California is a shining instance of financial and social progress, a beacon to the remainder of the nation and the remainder of the world.
Doubt it? It should be true as a result of Gov. Gavin Newsom stated it Tuesday in his fourth State of the State handle, declaring, “now, within the midst of a lot turmoil with stacking stresses and dramatic social and financial change, California is doing what we have now executed for generations, lighting out the territory forward of the remainder, increasing the horizon of what’s attainable.”
He known as it “The California Means” and stated it “means rejecting previous binaries and discovering new options to large issues … ”
Nonetheless, Newsom ignored many “large issues” as he portrayed a state on the slicing fringe of just about every part constructive.
By any measure, the state has an immense scarcity of housing that has pushed prices via the roof and given California the nation’s highest poverty charge. However neither the housing disaster nor the poverty charge crossed his lips.
He additionally sidestepped one other disaster — a drought that threatens to devastate California’s agricultural trade and, within the longer run, clobber your entire economic system.
As a substitute, Newsom portrayed the economic system within the rosiest phrases, saying, “With regards to the economic system, California is unmatched.
“We dominate in analysis, innovation, entrepreneurialism, enterprise capital — and stay the world’s fifth largest economic system. Our GDP progress has persistently outpaced not solely the remainder of the nation — however most different massive, western democracies. Practically 1,000,000 new jobs within the final 12 months. In December alone, 25% of America’s jobs had been created proper right here in California. Extra new enterprise begins in the course of the worst of the pandemic than Texas and Florida mixed.”
Sounds nice, proper? However Newsom prevented the truth that California has the nation’s highest unemployment charge at 6.5%, almost three proportion factors larger than the nationwide charge and thrice as excessive as some states.
How about schooling?
“I’m speaking about an actual transformation of our public schooling system, like we’re doing proper right here in California,” Newsom claimed. “By creating selections — actual selections — for folks and unprecedented help for his or her children.”
What in regards to the devastation that COVID-19 visited upon the state’s almost 6 million public faculty college students, and the widening “achievement hole” between poor college students and their extra advantaged classmates? What about California’s chronically poor efficiency on nationwide educational exams? Not a phrase.
Newsom bragged in regards to the state’s main function in lowering greenhouse gases and lowering the dominance of hydrocarbons in transportation and utilities.
“At a time once we’ve been heating up and burning up, one factor we can not do is repeat the errors of the previous,” Newsom stated. “Embracing polluters. Drilling much more oil, which solely results in much more excessive climate, extra excessive drought, extra wildfire.”
Nonetheless, he stated nothing about California’s looming scarcity of electrical energy, already evident on scorching summer time days. Nor has he spelled out how the financial impacts of the conversion to an all-electric society will probably be alleviated.
Newsom did point out crime, at the least in passing, however supplied faint solace to victims of the state’s rising crime charges, significantly the wave of murder within the main cities.
“Our strategy is to be neither detached to the realities of the current day, nor revert to heavy-handed insurance policies which have marked the failures of the previous,” Newsom stated, citing extra money for each regulation enforcement and “new applications to sort out the foundation causes of crime, doubling down on confirmed violence prevention applications.”
Backside line: As a State of State speech, it was shockingly poor. It sounded extra like a kickoff to his re-election marketing campaign.
Dan Walters is a CalMatters columnist.