Trump proposes drastic cuts to 'dysfunctional' Section 8 housing program



President Donald Trump's administration released a budget plan on Friday that proposed drastic cuts across the federal government, including slashing the Department of Housing and Urban Development's discretionary funding by more than 40%.

The budget referred to the federal government's current rental assistance program as "dysfunctional." NPR reported that it essentially called to end the Housing Choice Voucher Program, also known as Section 8, noting that it would slash rental aid by roughly 40%.

'It furthers our mission-minded approach at HUD of taking inventory of our programs and processes to address the size and scope of the federal government, which has become too bloated and bureaucratic to efficiently function.'

According to the administration's budget plan, the proposal aims to empower states to provide housing assistance "by transforming the current federal dysfunctional rental assistance programs into a state-based formula grant which would allow states to design their own rental assistance programs based on their unique needs and preferences."

If adopted, the budget would place a two-year cap on rental assistance for able-bodied adults. It would also ensure that "a majority" of the funding went toward the elderly and disabled.

"A state-based formula program would also lead to significant terminations of federal regulations," the budget continued. "In combination with efforts related to opening up federal lands, this model would incentivize states and the private sector to provide affordable housing."

Additionally, the budget would earmark $25 million in housing grants for individuals aging out of the foster care system.

HUD Secretary Scott Turner released a statement responding to Trump's proposed budget, calling it a "bold ... reimagining of how the federal government addresses affordable housing and community development."

"It rightfully provides states and localities greater flexibility while thoughtfully consolidating, streamlining, and simplifying existing programs to serve the American people at the highest standard," Turner said. "It creates the opportunity for greater partnership and collaboration across levels of government by requiring states and localities to have skin in the game and carefully consider how their policies hinder or advance goals of self-sufficiency and economic prosperity."

He added, "Importantly, it furthers our mission-minded approach at HUD of taking inventory of our programs and processes to address the size and scope of the federal government, which has become too bloated and bureaucratic to efficiently function."

Critics of the plan have argued that it would lead to a spike in homelessness.

Kim Johnson, policy manager with the National Low Income Housing Coalition, told NPR, "We would see, I think, homelessness escalate in a way that has been really unprecedented and unheard of."

NLIHC argued that the budget would "decimate HUD's vital affordable housing, homelessness, and community development funding."

"In total, the 'skinny' request foreshadows a full request that will aim to slash HUD spending by 44% from FY25, including a proposal that would result in an unprecedented 43% cut to HUD's rental assistance programs," the nonprofit stated.

NLIHC noted that 200,000 households currently depend on the HCV program.

Others supported Trump's move to reduce Section 8 funding significantly.

Conservative commentator Ann Coulter wrote in a post on social media, "Section 8 housing is a scam for slumlords to charge the government exorbitant rents on behalf of non-paying welfare recipients. Can't imagine anyone OTHER THAN a slumlord defending it."

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Young Canadians Voted Against Spending Orgy, But Their Insulated Parents Won

Younger Canadians stuck living with their parents and unable to afford starting families supported the Conservative Party. Liberals won.

How California’s crisis could lead to a big political shift



California’s wide range of problems — including declining schools, widening inequality, rising housing prices, and a weak job market — shows the urgent need for reform. The larger question is whether there exists a will to change.

Although the state’s remarkable entrepreneurial economy has kept it afloat, a growing number of residents are concluding that the progressive agenda, pushed by public unions and their well-heeled allies, is failing. Most Californians have an exceptional lack of faith in the state’s direction. Only 40% of California voters approve of the legislature, and almost two-thirds have told pollsters the state is heading in the wrong direction. That helps explain why California residents — including about 1.1 million since 2021 — have been fleeing to other states.

California needs a movement that can stitch together a coalition of conservatives, independents, and, most critically, moderate Democrats.

Unhappiness with the one-party state is particularly intense in the inland areas, which are the only locales now growing and may prove critical to any resurgence. More troubling still, over 70% of California parents feel their children will do less well than they did. Four in 10 are considering an exit. By contrast, seniors, thought to be leaving en masse, are the least likely to express a desire to leave.

In some ways, discontent actually erodes potential support for reform. Conservative voters, notes a recent study, are far more likely to express a desire to move out of the state; the most liberal are the least likely. “Texas is taking away my voters,” laments Shawn Steel, California’s Republican National Committee member.

New awakenings

Given the demographic realities, a successful drive for reform cannot be driven by a marginalized GOP. Instead, what’s needed is a movement that can stitch together a coalition of conservatives, independents (now the state’s second-largest political grouping), and, most critically, moderate Democrats.

Remarkably, this shift has already begun in an unlikely place: the ultra-liberal, overwhelmingly Democratic Bay Area. For years, its most influential residents — billionaires, venture capitalists, and well-paid tech workers — have abetted or tolerated an increasingly ineffective and corrupt regime. Not only was the area poorly governed, but the streets of San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, and other cities have become scenes of almost Dickensian squalor.

Over the past two years, tech entrepreneurs and professionals concerned about homelessness and crime worked to get rid of progressive prosecutor Chesa Boudin. Last year, they helped elect Dan Lurie, scion of the Levi Strauss fortune, as mayor, as well as some more moderate members to the board of supervisors. Lurie, of course, faces a major challenge to restore San Francisco’s luster against entrenched progressives and their allies in the media, academia, and the state’s bureaucracy.

Similar pushbacks are evident elsewhere. Californians, by large majorities, recently passed bills to strengthen law enforcement, ditching liberalized sentencing laws passed by Democratic lawmakers and defended by Gov. Gavin Newsom (D). Progressive Democrats have been recalled not only in San Francisco but also in Oakland (Alameda County) and Los Angeles, with voters blaming ideology-driven law enforcement for increasing rates of crime and disorder.

Critically, the liberal elites are not the only ones breaking ranks. Pressure for change is also coming from increasingly conservative Asian voters and Jews — who number more than 1 million in the state and largely are revolted by the anti-Semitism rife among some on the progressive left. Protecting property and economic growth is particularly critical to Latino and Asian immigrants — California is home to five of the 10 American counties with the most immigrants — who are more likely to start businesses than native-born Americans.

These minority entrepreneurs and those working for them are unlikely to share the view of progressive intellectuals, who see crime as an expression of injustice and who often excused or even celebrated looting during the summer of 2020. After all, it was largely people from “communities of color” who have borne the brunt of violent crime in cities such as Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Francisco. Minorities also face special challenges doing business here due to regulations that are especially burdensome on smaller, less capitalized businesses. According to the Small Business Regulation Index, California has the worst business climate for small firms in the nation.

The shift among minority voters could prove a critical game-changer, both within the Democratic Party and the still-weak GOP. In Oakland, for example, many minorities backed the removal of Mayor Sheng Thao (D), a progressive committed to lenient policing in what is now California’s most troubled, if not failed, major city.

Latinos, already the state’s largest ethnic group, constituting about 37.7% of the workforce, with expectations of further growth by 2030, seem to be heading toward the right. In the last presidential election, Trump did well in the heavily Latino inland counties and won the “Inland Empire” — the metropolitan area bordering Los Angeles and Orange Counties – the first time a GOP presidential candidate has achieved this in two decades.

Back to basics

After a generation of relentless virtue-signaling, California’s government needs to focus on the basic needs of its citizens: education, energy, housing, water supply, and public safety. As a widely distributed editorial by a small business owner noted, Californians, especially after highly publicized fire response failures in Los Angeles earlier this year, are increasingly willing to demand competent “basic governance” backed by a “ruthless examination of results” to ensure that their government supports “modest aspirations” for a better life.

California once excelled in basic governance, especially in the 1950s and '60s under Democratic Gov. Edmund G. “Pat” Brown. The state managed to cultivate growth while meeting key environmental challenges, starting in the late 1960s, most notably chronic air pollution. In what is justifiably hailed as a “major success,” California helped pioneer clean air regulatory approaches that have vastly reduced most automotive tailpipe emissions as well as eliminated lead and dramatically cut sulfur levels.

All of this starkly contrasts with the poor planning, execution, and catastrophist science evoked to justify the state’s climate agenda. Even Pat Brown’s son, former Gov. Jerry Brown (D), recognized that California has little effect on climate. Given the global nature of the challenge, reducing one state’s emissions by cutting back on industrial activities accomplishes little if those activities move elsewhere, often to locations with fewer restrictions such as China and India.

Rather than focusing on “climate leadership,” Sacramento needs to tackle the immediate causes of record out-migration, including sluggish economic growth and the nation’s highest levels of poverty and homelessness. The great challenges are not combatting global temperature rises but the housing crisis and the need to diversify the economy and improve the failing education system. As these problems have often been worsened by climate policies, there seems little reason for other states and countries to adopt California’s approach as a model.

halbergman via iStock/Getty Images

Fixing housing

California now has the nation’s second-lowest home ownership rate at 55.9%, slightly above New York (55.4%). High interest rates that have helped push home sales to the lowest level in three decades across the country are particularly burdensome in coastal California metros, where prices have risen to nearly 400% above the national average. The government almost owned up to its role in creating the state’s housing crisis — especially through excessive housing regulations and lawfare on developers — earlier this year when Newsom moved to cut red tape so homes could be rebuilt after the Los Angeles fires.

Current state policy — embraced by Yes in My Backyard activists, the greens, and unions — focuses on dense urban development. Projects are held up, for example, for creating too many vehicle miles traveled, even though barely 3.1% of Californians in 2023 took public transit to work, according to the American Community Survey. As a result, much “affordable” development is being steered to densely built areas that have the highest land prices. This is made worse with mandates associated with new projects, such as green building codes and union labor, that raise the price per unit to $1 million or more.

A far more enlightened approach would allow new growth to take place primarily outside city centers in interior areas where land costs are lower and where lower-cost, moderate-density new developments could flourish. These include areas like Riverside/San Bernardino, Yolo County (adjacent to Sacramento), and Solano County, east of San Francisco Bay. This approach would align with the behavior of residents who are already flocking to these areas because they provide lower-income households, often younger black and Latino, with the most favorable home ownership opportunities in the state.Over 71% of all housing units in the Inland Empire are single-family homes, and the aggregate ownership rate is over 63%, far above the state’s dismal 45.8% level.

Without change, the state is socially, fiscally, and economically unsustainable. California needs to return to attracting the young, talented, and ambitious, not just be a magnet for the wealthy or super-educated few.

More than anything, California needs a housing policy that syncs with the needs and preferences of its people, particularly young families. Rather than being consigned to apartments, 70% of Californians prefer single-family residences. The vast majority oppose legislation written by Yes in My Backyard hero Democratic state Sen. Scott Wiener banning single-family zoning in much of the state.

Investment in the interior is critical for recreating the old California dream for millions of aspiring households, particularly among minorities who are being driven out of the home ownership market in the coastal metropolitan areas. The only California metropolitan area ranked by the National Association of Realtors as a top 10 pick for Millennials was not hip San Francisco or glamorous Los Angeles, but the more affordable historically “redneck” valley community of Bakersfield.

The numerous housing bills passed by Sacramento have not improved the situation. From 2010 to 2023, permits for single-family homes in California fell to a monthly average of 3,957 units from 8,529 during 1993-2006. California’s housing stock rose by just 7.9% between 2010 and 2023, lower than the national increase (10.3%) and well below housing growth in Arizona (13.8%), Nevada (14.7%), Texas (24%), and Florida (16.2%).

A more successful model can be seen in Texas, which generally advances market-oriented policies that have generated prodigious growth in both single-family and multi-family housing. This has helped the Lone Star State meet the housing needs of its far faster-growing population. A building boom has slowed, and there’s been some healthy decrease in prices in hot markets like Austin. Opening up leased grazing land in state and federal parks — roughly half the state land is owned by governments — could also relieve pressure on land prices. Until California allows for housing that people prefer, high prices and out-migration will continue into the foreseeable future.

Ultimately, California has room to grow, despite the suggestions by some academics that the state is largely “built out.”In reality, California is not “land short,” either in its cities or across its vast interior. Urbanization covers only 5.3% of the state, according to U.S. Census Bureau data, while parks, agricultural land, deserts, and forests make up the bulk of the area.

Diversifying the economy

Even Jerry Brown has remarked that the “Johnny one note” tech economy the state’s tax base depends on could stumble. This would reduce the huge returns on capital gains from the top 1% of filers, who now account for roughly half of all state income tax revenues. This overreliance may be particularly troublesome in the era of artificial intelligence, where tech companies may continue to expand but have less need for people. Indeed, San Francisco County, which boasts many tech jobs, experienced the nation’s largest drop in average weekly wages, 22.6%, between 2021 and 2022.

To expand opportunity and, hence, its tax base, California has to make more of the state attractive to employers. The best prospects, again, will be in inland areas.Today, when firms want to build spaceships, a clear growth industry where California retains significant leadership, as well as battery plants and high-tech and food processing facilities, they often opt to go to Nevada, Arizona, Tennessee, and Texas. Given lower land and housing costs, San Bernardino and Riverside Counties, as well as spots on the Central Coast, should be ideally situated to compete for those jobs.

The current economic pattern creates a situation where AI developers, elite engineers, and venture capitalists may enjoy unprecedented profits, but relatively little trickles down to the mass of Californians. Not all Californians have wealthy parents to subsidize their lifestyle, and few are likely to thrive as AI engineers. To address the dilemmas facing the next generation of Californians, the state needs to focus not just on ephemera, software, and entertainment but on bringing back some of the basic industries that once forged the California dream. In this way, President Trump’s policies could actually help the state, particularly in fields like high-tech defense and space.

In the 1940s, California played a key role in the American “arsenal of democracy.” Today, it could do the same, not so much by producing planes and Liberty ships, but drones, rockets, and space-based defense systems. Indeed, there are now discussions of reviving the state’s once-vaunted shipbuilding industry that buoyed the economy of Solano County — something sure to inspire the ire of the Bay Area’s rich and powerful environmental lobby.

Photo by Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Improving education

Climate and environmentalism are not the only barriers to California’s revival. No problem is more pressing and consequential than the state’s failure to educate California’s 5.9 million public school children. In fiscal year 2023-2024, California will spend about $128 billion on K-12 public education — an amount exceeding the entire budget of every other state except New York. Despite this level of spending, about 75% of California students lack proficiency in core subject areas based on federal education standards.

Two out of three California students do not meet math standards, and more than half do not meet English standards on state assessments. Overall, less than half of California public school students performed at or above grade level for English language arts (reading, writing, etc.), while only 34.62% met or exceeded the math standard on the Smarter Balanced 2023 tests. The failures are particularly clear among minority students. According to the latest California testing results, only 36.08% of Latino students met or exceeded proficiency standards for English language arts. Only 22.69% met or exceeded proficiency standards in math. Latino students, for example, in Florida and Texas do somewhat better in both math and English, even though both states spend less per capita on education than California.

Not surprisingly, many parents object to a system where half of the state’s high school students barely read at grade level. One illustration of discontent has been the growth of the charter school movement. Today, one in nine California schoolchildren attend charter schools (including my younger daughter). The state’s largest school district, the heavily union-dominated Los Angeles Unified School District, has lost roughly 40% of its enrollment over two decades, while the number of students in charters grew from 140,000 in 2010 to 207,000 in 2022.

In addition to removing obstacles to charters, homeschoolers are part of the solution. California homeschool enrollment jumped by 78% in the five-year period before the pandemic and in the Los Angeles Unified School District by 89%. Equally important, some public districts and associated community colleges, as in Long Beach, have already shifted toward a more skills-based approach. Public officials understand that to keep a competitive edge, they need to supply industrial employers with skilled workers. This is all the more crucial as the aerospace workforce is aging — as much as 50% of Boeing’s workforce will be eligible for retirement in five years. In its quest for relevance, Long Beach’s educational partnership addresses the needs of the city’s industrial and trade sectors.

This approach contrasts with the state’s big push to make students take an ethnic studies course designed to promote a progressive and somewhat anti-capitalist, multicultural agenda. They will also be required to embrace the ideology of man-made climate change even if their grasp of basic science is minimal. A “woke” consciousness or deeper ethnic affiliations will not lead to student success later in life. What will count for the students and for California’s economy is gaining the skills that are in demand. You cannot run a high-tech lathe, manage logistics, or design programs for space vehicles with ideology.

More to come

Conventional wisdom on the right considers California to be on the road to inexorable decline. Progressives, not surprisingly, embrace the Golden State as a model while ignoring the regressive, ineffective policies that have driven the state toward a feudal future.

Yet both sides are wrong. California’s current progressive policies have failed, but if the state were governed correctly, it could resurge in ways that would astound the rest of the country and the world. Change is not impossible. As recent elections showed, Californians do not reflexively vote for progressives if they feel their safety or economic interests are on the line.

If change is to come in California, it may not be primarily driven by libertarian or conservative ideologies but by stark realities. Over two-thirds of California cities do not have any funds set aside for retiree health care and other expenses. Twelve of the state’s 15 large cities are in the red, and for many, it is only getting worse. The state overall suffers $1 trillion in pension debt, notes former Democratic state Rep. Joe Nation. U.S. News and World Report places California, despite the tech boom, 42nd in fiscal health among the states. This pension shortfall makes paying for infrastructure, or even teacher salaries, extraordinarily difficult at the state and local levels.

Without change, the state is socially, fiscally, and economically unsustainable, even if a handful of people get very rich and the older homeowners, public employees, and high-end professionals thrive. California needs to return to attracting the young, talented, and ambitious, not just be a magnet for the wealthy or super-educated few.

This can only happen if the state unleashes the animal spirits that long drove its ascendancy. The other alternative may be a more racial, class-based radicalism promoted by the Democratic Socialists of America and their allies. They have their own “cure” for California’s ills. We see this in debates over rebuilding Los Angeles, with progressives pushing for heavily subsidized housing, as with the case of the redevelopment of the Jordan Downs public housing complex, while seeking to densify and expand subsidized housing to once solidly affluent areas like the Palisades.

California has survived past crises — earthquakes and the defense and dot-com busts — and always has managed to reinvent itself. The key elements for success — its astounding physical environment, mild climate, and a tradition for relentless innovation — remain in place, ready to be released once the political constraints are loosened.

Fifty years ago, in her song “California,” Canada-reared Joni Mitchell captured the universal appeal of our remarkable state, not just its sunshine, mountains, and beaches, but also how it gave its residents an unprecedented chance to meet their fondest aspirations. Contrasting her adopted home with the sheer grayness of life elsewhere, she wrote, “My heart cried out for you, California / Oh California, I’m coming home.”

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.

Why California’s ‘model state’ is a warning, not a goal



California’s economic, academic, media, and political establishment still embraces the notion of the state’s inevitable supremacy. “The future depends on us,” Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) said at his first inauguration, “and we will seize this moment.” Others see California as deserving and capable of nationhood — a topic that has resurfaced with President Donald Trump’s presidency, as it reflects, in the words of one New York Times columnist, “the shared values of our increasingly tolerant and pluralistic society.”

Critics say this vision is at odds with the facts on the ground. Rather than the exemplar of a new “progressive capitalism” and a model for social justice, California both accommodates the highest number of billionaires and the highest cost-adjusted poverty rate. It has the third-highest gap, behind just Washington, D.C., and Louisiana, between middle- and upper-middle-income earners of any state. Nearly one in five Californians — many working — live in poverty (using a cost-of-living adjusted poverty rate); the Public Policy Institute of California estimates another one in five live in near-poverty — roughly 15 million people in total.

Barely one in three state residents consider California a good place to achieve the American dream. Increasingly, California is where this dream goes to die.

“California” is a model that no longer delivers. Sure, California has a huge gross domestic product, paced largely by high real estate prices and the stock value of a handful of huge tech firms. It retains the inertia from its glory days, particularly in technology and entertainment, but that edge is evaporating as tech firms flee the state and Hollywood productions are shot around the world. For all its strengths, California has the nation’s second-highest rate of unemployment, with lagging job growth, particularly in comparison to its neighbors and chief rivals — notably Texas, Arizona, and Nevada.

The signs of failure are evident on the streets. Roughly half the nation’s homeless population lives in the Golden State, many concentrated in disease- and crime-ridden tent cities in Los Angeles or San Francisco. Barely one in three state residents — and only one in four younger voters — now consider California a good place to achieve the American dream. Increasingly, California is where this dream goes to die.

‘San Francisco gentry liberalism’

The roots of California are long and deep. In August, for example, the New York Times reported how its development into a one-party state controlled by progressive Democrats has made it the country’s center of political corruption.

“Over the last 10 years,” the Times reported, “576 public officials in California have been convicted on federal corruption charges, according to Justice Department reports, exceeding the number of cases in states better known for public corruption, including New York, New Jersey, and Illinois.”

Ironically, the state’s corruption and decline have been expressed through policies long touted as symbols of progressive enlightenment and virtue — the odd marriage of oligarchal wealth and woke political consciousness some describe as “San Francisco gentry liberalism.”

Under this regime, personified by Newsom and former Vice President Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), progressivism has lost its historic embrace of upward mobility and replaced it with an ideology obsessed with race, gender, and climate. It has produced a political leadership class that, for the most part, is largely made up of longtime government or union operatives. In the legislature, the vast majority of Democrats have little to no experience in the private sector. The failure may have been accelerated by the secular decline of the once-powerful Republican Party over the past two decades. This decline removed the incentives for Democrats to concern themselves with moderate voters of either party.

This development represents a distinct break even with California’s pro-growth progressive past, which helped make the Golden State a symbol of American opportunity, innovation, and prosperity. The late historian and one-time state librarian Kevin Starr observed that under the governorship of Democrat Pat Brown in the late 1950s and early 1960s, California enjoyed “a golden age of consensus and achievement, a founding era in which California fashioned and celebrated itself as an emergent nation-state.” In 1971, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith described the state government as run by “a proud, competent civil service,” enjoying some of “the best school systems in the country.”

This may seem something like ancient mythology to most Californians today. If the builder Pat Brown was an exemplar of “Responsible Liberalism,” California’s government today has been ranked by Wallet Hub as the least efficient in delivering services relative to the tax burden. Pat Brown’s son, Jerry, the Democratic governor from 1975 to 1983 and then again from 2011 to 2019, and his successor, Gavin Newsom, epitomize the triumph of ideology over effectiveness. Theirs is a kind of performative progressivism that shrugs about things like roads that are now among the nation’s worst, a high-speed bullet train plagued with endless delays and massive cost overruns, and a failure to boost critical water systems in a perennially drought-threatened state.

In exchange for all this, the progressive regime has stuck ordinary Californians and businesses with some of the nation’s highest taxes and greatest regulatory burdens. California’s business climate is rated at or near the bottom in most business surveys. The Tax Foundation’s 2019 State Business Tax Climate Index, which evaluates taxes in five categories, also lists California at No. 49, with only New Jersey trailing.

These policies have made California exceptionally expensive for both businesses and households. Indeed, according to current estimates, only Hawaii and Massachusetts have a higher cost of living. California has the highest average housing costs, the second-highest transportation costs, and the third-highest food expenses in the country. Much of this is invisible to the top 20% and 5% of California households, who enjoy median incomes of $72,500 and $129,000 — greater than their national counterparts — but is widely felt in the state’s less affluent areas.

Pell-mell into climatism

California progressivism today embraces many causes — undocumented immigrants, transgender kids, reparations for slavery — but nothing has shaped the state’s contemporary politics more in recent years than a commitment to what Newsom described in 2018 as “climate leadership.”

In embracing the catastrophism that defines climate change as an existential threat to life on the planet, Newsom has left behind the old progressive notion of focusing on materially improving people’s lives by embracing inherently uncertain computer models predicting danger.

In California, experts from what Bjorn Lomborg, a leading skeptic of climate catastrophism, calls “the climate industrial complex” provide the justification for staggeringly expensive, socially regressive mandates based on the conjured models. The state mandates greenhouse gas reductions but leaves implementation in the hands of state agencies closely aligned with the green lobby.

This allows the legislature to look the other way as state climate policies knowingly increase poor and working family costs and shift billions of dollars to the wealthy in the relentless pursuit of unilaterally modeled carbon emission targets that even advocates admit cannot possibly “fix” the global climate. Indeed, in 2023, the California Air Resources Board belatedly disclosed that current state climate policies would disproportionately harm households earning less than $100,000 per year while boosting incomes for those above this threshold.

Newsom’s dogged emphasis on climate change — and achieving “carbon neutrality” by 2045 — has meant massive subsidies for wind and solar, mandates to reduce personal car use by nearly three times the temporary cuts caused by pandemic lockdowns, electrification of home appliances at a cost of many thousands of dollars per household, and even cuts to dairy and livestock emissions with technology mandates, accelerating the relocation of these food producers to other states and increasing food prices.

To justify the pain, state regulators estimated that paying for these changes today would prevent future climate damage, all of which depends on highly uncertain projections spanning, in some cases, hundreds of years in the future. The problem is that even if damage projections are remotely accurate, California’s climate law recognizes that the state cannot affect the global climate unless everyone else in the world follows suit. In fact, global emissions are rising, especially from China, which exported over $120 billion in goods and services, notably manufactured goods, often produced with coal, to California in 2023.

Also based on “expert” opinion, the state has embraced a policy to force people to buy electric vehicles by 2035 — a policy increasingly questionable amid slowing demand for these vehicles. Once again, state officials relying on speculative projections proclaim that the policy will benefit the state’s consumers and the environment — although this seems questionable, given, as Volvo suggests, the energy demands of building such cars may take years to have a positive impact.

Photo by David McNew/Getty Images

The price of climate delusion

The recent fires that incinerated a swath of Los Angeles revealed the shortcomings of the current climate-obsessed regime. To be sure, Trump’s claim that water policies created the conflagration is largely false, but the lack of attention to water delivery and forest maintenance, a consistent aspect of the Brown-Newsom era, clearly contributed to the intensity of the blaze.

In 2014, California voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure allocating $2.7 billion to increase state water storage capacity, including the building of new reservoirs. These facilities would not only improve an aging water system neglected for decades but also capture and store precipitation that may occur in less frequent, more intense storms. Yet even government apologists concede that 10 years later, progress has been too slow, with deeply entrenched bureaucracies issuing permits only at a “glacial” pace.

Rather than building on the achievements of Pat Brown, state officials spent a quarter of a billion dollars helping environmental groups destroy dams and hydroelectric generation along the Klamath River in Northern California. While this effort may yet improve fish habitat as intended, its initial results are sobering. Most of the river’s existing fish, crustaceans, and other organisms were killed by toxic sediment as the dams were removed, and unanticipated tar-pit-like mud exposure trapped large mammals, including protected wild horses. In March 2024, fish that state biologists confidently released into the restored river perished in a mass “die-off” within two days.

These misplaced priorities are also mirrored in Los Angeles, where reservoirs were left empty, leaving water unavailable and water hydrants without pressure. Both the state and local governments have failed to sufficiently fund fire-fighting operations — except for approving lavish pensions.

The climate catastrophists may promote fires as a sign of the coming apocalypse, but still consistently oppose effective fire management, as the Little Hoover Commission found as far back as 2018, discouraging such things as controlled burns and brush clearance. Policies of controlled burns, practiced by Native Americans and in areas like Western Australia, have been largely ignored.

Even as he rails against “misinformation,” Newsom blamed the recent Los Angeles fires, as he has regarding earlier blazes, on climate change. This claim has been widely debunked by scientists like Steve Koonin, Roger Pielke, and the U.S. Geological Service. Undaunted, Newsom’s neat solution appears to be to sue the oil companies for fires made far worse by Newsom’s own policies.

The greening of decline

Charred landscapes and burned houses reflect one legacy of California’s progressive obsessions. The impact of taxes and climate regulations on the overall economy has been more widespread, particularly for minorities and working- and middle-class households, who were once the focus of traditional liberalism.

This shift has been bolstered by the ascendancy of public employee unions and the remarkable growth of the state bureaucracy. California, under Pat Brown, largely avoided public employee unions, but Jerry Brown and other governors reversed this policy. Since 2022, even with budget shortfalls, California has among the highest rates of government sector growth in the country. Today, they are widely seen as a dominant force in Sacramento. Particularly powerful has been the 310,000-member California Teachers Association. Their numbers have continued to swell, even amid budget shortfalls, at a faster rate than private-sector employment.

Public employees, or their union representatives, constitute a powerful part of California’s emerging class hierarchy. Increasingly, their livelihoods are tied to an agenda of ever more regulation and taxes. Public workers, of course, also share these costs, but more regulation also engenders more jobs for the bureaucracy.

Ultimately, California, the birthplace of youth culture, is getting old — with some places more resembling Hawaii than the entrepreneurial powerhouse of the past.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of Californians, particularly the working class, do not enjoy such benefits. In assessing the impacts of climate policies, environmental and civil rights attorney Jennifer Hernandez has dubbed these policies “the Green Jim Crow,” linking the state’s climate regulatory effort to the impoverishment of millions. California has the highest energy prices in the continental U.S., double the national average, which has exacerbated “energy poverty,” particularly among the poor and those in the less temperate interior.

In 2023, Chapman University researcher Bheki Mahalo found that the tech and information sector accounted for close to two-thirds of state GDP, compared to 8.5% in 1985. Virtually every sector associated with blue-collar employment — manufacturing, construction, transportation, and agriculture — has declined while most others have stagnated.

Consider California’s once-vibrant fossil fuel industry. The state’s last major oil firm, Chevron, recently moved to Houston. In 1996, California imported less than 10% of its crude oil from foreign sources. In 2023, foreign suppliers such as Iraq and Saudi Arabia accounted for over 60% of the state’s supplies. This continued shuttering of the state’s fossil fuel industry will cost California as many as 300,000 generally high-paying jobs, roughly half held by minorities, and will devastate, in particular, the San Joaquin Valley, where 40,000 jobs depend on the oil industry.

Other blue-collar industries — construction, manufacturing, logistics, and agriculture — are also suffering under California’s climate policies. Over the past decade, it has fallen into the bottom half of states in manufacturing sector employment, ranking 44th in 2023. Its industrial new job creation has paled in comparison to gains from competitors such as Nevada, Kentucky, Michigan, and Florida. Even without adjusting for costs, no California metro area ranks in the U.S. top 10 in terms of well-paying blue-collar jobs. But four — Ventura, Los Angeles, San Jose, and San Diego — sit among the bottom 10.

But not all the damage has been limited to “the carbon economy.” Progressive climate, labor, and tax policies have chased a broad range of companies out of the state, including an array of leading companies tied to professional services and engineering: Jacobs Engineering, Parsons, Bechtel, Toyota, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Charles Schwab, and McKesson. Even Hollywood is hemorrhaging jobs, and recently, In-N-Out Burger — the state’s widely beloved fast food chain — announced it is planning a move to Tennessee. California is increasingly losing ground both in tech and high-end business services to sprawling, low-density metro areas like Austin, Nashville, Orlando, Charlotte, Salt Lake City, and Raleigh.

California, once the land of opportunity, is the single worst state in the nation when it comes to creating jobs that pay above average, while it is at the top of the heap in creating below-average and low-paying jobs. The state hemorrhaged 1.6 million above-average-paying jobs in the past decade, more than twice as many as any other state. Since 2008, the state has created five times as many low-wage jobs as high-wage jobs. In the past three years, the situation worsened, with 78.1% of all jobs added in California from lower-than-average-paying industries versus 61% for the nation as a whole.

The only sector that has seen big growth in higher-wage jobs has been the government, which is funded by tax receipts from the struggling private sector. Public sector employment is growing at about the same pace as jobs overall in California, but over the decade at twice the national pace. The average annual pay for those public sector government jobs is now almost double that of private sector jobs.

The housing crisis: Middle-class kill shot

The lack of well-paying jobs meshes poorly with high living costs, notably in terms of housing. Here again, climate politics play a critical role in driving high housing prices in California. In the late 1960s, the value of the typical California home was more than four times the average household’s income. Today, it’s worth more than 11 times. The median California home is priced nearly 2.5 times higher than the median national home, according to 2022 census data.

A key driver of this price hike is climate policy restraints on suburban development and single-family housing, supposedly to cut residential emissions. These restrictions push putting new housing close to transit in a state where barely 3% of employees use it to get to work, according to the American Community Survey. Perhaps more to the point, these policies are not what most Californians want. One recent Public Policy Institute of California survey has found that 70% of Californians prefer single-family residences, according to a poll by former Obama campaign pollster David Binder, and oppose legislation, written by state Senator Scott Wiener (D), that banned single-family zoning in much of the state.

The state has tried to sell its density dream as a means to boost production as well as lower prices. It has not worked out. From 2010 to 2023, California’s housing stock rose by just 7.9%, lower than the national increase of 10.3% and well below housing growth in Arizona (13.8%), Nevada (14.7%), Texas (24%), and Florida (16.2%). These states are also the primary beneficiaries of California’s out-migration. An unusually large pool of affluent households is “stuck” and bids up prices in urban rental markets.

Today, home ownership is becoming rarer among California residents. The state now has the nation’s second-lowest home ownership rate, at 55.9%, slightly above New York (55.4%). High prices impact young people, particularly on the home ownership rate.

Home ownership for Californians under 35 has fallen by more than half since 1980 and is plummeting even among people in their 40s and 50s. These initiatives particularly impact minorities. Based on census data analyzed by demographer Wendell Cox, the state’s African-American home ownership rate is 35.5% — well below the national rate of 44% — and the state’s Latino home ownership rate ranked 41st nationwide.

Alessandro Biascioli via iStock/Getty Images

From surfboard to walker?

If you think of California’s wealth-creation machine as a conveyor belt, continually providing generations with a stake in society through their homes, that belt has now stalled. Reduced economic opportunity and lack of affordable housing have created something once thought impossible — population growth well below the national average. In virtually every survey exploring why residents are leaving the state, housing costs are at the top of the list.

Increasingly, California’s demographics resemble the pattern of out-migration long associated with Northeastern and Midwestern states. Since 2000, more than 4 million net domestic migrants, a population about the same as the Seattle metropolitan area, have moved to other parts of the nation from California. Since 2020, the pace has picked up, with almost 1.5 million domestic migrants in just four years.

Many leaving the state are in their 30s and 40s, precisely the group that tends to buy houses and start businesses. In 2022, California lost over 200,000 net migrants older than 25, the bulk of whom had either four-year or associate degrees. The groups showing the biggest tendency to leave, according to IRS numbers, are those in their late 30s to late 50s, which includes people who tend to have families.

At the same time, international migration, long a source of demographic vitality, has lagged behind other key states, notably Texas. As the Brookings Institution has noted, from 2010 to 2018, the foreign-born population of Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin, Columbus, Charlotte, Nashville, and Orlando increased by more than 20%, while San Francisco’s foreign-born population grew only 11% and New York’s by 5%.

The state retains by far the nation’s largest foreign-born population, but even the massive movement allowed under Biden’s open-border policy since 2021 failed to reverse population declines in big California cities. With the border now effectively closed, this last source of population growth is likely to decline.

By losing immigrants and younger people, the state is effectively consuming its “seed corn.” The state’s total fertility rate, long above the national average, is now the nation’s 10th lowest and falling faster than the national average and than its key competitors. Los Angeles and San Francisco rank last and second to last in birth rates among the 53 major U.S. metropolitan areas. In California, only the Riverside and San Bernardino metroplex exceeds the national average for births among women between ages 15 and 50, according to the American Community Survey.

Ultimately, California, the birthplace of youth culture, is getting old — with some places more resembling Hawaii than the entrepreneurial powerhouse of the past. From 2010 to 2018, California aged 50% more rapidly than the rest of the country, according to the American Community Survey. As of 2022, 21% — or 8.3 million people — were over the age of 60 in California, and according to the California Department of Aging, this population is expected to grow by 40% in the next 10 years.By 2036, seniors will be a larger share of the population than kids under the age of 18. California is gradually ditching the surfboard and adopting the walker.

Needed: A new California agenda

Newsom’s response to the state’s decline, rather than a call for major reform, has been for “Trump-proofing” the state, spending tens of millions on lawsuits. Such gestures do not address how California can maintain its status as the epicenter of “the new economy” and address the vast divides between the elite and highly educated and the vast mass of our residents.

Rather than fight the president at every turn, California can find ways to take advantage of the new regime. After all, hanging on to the climate agenda is doing very little good for Californians or the planet. California has reduced its emissions since 2006 at roughly the same rate as the rest of the country. The fires have largely erased even these gains, as does the fact that when people or companies flee the state, their carbon signature tends to increase.

Oddly, Trump could force needed policy changes in order to bring in federal help — something Newsom has already done in regard to water policy. The notion that California has a better model — the rationale for the Newsom-led “resistance” — does not sell in the rest of the country, much less at the White House. In a national 2024 survey conducted for the Los Angeles Times, only 15% of respondents felt that California is a model other states should copy; 39% said the state was not a model and should not be emulated; 87% said the state was too expensive; and 77% would not consider moving to California.

Yet for all its problems, California is far from hopeless, and its promise is not extinguished. It remains uniquely gifted in terms of climate, innovation, and entrepreneurial verve. Sitting at the juncture of Asia, Latin America, and North America, it can once again become, as Kevin Starr noted, America’s “final frontier: of geography and of expectation.”

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.

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It is almost breathtaking how impotent the Biden administration was — which, for better or worse, makes the jarring pace of the Trump administration even more noticeable. President Trump has already set us on a new course internationally, begun reshaping the government, and will soon target the domestic economy. It is crucial that he focuses on restoring the American dream of home ownership.

While largely indecisive in most areas, Joe Biden’s Department of Housing and Urban Development seemed especially bent on slowing down markets and raising prices for American consumers — including those who bought homes.

Trump’s appointments at HUD and the Justice Department can score early wins by restoring law and order to the housing market.

President Trump appears to be on a better path. Scott Turner, the former Texas state representative and new Housing and Urban Development secretary, sailed through confirmation last month. He has moved swiftly to reverse troubling Biden-era regulations, such as the 2021 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, effectively a zoning tax that drove up housing costs.

Reversing Biden-era policies

Certainly, Turner’s HUD will pursue priorities that are different from those of the Biden administration. Biden’s housing agenda focused mainly on diversity and equity issues. One example was the department’s leadership of the Interagency Task Force on Property Appraisal and Valuation Equity.

Various government agencies, including the Department of Justice, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, participated in this sprawling task force, which sought to crack down on appraisal bias. Even before Turner’s confirmation, the Trump administration began scrubbing the task force from government websites as part of the president’s anti-DEI executive order.

For Turner to restore the American dream of home ownership, he must dismantle many of the task force’s initiatives and other Biden-era housing policies — a challenge he appears eager to take on.

Shortly after his confirmation on February 5, Turner told the Wall Street Journal that he would move quickly to root out inefficiencies in the department and streamline HUD. He also pledged to scrutinize diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, such as “appraisal bias.”

Rocket Mortgage revisited

A recent appraisal bias lawsuit filed by the Biden Justice Department against a host of defendants, including Rocket Mortgage — the nation’s largest mortgage lender — illustrates how Biden’s administration prioritized its DEI agenda over more affordable housing. The lawsuit would be a good place for Turner to start.

In 2021, HUD took over an investigation from Colorado authorities after a Rocket Mortgage customer alleged she was a victim of appraisal bias. In July 2024, HUD announced a lawsuit against Rocket Mortgage and third-party appraisers Solidifi US and Maverick Appraisal Group. In October, a little over two weeks before the presidential election, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit in Denver, alleging the companies discriminated against the black homeowner by undervaluing her home based on her race.

The lawsuit has caught the attention of former HUD officials and legal scholars because the Justice Department’s proposed remedies from Rocket Mortgage would set a dangerous precedent by holding mortgage lenders responsible for independent appraisers hired by mortgage applicants.

Appraisal independence is vital

The principle of appraisal independence, established in the Dodd-Frank Act, ensures that an appraiser’s independent judgment is free from the influence of other parties who might benefit. This safeguard eliminates the conflicts of interest that contributed to the pre-2008 housing bubble, when lenders obtained inflated appraisals to assume more risk and increase profits.

Fannie Mae maintains a fact sheet outlining appraisal independence for sellers and prospective borrowers, emphasizing that lenders are prohibited explicitly from ordering an appraisal, selecting or recommending a particular independent appraiser, or engaging in any communications that could affect the valuation.

Appraisal bias is a real problem but stems from a few bad apples, not a malfunctioning system. The Biden administration’s attempt to rewrite housing laws through the Justice Department and HUD risks disrupting the mortgage-lending industry and making home ownership even more unattainable by reversing protections to prevent another 2008-like housing bubble.

By dismantling the barrier between independent appraisers and lenders, the Biden Justice Department has brought uncertainty to the industry and threatens to destabilize the housing market.

Trump’s appointments at HUD and the Justice Department can score early wins by restoring law and order to the housing market. In doing so, they can help make the American dream of home ownership affordable again — simply by backing off the companies making housing affordable in the private market.

Illegal aliens are criminals, not victims



The Trump administration has only just begun its deportation efforts, and the media is already shaping a narrative of victimhood. Reporters highlight nervous parents, crying children, and desperate prayers, all designed to evoke guilt and pressure conservatives into abandoning border enforcement. This strategy has worked in the past, but the immigration crisis has escalated to a point where even Democratic politicians acknowledge the damage these policies have caused in their own districts.

Americans must stand firm in defending their borders and protecting their communities, rejecting the moral blackmail the left is now pushing on a public that has had enough. The media’s tactic of using guilt to undermine border enforcement has been effective before. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-N.Y.) widely publicized display of emotion over the “kids in cages” narrative gained enormous traction in 2018.

As the media attempts to manipulate the public into opposing the deportation policies that Trump was elected to enforce, conservatives must remain resolute.

While some Democrats, such as New York City Mayor Eric Adams, now recognize that unchecked illegal immigration harms their own constituents, the broader progressive movement refuses to back down. The moment Trump’s deportation efforts resumed, the press flooded the news cycle with stories of hardship, portraying illegal immigrants as victims. But the reality is clear: They broke the law, and their removal is not only justified but necessary to uphold the rule of law and protect the American public.

By 2025, Americans have reached a breaking point on immigration. The emotional appeals and "kids in cages" narratives that worked in 2018 no longer hold the same sway. For years, liberals enabled mass immigration by framing it as a bureaucratic misclassification rather than a legal violation. They aggressively stripped the term "illegal" from the conversation and labeled anyone who pointed out legal violations as racist. Some progressives even attempted to grant illegal immigrants voting rights in local and state elections, a move that backfired and sparked widespread public outrage.

Meanwhile, some conservatives played their own version of the immigration game, portraying illegal immigrants as religious, family-oriented, and hardworking — natural allies against the atheistic, socialist left. They minimized illegal entry as a minor infraction, akin to jaywalking, and argued that these new arrivals would ultimately strengthen conservative values.

In reality, mass illegal immigration has weakened the rule of law, disrupted communities, and driven up the cost of living. The middle class has shrunk, family formation has stalled, and the transmission of American traditions and values has slowed to the point where conservatism struggles to sustain itself. The effects of unchecked immigration have reshaped the country — and not for the better.

Illegal immigration is neither a victimless crime nor a bureaucratic oversight. It is often orchestrated by foreign cartels that use it as a conduit for drug smuggling and human trafficking. Gangs infiltrate U.S. cities, seizing control of neighborhoods and entire apartment complexes, as seen in Aurora, Colorado. High concentrations of illegal immigrants create ethnic enclaves where assimilation is minimal, and English language acquisition is avoided.

Hospitals and emergency rooms become overwhelmed as illegal immigrants — many without health insurance — receive care without paying their bills, driving up costs and increasing wait times for American citizens. Public schools, already strained, are forced to divert resources to accommodate non-English-speaking students, reducing the quality of education for native-born children.

Illegal immigration also distorts the labor market by increasing competition for jobs and suppressing wages. The surge in population inflates housing demand, making homeownership even more unattainable for young couples looking to start families.

Not every illegal immigrant is violent, but every crime committed by one is entirely preventable. Laken Riley should still be alive today. Her murder was not just a tragedy but the direct result of Biden administration policies that allowed her killer to remain in the country. Every crime committed by an illegal immigrant who was not deported is a failure of leadership — and every policymaker who enabled it has blood on his hands.

As the media attempts to manipulate the public into opposing the deportation policies that Trump was elected to enforce, conservatives must remain resolute. Illegal aliens are criminals. If deportation causes them distress or hardship, they are not victims — they are experiencing the consequences of their actions. If their children are affected, the responsibility lies with the illegal immigrant, not the U.S. government or the American people. No negative behavior is corrected without consequences, and if the immigration crisis is ever to be resolved, the Trump administration must enforce the law without hesitation.

When Debrina Kawam boarded a New York subway, she had no idea she would become the subject of a horrifying and iconic image. The 57-year-old New Jersey woman was allegedly burned alive by a 33-year-old illegal alien from Guatemala as a police officer looked on. Whenever the media tries to shame conservatives for supporting deportation, the only response should be the image of Debrina engulfed in flames, screaming for help that never came.

Americans do not have to live like this. The Trump administration must not only continue but accelerate deportation efforts and reject the media’s cynical attempts at moral blackmail. The lives of women like Debrina Kawam and Laken Riley depend on it.

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