My governor Gavin Newsom has finally found an excuse to get out of the state he’s been tyrannizing for the last three years.
He’s going around to red states like Florida, telling them how they’re the ones that are doing everything wrong.
While Newsom is AWOL, which actually is a good thing for the over-taxed people of California, the state continues to fall apart.
Its great cities continue to suffer from high crime and homelessness.
Its budget deficit for 2023 is $22 billion. And so many people are moving away that California is leading the country in net population loss.
The Golden State has a ton of economic and social problems, most of them politically made by “progressives” like Newsom.
Its once renowned infrastructure continues to crumble, and its electricity and natural gas prices are twice as high as other states.
We all know Newsom has his eyes, ears and deeply-bleeding heart set on moving into the White House in 2024.
For months it’s been as clear as his hair gel that he’s scheming to become either Biden’s new VP or replace poor Old Joe on the top of the Democrat ticket.
But based on his low career batting average in the minors, a President Newsom is guaranteed to be a major disaster for the whole country.
As mayor of San Francisco and then as governor, he failed to fix the state’s exploding homeless problem – despite his big promises.
And no Californian will ever forget the damage Gov. Newsom did to businesses and school kids with his strict, long and arbitrary lockdowns during the pandemic.
As governor he’s also blown a lot of money and hot air on environmental issues, especially climate change.
He’s a true believer in the fight to save the planet by reducing carbon emissions and destroying the fossil fuel industries that have made our lives richer, healthier and easier.
Newsom and his fellow zealots are so super-worried about the threat of global climate change that they think it’s OK to pass laws that force ordinary people to buy expensive electric cars.
In pursuit of reaching zero-emissions by 2035, the state of California is requiring 35 percent of new cars sold in 2026 and 68 percent in 2030 to be electric. About 19 percent of cars sold here last year were zero-emissions.
The Biden Administration – knowing a terrible California law when it sees it – has announced similar standards for the rest of the country that will force 66 percent of cars sold in 2032 to be electric cars.
But right now only 6 percent of America’s cars are electric – for sensible reasons.
As the Corvette-loving Biden family knows, EVs are expensive, don’t go far enough on a “tank” of electricity and need to have their batteries charged at charging stations we don’t have enough of yet.
A Tesla Model S is great. It has a range of 405 miles – and costs $96,000. Everyone would love to own one – if they could afford to buy it and keep it charged.
A Chevy Bolt EV is more affordable at about $27,000. But its range is only 259 miles on a single charge and no one in Newsom’s circle would risk being caught driving one, especially across a desert.
Of course, this foolish and unreachable plan to save the planet by forcing us into EVs is just another example of government making you buy something that it thinks you should have but you don’t want.
But it doesn’t matter to Newsom and other environmental crazies that everything the doomsayers have said about climate since the 1970s has not come true.
Global cooling ... global warming ... and now climate change. It doesn’t matter.
If Al Gore and the other climate experts knew what they were talking about, by now the Greenland ice sheet would be half-melted and the offices of the New York Times would be under 30 feet of water.
Which, come to think of it, might not be such a bad thing.
Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to reagan@caglecartoons.com and follow @reaganworld on Twitter
