SACRAMENTO — Those of us who know and love San Francisco have a pretty good idea why the city continues to become less livable as rampant crime and homelessness turn its streets into (literal) cesspools of public disorder. Despite a...
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SACRAMENTO — Those of us who know and love San Francisco have a pretty good idea why the city continues to become less livable as rampant crime and homelessness turn its streets into (literal) cesspools of public disorder. Despite a $14.6 billion budget, the city struggles to handle its basic responsibilities. Officials did, in fact, quickly clean up downtown streets in time for an international conference with Chinese President Xi Jinping, but reports suggest “addicts and homeless swarm[ed] back” to its streets after the event.
Meanwhile, San Francisco’s city government takes the “let no flower bloom” approach toward allowing its private citizens to do much of anything. The San Francisco Chronicle reported this week about one property owner’s attempt to build a tiny balcony on his house — a process that took almost a year and involved three community hearings, Planning Department reviews, and whatnot. A top city planning official told the newspaper that the timeline was “well within norms,” which probably isn’t the good defense that one might think it is.
A new state law that streamlines building approvals even provides special oversight of San Francisco’s building-approval process. Even legislators acknowledge it’s too cumbersome to build anything there, which helps explain the city’s absurd home prices and chronic underbuilding. Despite eye-popping rents, thousands of San Francisco apartments are vacant, in large part because property owners are afraid of renting out their places to strangers. Basically, the city’s rent-control laws make it nearly impossible to evict bad tenants.
These are quite obviously government failures, yet San Francisco Supervisor Dean Preston said in a recent documentary that the city’s street-level disorder “is absolutely the result of capitalism and what happens in capitalism to the people at the bottom rungs.” In his view, the city’s homelessness crisis isn’t primarily the result of drugs or mental illness — or the city’s failure to humanely address those problems — but from evictions and people losing their jobs.
The bizarre views of one elected Democratic socialist wouldn’t matter that much if the city — and the entire state, for that matter — didn’t constantly blame the private sector for obvious, repeated, and unfixable government failures. Last week, I wrote about increasing euthanasia rates at municipal-run animal shelters, which offers one small insight into our state’s way of doing business. Gov. Gavin Newsom earmarked $50 million to turn us into a “no kill” state. Despite that promise, euthanasia rates keep going up — mainly because animal shelters continue with their COVID-19 policies that limit public access to view animals in kennels.
Our nationally high gas prices are, according to Newsom and Democratic officials, the result of corporate greed. Those prices apparently have no connection to the state’s exceedingly high gas taxes, special environmentally friendly fuel formulation (thus eliminating imports from other states), and its frequently announced intention to shutter the fossil-fuels industry to create a carbon-free future. Sane refiners have understandably pulled back their refinery investments. The basic rule: The government can never be at fault, only the private sector.
You get more of what you subsidize and less of what you punish, so it’s no surprise that California keeps getting bigger and more aggressive government — and businesses keep heading to other states. California cannot control its spending addiction. The latest budget is a whopping $311 billion, and nothing ever gets fixed. In the face of a $22.5 billion deficit last year, the governor avoided major cuts and employed a variety of “kick the can down the road” accounting gimmicks in the apparent hopes that a resurgent economy would bail him out. (RELATED: California’s Giant Deficit Puts Newsom in Hot Water)
The Legislative Analyst’s Office reported last week: “Largely as a result of a severe revenue decline in 2022-23, the state faces a serious budget deficit. Specifically, under the state’s current law and policy, we estimate the Legislature will need to solve a budget problem of $68 billion in the upcoming budget process.” That’s the largest deficit in raw numbers in state history. California’s highly progressive tax system is dependent on revenues from those dreaded billionaires and tech companies — and high interest rates and reduced investment are taking their toll.
Only a year and half ago, Newsom was proud to announce a $97.5 billion budget surplus and then embarked on a spending spree. Most of us counseled otherwise. The state could have used those dollars to, for instance, rejigger the tax system to make it friendlier to business and less dependent on boom-and-bust cycles. It could have largely fixed the state’s water problems, upgraded its decrepit transportation system, and, heaven forbid, reduced taxes for its residents. Now, the governor finally faces his first genuine challenge in statewide office.
He could pull back on the $100-billion-plus high-speed rail system that even the New York Times termed a “multi-billion-dollar nightmare.” But the operating standard in California is to never question or even thoroughly analyze the results of past spending even as you demand more spending. Never let basic responsibilities get in the way of some pipedream. By the way, no one is clamoring to hop on a bullet train from Merced to Bakersfield, whatever the relative merits of those Central Valley cities. (READ MORE: Think Biden’s Railroad Across the Indian Ocean Is a Fantasy? Check Out California’s Vaunted ‘Bullet Train.’)
Did I mention that despite record expenditures, the state’s public schools continue to languish? Per the Los Angeles Times last year: “Two out of 3 California students did not meet state math standards and more than half did not meet English standards on state assessments.” And note that “84% of Black students and 79% of Latino and low-income students did not meet state math standards in 2022.” The governor’s main approach has been to make it harder for those kids to attend charters.
Maybe, just maybe, the answer isn’t more government and more spending. One would think that a state that prides itself on its innovation might, I don’t know, actually try something more innovative than taxing and spending more to fund the same bureaucratic systems. The only silver lining: The only time California ever tries anything different is when it has no choice because revenues have run out. They’ve run out again, but only a fool would have high expectations.
Steven Greenhut is Western region director for the R Street Institute. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org.
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