He believes that such courage deserves our support and protection.

He gets part of the issue right—the free part. Many illegals have come here because they get free housing, free medical care, free education for their children, free food, free, free, free. Who doesn't like free stuff! There's only one problem.

It isn't free.

We pay for all that "free" stuff. It comes from the money we pay in taxes. It comes from the costs of reduced wages, of increased crime, and from thousands of other ways. Our money, the money of California citizens, pays for all that free stuff. The money that we would use to pay our own bills, to support our families, to pay for housing, to buy food and clothes for our own kids, the money that comes out of our own pockets is paying for all that free stuff.

Our money.

Out of our pockets.

Our governor and his legislator handmaidens have put the welfare of illegals ahead of our citizens. We need to get our priorities straight.

Newsom went on to say that we needed illegals here to do the jobs that Americans won't do. He said he visited many places where illegals were doing dirty, unpleasant, but necessary jobs, and he didn't see anyone there who looked like him. I doubt that many of those folk could afford Newsom's hair stylist, but I don't think that is what he meant. From that quick look, he concluded that Americans didn't want those jobs.

But why would an employer hire an American citizen when they could hire an illegal to do the same work at much lower pay. An American would have to be paid at least minimum wage, while an illegal will accept much less. Who will they complain to about low wages? ICE? Since California is a sanctuary state, employers face little or no penalties for hiring illegals.

No, it is not the case that Americans won't do those jobs. The real situation is that they never even get the chance to be hired. Newsom got it wrong again.

Election manipulation

Recent estimates indicate that twenty percent or more of the California voter rolls are for illegally registered non-citizens. Motor-voter registration, a lax online registration system, and even NGO and State sponsored registration drives targeting new immigrants have led to these large percentages. Once in the rolls, they are almost impossible to remove, in no small part because our Governor has declared us a Sanctuary State where you can't enquire about citizenship status.

While few illegals are likely to vote, their registration entries in the rolls support a variety of cheat mechanisms where votes can be cast in their name without their knowledge. The state's universal vote-by-mail system makes the process easy. Centralized ballot processing, legal ballot harvesting, mandated unsupervised ballot drop boxes, among other state required support for election manipulation make fair and honest elections a thing of the past.

Now, as part of Newsom's struggle against Trump's efforts to make America great again, he has promoted a plan for redistricting California to eliminate any possibility of Republicans winning any elected office. After all, cheating is the right thing to do so long as it is done for a good cause, like electing only Democrats.

Architect Frank Lloyd Wright once said that if you picked up the US and shook it, everything loose would slide into Southern California. I think he should have added Sacramento, the state capitol.

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