From the Golden State to the socialist state



On November 3, California voters will find 37 candidates for local office on their ballots endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America. That’s more than half of the 69 DSA-endorsed local candidates nationwide, according to Ballotpedia. Minnesota, the distant runner-up, has six.

California, it seems, has become fertile ground for politicians promising to cure the failures of big government with still more government.

Californians have paid for big promises long enough. Before funding the next experiment, they should demand the receipts.

This is quite a reversal for the once Golden State. The Gold Rush, the transcontinental railroad, agriculture, manufacturing, and Silicon Valley transformed California into a magnet for Americans who wanted to build businesses and fortunes. Opportunity was its calling card.

Today, millions of Californians find it increasingly difficult even to afford the place.

The socialist candidates did not create all these problems. California's governing establishment spent decades laying the groundwork. Nor is every progressive regulation a socialist policy; California remains a powerhouse of private enterprise. But that only sharpens the question facing the newcomers: Why should voters trust a more expansive government to repair what government has helped break?

Consider housing. According to the Public Policy Institute of California, the typical home was worth roughly $776,000 in the first seven months of 2026. The national figure was $372,000. California has under-built for decades, leaving a housing shortage that estimates put at more than 1 million units.

Land and construction costs are high, and people still want to live in California. Those realities do not absolve lawmakers who imposed layers of local restrictions and cumbersome approval procedures. The obstacles became so obvious that Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed legislation in 2025 to streamline environmental reviews and speed construction. Sacramento finally acknowledged that its rules had become part of the problem.

A state that spends years making homes harder to build should not act astonished when workers cannot afford them.

Then there is electricity. In July, California's average residential price reached 33.6 cents per kilowatt-hour, compared with 18.3 cents nationally, according to federal energy data. Families do not experience those figures as an abstract dispute over climate policy. They experience them when the utility bill arrives.

The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office identified greenhouse-gas policies as one contributor to California's soaring rates. Wildfire costs and the utilities' operating structures also play a role. The explanation is complicated; the price is unmistakable. Politicians pursuing ambitious mandates owe residents an honest accounting of what those mandates cost.

And what has California received for its vast spending on homelessness?

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JP Yim/Getty Images for Clinton Global Initiative

The state allocated nearly $24 billion for homelessness and housing programs during the five fiscal years ending in 2022-23. Yet in 2024, the state auditor reported that California lacked enough outcome data to assess the cost-effectiveness of three of the five programs examined. Two appeared cost-effective. The other three could not be properly judged because officials had failed to collect sufficient information.

That is not proof that every dollar was wasted. It is an indictment of a government that spends billions before establishing whether key programs deliver results. Taxpayers are entitled to more than another appropriation and another promise.

Yet California’s budget offers no reassurance. The Legislative Analyst’s Office projects roughly $29 billion in outstanding budgetary borrowing by the end of the 2026-27 fiscal year. It also identifies a structural imbalance: The enacted budget is balanced, but ongoing expenses exceed ongoing revenues.

California is not bankrupt — yet. Its economy remains enormous and productive. Indeed, that makes the recurring fiscal trouble harder to excuse. A state blessed with extraordinary wealth should be able to account for its spending and live within its means.

Now consider what some of the socialists propose. On Election Day, voters will decide Proposition 40, which would impose a one-time 5% tax on the wealth of billionaires who were California residents on January 1. Naturally, the DSA supports it. Most of the proceeds would go toward health care, with smaller shares for education and food assistance.

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John Tully/Getty Images

Supporters say the money would help protect health care from largely overhyped federal funding cuts. The state projects the tax could raise tens of billions of dollars. But a one-time windfall is no cure for permanent spending commitments. California's Legislative Analyst warns that wealthy taxpayers could respond in ways that reduce future income-tax revenue. Once the windfall is spent, what comes next?

This is the argument socialists should have to confront. California already taxes heavily, regulates extensively, and devotes staggering sums to public programs. Yet housing is scarce, electricity is expensive, homelessness persists, and Sacramento borrows against tomorrow to meet today's obligations. Expanding the government’s reach without repairing its failures offers no guarantee of better results.

Many Californians recognize this. There are also plenty who may conclude that the existing political establishment has failed them so badly that an avowed socialist deserves a chance. Their frustration is understandable if misplaced.

California once drew the ambitious from across America with a promise that hard work could pay off. Before voters give Sacramento and city halls still more power, they should demand evidence that the power already granted has been used wisely.

Californians have paid for big promises long enough. Before funding the next experiment, they should demand the receipts.

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The government would like to discuss your allowance



Abdul El-Sayed did Americans a favor when he sat down with Jesse Watters on Fox News this week. The Michigan U.S. Senate candidate gave us a remarkably clear lesson in the philosophy behind America’s growing democratic socialist movement. The real question is simple: Who owns your property — you or the government?

The most revealing moment was not about Sharia law, transgender medicine, or even socialized health care. It came when Watters pressed El-Sayed about his proposal to tax the wealth of Americans with more than $100 million.

Before giving government more power, ask what happens when the people wielding it decide that you, too, have more than you need.

El-Sayed has made the argument before. Billionaires, he says, can surrender a substantial portion of their wealth and still remain billionaires. Their children and grandchildren will still be rich.

Notice the premise. This is not merely an argument that government needs revenue for legitimate functions, nor a dispute over whether the top marginal income-tax rate should be 35% or 39%. The argument is that you possess more than you need — and government gets to decide how much that is.

That is the part Americans need to understand.

Suppose you build a company. You work for decades. You save, invest, and take risks. The company becomes enormously valuable. Under the traditional American understanding, the presumption is that the property is yours. Government may tax under constitutional authority, but it does not acquire an unlimited moral claim on your property because politicians decide you have too much of it.

El-Sayed reverses that presumption. What are you going to do with all that money? Whatever your answer, the socialist argument says it is too much because you have more than you need.

The proper question is not what you intend to do with your property. The proper question is: By what right does the government take it?

That distinction takes us back to 1776. The founders understood that government is necessary to protect life, liberty, property, contracts, and the peaceful exercise of rights.

But precisely because government possesses coercive power, it must be limited. The founders built a constitutional order around the insight that human beings abuse power, so power must be divided, checked, and restrained.

Read the Declaration of Independence. The complaint against George III is repeatedly that political power has exceeded its proper bounds. The king interferes with colonial legislatures, imposes taxes without consent, and seeks to subject Americans to “absolute Despotism.”

The central political problem was not how government could solve every problem. It was how citizens could prevent government from becoming one.

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Brandon Bell/Getty Images

Compare that instinct with New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s declaration that there is “no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about.” That is nearly the photographic negative of the American constitutional tradition.

The founders asked: What powers have we actually given government, and how do we limit them? The new socialists ask: What problem is left for government to solve?

El-Sayed’s wealth-tax argument reveals why. Once we abandon the presumption that your property is genuinely yours, the limiting principle becomes hard to locate. If $100 million is too much, why not $50 million? Why not $10 million? If politicians may determine how much wealth you need, why stop with billionaires?

The issue is not whether anyone should feel sorry for billionaires. The issue is who owns the property.

Redistribution is politically easiest when it begins with somebody almost nobody identifies with. He has plenty. You do not. Why shouldn’t government take some?

Because a government powerful enough to decide how much property another person needs has been given a power that does not become harmless merely because its first target is richer than you.

Then there is the comic assumption beneath the argument: Government will spend the money more wisely.

El-Sayed’s home state offers a useful caution. The state auditor found Michigan’s Unemployment Insurance Agency ineffective during the COVID pandemic. Fraud controls were weakened, billions in improper or fraudulent payments went out, and later audits found serious failures in recovering them.

These are the institutions that will reliably improve on the decisions of people who built billion-dollar companies?

Government has legitimate but limited purposes, and legitimate taxation follows from those purposes. But legitimate taxation does not establish a standing claim to whatever share of your wealth politicians decide you do not need.

This debate is especially important because socialism has found a receptive audience among younger Americans. Harvard’s 2025 Youth Poll found support for capitalism among young Americans at only 39%, while nearly half of young Democrats expressed support for socialism.

That is, in part, a failure of education.

We have spent enormous energy teaching young Americans to critique power and too little teaching them why constitutional government was designed to limit it. Much of contemporary oppression theory condemns authorities who presume to know how others should live, then demands political power to impose its own answers.

The next generation needs a different lesson.

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Sarah Rice/Getty Images

Your life is your responsibility. Your neighbor’s property belongs to your neighbor. Wealth does not become public property when it crosses an arbitrary number selected by a politician. Government exists to protect rights, not to decide how much prosperity citizens are permitted to enjoy.

Freedom includes choices politicians consider foolish or wasteful. Save your money, give it away, invest it, build a business, leave it to your children, support your church, fund a charity, or buy something ridiculous. Within the law, those decisions belong to you.

That is what limited government protects.

The socialist temptation is perennial because it begins with an attractive promise: Give us more power, and we will use it to make life fairer.

The American answer is older and wiser: Before giving government more power, ask what happens when the people wielding it decide that you, too, have more than you need.

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VIDEO: Jeff Bezos slaps down socialist schemes and liberal policies in CNBC interview



Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos ripped into many of the policies on the left in a recent interview that was clipped widely on social media.

Bezos took aim at schemes to raise taxes on the wealthy and advocated lower taxes on Americans at the bottom of the economic ladder. He made the comments from the factory floor of his Blue Origin aerospace company during an interview on "Squawk Box" with CNBC host Andrew Ross Sorkin released Wednesday.

'We shouldn’t be asking this nurse in Queens to send money to Washington. They should be sending her an apology!'

When pressed on the issue of taxes, Bezos said half of Americans shouldn't pay federal income taxes at all. He cited the example of a theoretical nurse in Queens who earns $75,000 a year and pays about $12,000 in federal income taxes.

"People talk about making the tax system more progressive. How about we start by having the nurse in Queens not pay taxes? At all," he said.

"Why is a nurse in Queens who makes $75,000 a year paying more than $1,000 a month in taxes? That's $1,000 a month that could help with rent or groceries or anything. And by the way, do you know what that all adds up to? The bottom half of income earners in this country pay only 3% of the taxes," Bezos added.

"It's only 3%. We can find 3%. It's a small amount of money for the government," he continued. "And the more I thought about it, to me it's kind of absurd that we're doing this. You know, we shouldn’t be asking this nurse in Queens to send money to Washington. They should be sending her an apology! It really makes no sense!"

Bezos said it was fine to debate what the wealthy should pay in taxes but went on to accuse politicians of distracting voters by vilifying the wealthy. He added that politicians were ignoring the root problems causing inflation and other economic problems.

"If you're really being honest about it, we don't have a revenue problem in this country. We already have the most progressive tax system in the world," Bezos said. "The top 1% of taxpayers pay 40% of all tax revenue, the bottom half pay only 3%, and I think it should be zero."

"We actually have a spending problem," he added and cited the $44,000 that is spent on every child in the New York City school system with worse outcomes than other cities.

"If we ran Amazon the way New York City runs their school system," Bezos joked, "packages would take six weeks to arrive, we would charge you a $100 delivery fee, and when the package did finally arrive, it would have the wrong item in it!"

Sorkin didn't laugh.

"That's a skills issue!" Bezos added. "It's just competence."

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Bezos also argued that the government could double the taxes he pays and it wouldn't help the theoretical nurse in Queens because government spending is so out of control.

"You can't connect those two things, not logically," he said.

The entire segment on taxes with Bezos can be viewed on CNBC's YouTube channel.

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Glenn Beck exposes the Fed’s hidden stash — and it’s worse than we thought



For years, Glenn Beck has called for the abolition of the Federal Reserve, arguing it’s nothing more than a private banking cartel that enables endless government spending, devalues the dollar through inflation, and secretly steals wealth from Americans via corrupt monetary policies.

But new evidence that just surfaced proves the problem is even worse than he thought.

To explain what’s been happening behind the American people’s back, Glenn gives an analogy.

“Imagine the U.S. economy is like one giant, never-ending house party that’s been raging for years, and the Federal Reserve is the bartender in charge of the punch bowl. The punch bowl, that’s liquidity, easy money flowing through the banks and the markets and the businesses,” he begins.

For years, the “punch” was overdistributed, making partygoers drunk and willing to make poor decisions. “This is when stocks and houses get wildly overpriced. Companies borrow stupid amounts ... and everybody starts to do stupid things,” Glenn says.

That’s exactly what happened in 2022 when the Federal Reserve “just printed a whole buttload of money,” he says.

But when things “got ugly,” it suddenly reversed course and announced an initiative called “quantitative tightening,” which essentially “drained the whole punch bowl.”

The Federal Reserve “needed to get rid of $2.3 trillion worth of bonds that they owned, and they said, ‘We’re just going to let them expire,”’ Glenn explains.

“In theory, this drains the money out of the system, makes it harder for you to get loans and everything else. Borrowing is more expensive. The bubbles will pop. It forces the economy to sober up.”

But this was just a ruse, Glenn says.

Instead of actually stopping the flow of “punch,” the Federal Reserve during the COVID-19 pandemic quietly redirected it instead.

“A lot of it ended up in a giant backroom keg called the overnight reverse repo facility. ... These are money market funds, big investors, big banks,” Glenn says, “and they parked about $2.5 trillion in for safekeeping, and they were earning a safe interest rate from the Fed.”

But then the backroom keg finally ran dry.

“By 2023, something had changed. The short-term Treasury bills (super safe government IOUs) started paying higher interest than the keg in the back room, so the big investors said, ‘Why are we letting all the alcohol sit in the keg? We can have a party elsewhere,”’ Glenn says. “So they started draining the backroom keg $100-$200 billion every single month, and they poured that money right back into stocks and bonds and lending.”

What was the result?

“More punch than we started with in the first place!” Glenn exclaims.

“That’s why the Dow Jones keeps hitting new highs, government keeps funding huge deficits. ... The bartender was pretending to cut off the drinks while secretly letting the elite guests go into the back room and get the hidden stash.”

These still-drunk elites, Glenn says, continue to “make stupid, dumb bets,” which just makes the “hangover worse” for the normies.

“Look out, gang — you’ve been lied to yet again,” he cautions, calling the Federal Reserve a “criminal organization” that is “stealing from the American people.”

“End the Fed,” he pleads.

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