Crane's Corner: 7-21-21 Newsom's a Nuisance

Crane's Corner

Unlike some people I know, and a growing number of Californians I have not been hell bent on recalling Gavin Newsom as Governor. He’s a show boat, he’s hopelessly liberal and yes during the pandemic he overstepped his authority with a 15 month state of emergency, which gave him the juice to make some really questionable decisions. Like closing schools, churches and small businesses to in theory halt the pandemic, while allowing grocery stores, big box stores, liquor stores and select businesses with lots of foot traffic to stay open, in theory spreading Co Vid.
I wasn’t hell bent on recalling the Governor because the state is mega blue and the odds were that another left leaning idiot would take over, so why waste the energy? But no democrats have dared jump on the recall carousel and the odds of a recall measure passing, once extremely unlikely, are now unlikely but not impossible. As each day goes by Newsom is throwing money at some group of some program that is blatantly a suck up effort to buy the support of certain Californians, and that is irritating, What he did the other day was somewhere between stupid and dangerous.

In announcing he would spend 12 billion more dollars on the seemingly endless pot of tax dollars on the seemingly unsolvable homeless problem in California, Newsom at news conference started babbling about the California dream, saying it’s not over, and that California is such a warm, caring place he invited homeless people from all over the country to come to California to be taken care of,

This wasn’t one of these tiresome political sports wagers, where the Governor bets some Crabs and wine against 10 pounds of barbecue that the 49ers will beat the Kansas City Chiefs in The Big game. This is the Governors mouth and ego writing checks he can’t cash. It’s insane. For starters, California has arguably had the worst homeless problem of any state for years. An estimated 151 thousand on the streets of Sacramento, LA, San Diego, San Francisco and San Jose. But you’ll find some in Roseville and Rancho and Stockton. And the numbers keep growing. So it’s ludicrous that California with 20 percent of the nation's homeless can adequately house and feed the other 80 percent, some 416 thousand.

For starters, the cost of housing is among the biggest factors in why people become homeless, and California has the highest costs in the country and Newsom’s done little to change that except to extend a pandemic related rent moratorium that will only leave more people homeless when it expires. Inflation has hit California as hard as anywhere else in the country, squeezing the budgets of low and so called middle class wage earners, who have to choose between making the rent or buying groceries and living paycheck to paycheck and one big expense away from disaster.

Charity begins at home, and if we can fix our massive homeless problem that would be huge, but until we do the idea of exacerbating the problem by importing the homeless is reckless and moronic. And yes, worthy of a recall.