California was once known as the land of fruits and nuts, home to massive orange, almond, and pecan orchards and the producer of a huge amount of the United States’ agricultural production. Today it’s still known as the land of fruits and nuts, only now it’s due to the practitioners of sodomy in San Francisco, the crazy homeless people on Skid Row, and the vast numbers of hippies and leftists who moved to California since the 1960s and turned a red state blue.
California’s problem with homelessness is well known. Go just about anywhere in the state and you’ll see massive numbers of homeless people. With a mild climate, generous government handouts, and no chance of freezing to death, California is almost a kind of Shangri-La for the homeless. San Francisco’s problems with the homeless are so great that the city has become a laughing stock, known more for its problems with sidewalk poop than for anything else.
But if you thought the existing problems with homelessness would cause California politicians to take some sort of action to improve the situation, you would be wrong. In fact, California Governor Gavin Newsom, the subject of a recall election in September, is doubling down on the stupidity.
Newsom has signed legislation to spend an additional $12 billion in helping the homeless. Asked whether the unintended consequences of the bill might include more homeless people from around the country moving to California to take advantage of those additional billions of dollars of benefits, Newsom expressed no qualms about it whatsoever.
As any economist understands, the more money you spend subsidizing something, the more of it you get. So if you continue to spend billions of dollars bailing out the homeless, you should expect to get more homeless people. Rather than improving the situation of the homeless in California, Newsom’s latest actions will make it worse. And the inevitable result will be even more billions of dollars of spending in the future, fueling yet another spiral of increasing homelessness.
We’ll see whether Newsom’s little gambit will pay off on September 14, when Californians go to the polls to vote on whether or not to recall him. Between his horrendous COVID response and his inability to take real action on homelessness, we would hope that Californians have woken up at least somewhat, so that they’ll send that clown back to where he belongs.