State budget doubled from 2012, but Californians irrefutably worse off

Edward Ring of the California Policy Center analyzes California’s 2022-2023 state budget, totaling a whopping $300 billion. Looking back ten years, 2012’s budget (adjusted for inflation) was less than half of this upcoming year’s budget. But are Californians better off for it, when we consider statewide/local spiked-up costs of living, crime and homelessness crises, and overregulated business markets? To receive daily updates of new Opp Now stories, click here.

The California State Legislature has just released the “Floor Report of the 2022-2023 Budget,” and it’s a doozy. Representing an agreement between the budget committees of the Assembly and the Senate, and building on Governor Newsom’s proposal, this $300 billion monstrosity has moved one step closer to becoming final…

By almost every objective measure, Californians are worse off today than ten years ago. Back in June 2012, the average cost of a home in California was an already outrageous $307,000 ($391,000 in 2022 dollars). As of June 2022, the average cost of a home in California is just over $800,000.

Every basic necessity in California costs more: gasoline, electricity, and water. The only commodity where Californians still pay prices competitive with the rest of the U.S. is for fruit and vegetables, but regulators are fast closing in on that last advantage. Just ask a farmer that’s trying to get water allocations from a state bureaucracy committed to letting every precious drop of rain in these dry years run out to sea. And they’re doing this during a global food crisis.

What about crime? Homelessness? Is California better off today than it was ten years ago? Drive down any urban boulevard, or up any freeway onramp, and survey the expanse of tents and makeshift shacks. Did you see that ten years ago? The state’s answer? Turn tens of billions of dollars over to developers and “nonprofits” to build “permanent supportive housing” at an average cost of $500,000 per unit. These unfortunate souls could easily be rounded up and given inexpensive shelter, and required to maintain sobriety, and if that happened they’d either go back to Arkansas, or they’d finally have a chance to recover their dignity. Instead, while the homeless industrial complex scams taxpayers for additional billions, they frequent “safe injection sites” while living in squalor.

This article originally appeared in the California Policy Center. Read the whole thing here.

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