Since the Gold Rush days that paid for the Union in the Civil War, California has always been a boom-or-bust kind of place.  But the bust cycle it is currently experiencing seems extreme even by California’s standards of extremity.  People are moving out – in droves.  The new fast food minimum wage law is wrecking havoc.  The state’s budget is a shambles.  By now everybody knows the homelessness problem is unprecedently massive (not to mention bureaucratically overloaded).  Crime is on the rise. I could go on for a while and each of these problems, and the ones I am not mentioning, could be, have been and will be analyzed and commented upon extensively – but I think at this juncture that is missing the forest for the trees.  Let’s look at the forest.

First thing to note – After Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer, the leading Democrats on the national stage are all Californians – the more or less in hiding Nancy Pelosi, the Vice President Kamala Harris and California Governor Gavin Newsom.  In other words, California IS the Democrat’s bench.  It is said that the states are the “laboratory of democracy,” and California has certainly become the laboratory of liberal and Democrat policy.  Well, what precisely in the mess that used to be California looks like a successful experiment? The place is failing – rapidly.  Distaste, even hatred, for Trump notwithstanding – to want what is happening in California for the nation as a whole is not just suicidal, its delusional.  It’s just not working by any reasonable measure.  Voting for a Democrat in this upcoming election is nothing less than a departure from observable reality.

Think about it, notions of subbing out the rapidly failing Joe Biden at the convention this summer do what?  Open the door for Californians to step on the national stage.

The story I linked in the opening paragraph about the California budget is about a trial balloon floated this week moving towards filling the massive, no that’s too weak a word, planetary-sized budget deficit facing California.  First thing to note – that trial balloon does not even fill half of the most conservative projections of the deficit.  Second thing to note – it raises taxes in that already over-taxed state.  Finally, it jettisons, at least temporarily, a whole lot of California’s hyper-aggressive climate change policies.  What does that tell you?  Maybe the “climate emergency” is not all it is cracked up to be.  Clearly the budget emergency takes precedent.  Conclusion – the big issues proclaimed by Democrats are not that big after all.

There is one bit of good news here.  The climate agenda so many try to foist upon us is clearly ginned up to move us towards socialism.  Well, what we are learning in seeing California flounder in this fashion is that socialism is unaffordable – a lesson we actually learned watching the Soviet Union fail and China move to a market economy, but have clearly forgotten.  The good news is that such unaffordability makes itself very apparent well before the gradual transition can take place – while there is still time to reverse direction.  Even if California seems too stubborn to do so.

So, the failed California forest is pretty straightforward – don’t vote Democrat.