admin
Carl Higbie didn’t mince words on his Newsmax program when he blasted California as “a model for bupkis,” painting a picture of a once-great state that’s been hollowed out by left-wing governance and fiscal folly. His terse, angry rebuke — calling out crack pipe vending schemes, sprawling encampments, and an unfinished bullet-train boondoggle — captured the frustration millions of Americans feel watching California implode under its own policies.
What Higbie described isn’t comedy; it’s the real-day cost of choosing ideology over common sense. Conservatives have watched while permissive drug policies, soft-on-crime litigation and incentives that reward dependency have turned city streets into open-air emergencies that taxpayers must pay to mop up. There’s nothing compassionate about surrendering public order and letting neighborhoods collapse; that only punishes law-abiding citizens and small businesses who play by the rules.
California now carries the shameful distinction of hosting the nation’s largest unhoused population, a humanitarian and public-safety crisis that local politicians paper over with photo-ops and grants that never reach streets. The scale of the problem is not just anecdote; independent studies and county tallies show chronic concentrations of unsheltered homelessness in Los Angeles and other urban centers, even as officials trumpet modest one-year drops that mask long-term failure.
Families and employers aren’t blind to the dysfunction; they are leaving. For years U-Haul and census-tracking reports have documented heavy out-migration from California as residents flee sky-high housing costs, crushing taxes, and deteriorating quality of life — a quiet exodus that liberal elites pretend isn’t happening. This drain shreds the tax base the state brags about and leaves behind the least fortunate people who can’t move to greener pastures, deepening the cycle of decline.
Then there’s the rail white elephant: billions consumed, no workable coast-to-coast route, and a price tag that critics and auditors now peg in the neighborhood of another $100 billion to finish what was promised. This is the textbook example of government planning without accountability — grandiose spending on pet projects while essential services and infrastructure rot. Californians deserve leaders who build things that actually benefit commuters and taxpayers, not monuments to political vanity.
You want the bleeding to stop? Start with tax policy. California’s top marginal rates are the highest in the nation, and those punitive levies chase entrepreneurs, investors, and the middle-class out of the state. When you tax success into exile, you get hollowed-out cities, shuttered businesses, and a population that’s older, poorer, and more dependent on government programs for survival.
Environmental rules that should protect species and open spaces have become convenient tools for bureaucracies to freeze development while leaving people to rot in the streets and fields to lay fallow. Reasonable conservation is civilized; weaponized conservation that stops sensible water deliveries and energy projects in the name of a single endangered fish or frog becomes a luxury California simply can’t afford while its citizens suffer. Officials who hide behind biology to excuse catastrophic public-policy choices need to answer to voters, not lobbyists.
If conservatives are serious about saving California — and we are — the remedy is simple but politically painful: restore law and order, cut taxes to make the state competitive again, demand transparency and accountability on every multi-billion-dollar project, and put real housing and treatment solutions where they will do the most good. The voters who built this nation deserve better than platitudes and pie-in-the-sky promises; they deserve leaders who will fight for their safety, their jobs, and their future.
