The Los Angeles Times blames Republicans for California’s woes

 Here is a classic example of The LYING Gaslighting Inbred IDIOTS in the Democrat Media

One of the hallmarks of narcissism is that when things go wrong, it’s always someone else’s fault. Being a narcissist means never having to say you’re sorry. Nothing more perfectly illustrates this truism than an essay from yesterday’s Los Angeles Times blaming Republicans for California’s myriad woes. While the author is correct that, when Republicans had the chance, they didn’t make smart decisions, the reality is that it’s the Democrats who have led California to the desperate place it’s in now.

Steve Lopez’s essay doesn’t make the mistake of blaming Republicans for all the state’s problems. He concedes that Democrats have long controlled the former Golden State, which is plagued by homelessness, crime, out-of-control housing costs, and poverty.

He contends, however, “that none of that happened overnight, nor did it happen exclusively under Democratic leadership.” Lopez believes that Republican mismanagement during the times that Republicans controlled the government is as much to blame as Democrat mismanagement.

Image by Andrea Widburg.

The easy challenge to that argument is that, since 1970, the legislature has had a Democrat majority, which became a vetoproof supermajority in 2018. Moreover, Democrats have held the governor’s office nonstop since 2011. For the seven years before that, the governor was Arnold Schwarzenegger, who ran as a Republican but governed as a Democrat. In other words, Republicans have had a shrinking say in California’s governance for decades, so it’s really hard to blame them for the current problems.

Nevertheless, Lopez makes a valiant effort. I’ll quickly go through what he gets right and what he gets wrong and then wrap up with all the awful Democrat policies that have truly brought the Golden State to its knees.

According to Lopez, Republicans are all or partly responsible for the following:

They’re responsible for the mental illness problem, he says, because (i) a Republican joined with two Democrats in 1967 to limit involuntary psychiatric treatment, which eventually led to shutting down insane asylums, and (b) Ronald Reagan signed the legislation. Lopez neglects to add that the Democrats controlled the legislature that year, so Reagan would have had to waste political capital vetoing the bill.

There’s more going on than that, though. In the 1960s, deinstitutionalizing the mentally ill was a national trend based on exposés about terrible abuse in mental institutions (e.g., Ken Kesey’s 1962 book One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest). Urged on by the ACLU and eventually required to act by the Supreme Court, legislatures across America did away with the whole concept of “insane asylums.” This movement proved to have been a terrible idea, but no government—including California’s Democrat-controlled government—has dared to walk it back.

They’re responsible for the influx of illegal aliens, he says, because (i) agri-business needs the labor and writes checks to GOP lawmakers and (ii) illegal aliens come to escape Mexico’s narco-violence, which is fed by American-manufactured guns.

That charge ignores that the GOP has no political power in California. While agri-business dollars may go into GOP pockets, that cannot change Democrat legislative or gubernatorial action. We all know that Democrats are invested in illegal immigration, so don’t blame the Republicans on this one.

They’re responsible for crime, he says, because Republicans refuse to back gun control. Two things: First, for now at least, neither Democrats nor Republicans can get around that little thing called the Second Amendment. Second, the problem of gun crime is one of culture, not guns.

We know this is true because, as John Lott has analyzed repeatedly, most comprehensively in his book More Guns Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws, the NRA is right: An armed society is a polite society. And if you don’t want to believe John Lott or the NRA, believe the Obama administration’s study showing that, as of 2013, guns were making Americans safer. They were used defensively between 500,000 to 3 million times per year, far outstripping annual gun deaths.

So, every one of Lopez’s assertions has some truth (e.g., deinstitutionalization, agri-business, the GOP not backing gun control), but all are also completely wrong.

Now, let’s talk about Democrat policies that have destroyed California:

• California has the nation’s highest state taxes on individuals and one of the highest corporate tax rates. This drives out the population and breaks businesses.
• California enacted some of the strictest COVID regulations, which also broke businesses.
• California is a sanctuary state (which is illegal, violating the federal government’s constitutional authority over immigration), with illegal aliens driving up crime, flooding schools (where their lack of English drives down education for all), putting pressure on available housing, and sucking up taxpayer-funded resources, such as K-college education and healthcare.
• Effectively decriminalizing all low-level drug use and sales, in addition to “legalizing” marijuana (another unconstitutional usurpation of federal power), which drives up crime and drives down employment. (Drug users are not good workers.)
• Embracing policies that encourage homelessness, such as allowing street camping, providing endless supplies for living on the streets, allowing open-air drug markets, etc. Even with most deinstitutionalization, many of the people living on California’s streets are crazy enough to be institutionalized. Moreover, since almost all the homeless are engaged in criminal activity, California’s Democrat government could fund special treatment wings in prisons for substance-abusing criminal homeless people.
• Crazy gender policies, especially in education, which demoralize and drive out normal, nuclear families.
• Insane energy policies, including the nation’s highest gas taxes, shutting nuclear power plants, making refineries impossible, and mandating electric cars and trucks. Again, this makes life expensive for normal people and drives out business.
• Wacky environmental control over water policies in a state that regularly experiences droughts.
• Widespread rent control in major urban areas which limits housing stocks and disincentivizes landlord upkeep of rental properties.

Ultimately, while Republicans are not without sin, Democrats own California’s coming collapse.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/09/the_los_angeles_times_blames_republicans_for_california_s_woes.html

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