This past week California governor Gavin Newsom appeared on Fox News to debate Sean Hannity about the policies and governance of the “Golden State” as well as its obvious cultural and economic decline. To be clear, I don’t care for Hannity and obviously I find Newsom to be a reprehensible little weasel of a man, so I don’t really have a stake in which side comes out on top. That said, the interview/dispute is being heralded by the political left as a “win” for Newsom as they claim he “destroyed” Hannity on his own show.
I have to examine this kind of rhetoric with some amusement because generally leftists don’t view debates the same way normal people do. They don’t care about being factually correct, they only care about winning by any means necessary. And winning can and often does include lying or misrepresenting statistics to confuse or deflect their opposition. Hannity just didn’t come prepared for the flurry of disinformation and cherry-picked data Newsom was armed with.
Democrats and the corporate media in general have invested an intense amount of energy into a propaganda campaign that paints California as the central pillar of the US economy and American governance. According to them, California is a socialist Utopia essentially holding the rest of the nation up on its shoulders, and without such blue states we would spiral into oblivion.
For the sake of focus, I will only break down California’s mismanagement here. Specifically, I think it’s important to debunk many of the false fiscal claims made by Gavin Newsom; the same claims which are spreading like a cancer into leftist talking points all over the internet. Let’s begin, shall we?
Lie #1: High Tax Blue States Like California Subsidize Red States
This argument is false for a number of reason, but let’s start with how Democrats present the claim – They argue that red states are among the top states receiving federal welfare dollars and subsidies, and that blue states like California are paying high taxes into those subsidies. This is why you will often hear leftists say that “red states would not be able to survive without blue states.”
Here’s why this is nonsense – Out of the top ten most indebted states in the US, seven of them are Democrat controlled. California has the most debt by FAR with $519 billion in the red, around 60% more debt than New York and Texas which are #2 and #3 on the list. California also anticipates a $32 billion deficit in 2023. The state does not have the funds to support itself, let alone red states.
The bottom line? California takes far more money from the federal government that they pay out.
As of the most recent tax year for which figures are available, Californians paid $234 billion in federal income taxes. However, the state has already been allotted over $390 billion in funds from the federal government so far in 2023 and the year is only half done. Not only that, but CA took even MORE federal money from 2020 – 2022 ($400 billion to $500 billion) each year. Meaning, on average, CA is taking around $150-$200 billion more in federal money than it pays back in federal taxes every year.
Gavin Newsom often brags about California’s amazing budget surplus during covid, but the reality is that all of that cash was fed to the state by the federal government and the federal reserve printing press. For example, California defaulted on almost $19 billion in unemployment debt during their lockdowns, which they then had to borrow from the federal government to cover. They then passed that debt on to struggling business owners, forcing them to shoulder the burden through extra taxation while Newsom expanded deficit spending.
To be sure other states had to take federal funds as well to avoid unemployment default, many of them Democrat controlled because of their pointless extended mandates and business closures. Most states are in the hole when it comes to federal cash. But, the fact remains that California is a money pit; a prostitute for federal funds that creates exponential debt while leaching far more than their fair share. Blue states like California don’t foot the bill for red states. They can’t, because they are broke.
Lie #2: California’s GDP Is So Large That It Debunks All Economic Criticism
This was one of Newsom’s primary responses to Hannity during their debate over California’s decline – California has the 4th largest GDP in the world (over $3 trillion), therefore no criticism of its economy is valid. With that in mind, I’m going to tell you one of the biggest open secrets about how states like California, the federal government and the federal reserve calculate GDP:
They count a majority of government spending towards total GDP.
Yes, that’s right, California takes large amounts of tax dollars from citizens, takes hundreds of billions of dollars from the federal government, spends it all on numerous programs from welfare, to student loans to medicare/medicaid, then adds it all to their total GDP as if the government actually produces something other than debt.
Again, a lot of states do this in their calculations, but in blue nightmare states like California that have refined the art of GDP fraud down to a science. The CA government has found that all they have to do to drive up their GDP stats to record levels is keep borrowing and taxing and then spend as much as possible.
Another factor to consider is that CA’s real GDP adjusted for inflation is not generally cited by the media or by Democrats. With covid helicopter money triggering a 40-year spike in inflation in the past few years, California has some of the highest prices on goods and services in the country (3rd most expensive). In fact, prices are so high that many middle class workers have trouble surviving there. And, the higher the prices go, the higher GDP goes by extension.
If real GDP adjusted for inflation is not considered, then California’s economy might look much stronger than it actually is. If you want to know why CA supposedly about to become the 4th largest economy in the world, yet every major city in California is littered with homeless people and tent cities, it’s because their GDP is a shell game.
Lie #3: There Is No Citizen Exodus From California
Yes, there is. This is probably one of the more egregious lies that Newsom spreads in his Fox News interview as he cited “studies” out of institutions like UCLA to support his position that “more people are leaving red states per capita” than California.
First of all, the per capita argument is dishonest in this situation. What Newsom is trying to avoid is the fact that California has been losing its population to net domestic migration for around a decade.
In 2020 the state saw a loss of 725,000 people with 359,000 net losses in residents after gains are accounted. They lost 700,000 more people than they gained from April 2020 to July 2022. To put this in perspective, losing that many people is the same as a city the size of Seattle disappearing from the California map in the span of two years. California starting out with a larger population is irrelevant to the overall trend of population losses.
One of the best points Hannity made to counter Newsom’s disinformation was the fact that U-Haul had no trucks for Californian’s trying to leave the state because so many residents were relocating and no one was moving in. Newsom sneered at the data, likely because he knows it undermines his entire narrative.
U-Haul did indeed run out of trucks in CA because so many people were leaving. The top destination for U-Haul trucks was Texas followed by Florida, Tennessee, South Carolina, and Arizona. One could argue over the potential reasons for the exodus from CA, but the exodus is a FACT (I believe Newsom’s draconian covid mandates were the biggest reason for the migration, but taxation and a hostile business environment are solid causes also).
Furthermore, California is a sanctuary state which protects illegal immigrants from deportation, and illegal immigrants are counted as part of the resident population in any census. Every surge in migrants can offset California’s total population decline caused by real citizens relocating. California has handed out at least 1 million state drivers licenses to illegal immigrants since 2015, and the state is estimated to have at least 2.7 million migrants within its borders.
Lie #4: California Provides Opportunities For The Middle And Lower Class
No. Let’s go through the list of reason why California is a hellscape for the middle and lower classes – The state has the 2nd highest housing prices in the nation, only under Hawaii. It is the most expensive state for rent in the US, surpassing Hawaii with an average monthly rental cost of $1900. CA also has the third highest food prices in the country.
The median household income in California is $78,000, or $6500 per month (before taxes). The average total cost of supporting a family of four in California including basic necessities is $6700 per month. This is why the Pacific state had the highest homeless rates in the US in 2022 (except for Washington DC). Living in CA is a net negative prospect for the average person, and forget about starting a small business and building something better – California is consistently rated one of the worst states for starting and maintaining a business, which is why companies have been leaving in droves over the past few years.
Why Do They Lie?
I can only theorize on this issue, but I suspect that leftists lie about California as a success story because they see the state as the culmination of their ideology. It’s the beta-test state for numerous socialist policies to fester and then spread to other parts of the US. It’s a symbol of their vision for the future, and it’s falling apart. So, instead of fixing what’s really wrong with it they fabricate a narrative of a state on the rise rather than on the decline and attack anyone who points out the obvious problems.
I also believe that looking at California is a lot like looking into a crystal ball that shows us America a couple years from now. The way California is run, with endless debt and a cycle of statistical fallacies to hide the growing fiscal cancer, is a lot like the way our federal government is run. When we see the crumbling of CA, we are seeing a glimpse of what will soon happen to the rest of the country.
They have to make it look as good as they can. They have to lie. Because if they don’t divert blame they could end up paying the price for their mismanagement later.
Article cross-posted from Alt-Market.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.