CALIFORNIA
FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY,
OCTOBER 8, 2024, OR THEREAFTER
BY
THOMAS D. ELIAS
“TRUMP’S ANTI-CALIFORNIA RIFF IGNORES
POSITIVES”
A bright sun, blue sky and equally blue
Pacific Ocean formed the backdrop the other day when ex-President Donald Trump
came to his golf course on the Palos Verdes Peninsula near Los Angeles
essentially to run down California and blame everything he listed on Vice
President Kamala Harris, whom he trailed by slim margins in most polls of that
moment.
It was like listening to the ultimate
“declinist” diatribe, to borrow a term for this state’s critics coined by
former Gov. Jerry Brown.
Yet, for every claim Trump mentioned
(true, false or partially correct), another observer might have named a
positive, based on several recent independent studies.
For one example, Trump said California
has “the highest inflation” in America. Incorrect. This state has seen
significant inflation, but nevertheless had only the seventh largest price
increases in the nation over most of this year.
Trump didn’t mention the WalletHub.com
study indicating Californians had among the highest confidence in their own
financial futures, based on personal spending and plans for it. Another sign of
optimism: Californians ranked first in the nation, increasing their credit card
debt by $4.5 billion in the second quarter of this year. Of course, California
has by far the largest population among the states and therefore the most
active credit card accounts.
Trump claimed, too, that California has
the highest taxes in America. Not true. Yes, this state has the highest sales
tax, 7.5 percent. But overall, the tax burden here ranks eighth among the
states, largely because of the 1978 Proposition 13, which puts California
property taxes in the bottom half nationally despite the state’s ultra-high
real estate prices. The Trump golf course benefits directly from this.
But Trump neglected to mention that
California ties Washington State as the best in the West for finding jobs,
according to CommercialCafe.com rankings. San Francisco ranks in that study as
America’s best city for starting a post-college career. Six other California
cities ranked in the top ten of that category, including Sacramento, Stockton,
Fresno, San Bernardino, Victorville and Menifee. And it had four cities ranked
in the top 10 best places for working parents: San Francisco, Fremont, Irvine
and Oakland.
Plus, California tops all states in the
number of major corporations headquartered here, at 57, outstripping the 52 in
New York and 50 in Texas.
The ex-President blasted this state for
its homeless problems, saying that “After Kamala Harris and Gavin Newscum (sic)
took charge of San Francisco, homelessness increased by 200 percent.” Yes,
homelessness has risen in California, standing at 186,000 unhoused statewide in
the most recent surveys, but in San Francisco, it was at its lowest level since
2015 when surveyed early this year.
At the same time, Trump never mentioned
that California ranks in the top ten states for teachers' wellbeing, according
to another new analysis, this from the WalletHub website. California has the
seventh highest teacher salaries, when adjusted for the cost of living. It
ranks first in digital learning for schoolchildren, and fifth in the pace of
teacher pay increases.
For Trump to have cited any of
California’s many positives (none cited here are related to the state’s
best-in-the-nation weather), would not have benefited him politically.
Instead, he compared California’s forest
maintenance with Finland, ignoring that country’s location in far more
northerly Scandinavia, where forest fires are scarce. Thickly wooded forests
with dense underbrush that Trump believes should be cleaned out also are
uncommon in the far north. Trump, aware he has no more chance than ever of
winning California’s 54 electoral votes this year, also threatened to withhold
federal firefighting assistance if the state sticks with recently adopted clean
water standards.
Trump’s anti-California riff was plainly
designed for use in campaign commercials airing in other states where the
positives of California life get short shrift on newscasts that often feature
lurid video of wildfires and the mudslides that often follow. Not to mention
car chases.
But Californians would be wise to
remember that news coverage generally features negatives more than positives,
which means that declinist visions of California will always get more exposure
than the positives, no matter what or when.
-30-
Email
Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough:
The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch
It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias
columns, visit www.californiafocus.net
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