In his 1939 novel on American disillusionment, “The Day of the Locust,” Nathanael West chronicled people who flocked to Hollywood with high hopes, only to face a reality that they “had come to California to die.” These days, California is where liberal dreams go to die.
If there’s anywhere that could serve as the perfect sandbox for sweeping liberal ideas that are a longshot at the national level, it would be the Golden State. California is led by a staunch liberal, Democrats control every state-level office, and they enjoy supermajorities in both chambers of the legislature.
It also has tremendous wealth, natural resources, and a population approaching 40 million. Its gross domestic product of $2.8 trillion could make it the fifth largest economy in the world were it a separate country, basically tied with France and the United Kingdom.
Between the state’s ideological composition and its massive tax base, California should be a fertile ground for liberals to demonstrate proof of concept for policies they want to impose on the nation as a whole. Instead, California is just demonstrating why the leading items on the liberal agenda remain distant fantasies.
In his first State of the State speech, liberal Gov. Gavin Newsom, D-Calif., acknowledged what has been blindingly obvious for the past decade: that California’s sweeping proposal for a high-speed rail would have to be significantly scaled-back. “[L]et’s be real,” he said. “The project, as currently planned, would cost too much and take too long.”
Democrats’ “Green New Deal” proposal, among its long list of goals, envisions a vast national high-speed rail network. But the experience in California should be a cautionary tale.
Back in 2008, Californians approved a ballot measure for an 800-mile bullet train system that would connect the Bay Area to Sacramento and southern California. The first phase connecting Los Angeles to San Francisco was supposed to cost around $33.6 billion and the whole project was supposed to cost $45 billion. The idea received a boost in 2009 when former President Barack Obama came into office as a huge supporter of high-speed rail, and sent billions in stimulus money to California.
When push came to shove, however, the project had numerous delays and cost overruns. It faced land disputes and was challenged through the state’s environmental review process. According to the most recent estimates, the San Francisco area to Los Angeles area phase was going to cost $77 billion, or more than double the initial forecast for that segment.
When it was initially proposed in 2008, it was supposed to take eight years to complete. Yet, as things stand, only a useless stretch from Bakersfield to Merced is supposed to be operational by 2025, or 17 years after the ballot measure. And this was with construction confined to the less populated Central Valley, which was supposed to be much easier than the more densely populated urban areas.
Newsom said there was no path for the train beyond this small section. Though his office subsequently insisted that he still supports the project conceptually, clearly, he was forced to recognize that it was dead end.
This is not the only area in which liberal policy dreams have been strangled in the crib. One of the biggest goals of liberals is to create a national, socialist health insurance system, which is alternatively referred to to as single-payer or “Medicare for all.”
In 2017, there was a significant push by activists to pass single-payer in California. But a state analysis of the California senate proposal found that it would cost $400 billion a year. To put it in perspective, that’s how much the federal government currently spends on Medicaid for the whole country, a program that covers over 70 million people. It was killed by Democratic Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, who described the proposal as “woefully incomplete.”
Though Newsom campaigned as a supporter of single-payer, since taking office, he has pursued a more incremental approach that effectively would bolster Obamacare by reinstating the individual mandate, increasing subsidizes, and extending Medicaid to cover illegal immigrants up to age 26. He also sent a mostly symbolic letter to President Trump requesting a waiver to use federal funds to help finance single-payer, which he knows will be denied.
If major liberal agenda items haven’t been achievable in California, there’s no reason to believe that they could work at the national level, where the costs are even more staggering and there is much more significant political resistance.
