Gavin Newsom - "hey, California, let's have our own single payer health care system!"

Gavin Newsom, former mayor of San Francisco, is running for Governor of California.  And of course, as a believer in big government as well as “government as a solution”, Newsom feels compelled to make benefit promises with other people’s money.  In this case, he’s proposing that California put its own single-payer health care system in place since that old meanie Trump seems to be intent on dismantling the sparklingly successful ObamaCare.  </sarc>

No, seriously, this guy wants to pile even more debt on a state that can’t afford the debt it has now.

As Stephen Green points out over at Insty’s place:

A similar plan was rejected in November by Colorado voters by a four-to-one margin. Something about doubling state taxes and spending in the first year didn’t seem to sit well with voters. And as reported last week, California’s top marginal income tax is already the highest in the nation — at 13.3% it’s nearly one-third higher than second-place Maine — so “soaking the rich” doesn’t seem like a viable way to raise the necessary funds. Complicating things, Health and Human Services already consumes nearly a third of California’s spending, $53,828,602,000 out of $170,862,847,000.

And this, of course, will add a tremendous additional government spending mandate if it comes to pass.  Can you imagine the capital of wasteful spending that is California actually implementing this and what it will cost in real dollars?

But never fear, in California, politics is reality and money is just some stuff that people claim they need to do all of this.  Besides, there are always the rich.  Because politics is king!

California’s legislative analyst projected last year that the recent increase in the state’s minimum wage to $15 an hour will cost taxpayers $3.6 billion more a year in increased government worker pay. This is partly because already well-paid government workers sometimes have their pay pegged to a multiple of the minimum wage.

The increase will also drive up state welfare costs by wiping out many jobs. The American Action Forum predicts the increase will ultimately cost California nearly 700,000 jobs. An economist at Moody’s calculated that 31,000 to 160,000 California manufacturing jobs will be lost.

Gov. Brown won’t be fazed by these job losses. Back in 1995, he declared thatthe “conventional viewpoint says we need a jobs program and we need to cut welfare. Just the opposite! We need more welfare and fewer jobs.” In signing the massive increase into law last year, Brown admitted that “Economically, minimum wages may not make sense.” But “politically they make every sense,” he said.

Yeah, screw economics, this is about politics and self-agrandizement.  The future?  Heck, he won’t be around to see it. This is the state level version of building the Obama legacy.  The result?  The same – ruin.

Newsom is just another version of Brown.  His train to nowhere is likely to be called “CalCare”.

There’s a reason U-haul rates coming out of California are almost triple of those going into the state.

~McQ