California is bleeding. The sea of red ink that is the state budget nearly matches the size of the Pacific Ocean that is the state’s western border. There is a constitutional mandate for a balanced budget, but so many people suck at the state government teat there that googling stories about efforts to balance it are almost comical. Nearly everyone is lobbying to make sure they do not get cut, but the deficit is so bad that everyone will have to take a cut while their taxes are being raised. The situation is truly awful.

You will recall that earlier this week many major cities, most prominently San Francisco, CALIFORNIA, were brought to a standstill by protestors, calling for laying back and letting Israel be destroyed, blocked major traffic corridors. California was quite tolerant of the debacle, but I love how Florida handled it – picked up the jerks and dragged them off the street. No place has consumed the kool-aid of “tolerance=love” more than California. Which is why the budget crisis will never be resolved – they will tolerate one too many cries for help.

The wastefulness and stupidity is enormous. I love this:

California’s massive budget deficit, coupled with the state’s relatively high level of joblessness, has become a major barrier to reducing the billions of dollars of debt it has incurred to pay unemployment benefits.

The surge in unemployment brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic pushed the state’s unemployment insurance trust into insolvency. And over the last year California’s joblessness has been on the upswing again, reaching 5.3% in February, the highest among all states. The March job numbers come out Friday.

To keep the safety-net program operating at a time when the taxes paid by employers and earmarked for jobless benefits are insufficient, Sacramento has been borrowing billions of dollars from the federal government. The debt now stands at about $21 billion and growing, an increasing burden for state deficit fighters and for the businesses that pay into the jobless insurance program.

Payroll taxes paid by employers are rising not only to cover payouts to unemployed workers but also a state surcharge and a gradually increasing federal surtax to help pay off the principal on the debt. But the tax increases are not enough to deal with the huge loan the state has incurred, or at least not in any timely manner.

So, state policy generates unemployment, the state then pays the unemployed with money they do not have, taxing employers more heavily to try, but fail, to fill the void which then creates greater unemployment as the businesses close because they are no longer profitable. That would be comical were the tax burden not so terribly onerous. But it is really born of corruption. We started noting a couple of weeks ago that the place was pouring unaccountable billions into the homelessness problem with no measureable result. Blame shifting efforts just make the corruption more evident, not less.

California’s ballot proposition system has been used (Prop 13) and misused (Jungle primaries and vote harvesting) on countless occasions. (Consider Prop 47.) But when the citizens try to use it for something truly decent, the shenanigans drive them to court, which in California are almost as corrupt as the rest of the bunch. You have to love this paragraph from a recent Atlantic profile of Gov. Gavin Newsom:

This aura can invite distrust. So can participating in magazine profiles when you don’t want to be seen as buffing your national image at the expense of being a team player—the team being President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign.

“Aura?!” – My sainted Aunt Petunia! Anybody that is paying attention knows the man is a blame-shifting, gaslighting weasel. Some of us are old enough to remember referring to Bill Clinton as “Slick Wille.” Newsom sees Clinton’s slick, greases it up, then uses some sort of miracle lubricant from CalTech to make it frictionless. Given the failures and missteps and unconstitutional actions (forcibly closing churches during covid) of this man and his administration, the only way he is still standing must be corruption of some sort because it sure as heck ain’t merit.

Seriously, pray for California. People there are growing numb to it all and that is just creating more opportunity for waste, stupidity and corruption.

The post The Latest on the California Dumpster Fire appeared first on The Hugh Hewitt Show.