Upon hearing word of the English defeat at Saratoga during the American Revolutionary War, a young nobleman named John Sinclair wrote to his friend, the Scottish economist and political philosopher, Adam Smith.
“If we go on at this rate, the nation must be ruined!"
“Be assured, my young friend," Smith calmly assured Sinclair in his reply, "that there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Manhattan Judge Arthur Engoron, traveling back through time, wrote, "Hold our beers!"
Those two men seem to be on a mission to advance their states' slow-motion suicides into the fast-acting kind.
There's a new recall effort against Newsom, led by Rescue California director Anne Dunsmore. We can discuss the wisdom of yet another recall some other time, but there's no debating the idiocy of Newsom's latest budget-busting boondoggle: free health care for illegal aliens. The expanded provisions went into effect on Jan. 1 and are expected to "cost the state over $6.5 billion annually to provide Medi-Cal to all undocumented immigrants, according to the most recent analysis by the non-partisan Legislative Analyst Office," according to Calif. Senate Minority Leader Brian Jones, a Republican.
California faces a $73 billion budget deficit this year, by far the largest in any state's history. It's almost double the $36 billion Newsom had projected. Just two years ago, Dunsmore said to RealClear's Susan Crabtree on Monday, "Right now, people are trying to make ends meet, and it's getting worse, not better. Our tax base is gone. Just how out of touch is he?"
So who's going to pay for all that free health care for illegals? There is only one place for the money to come from: those who pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits — and who still call California home. "For how much longer, though?" is the question that ought to keep Sacramento lawmakers up at night but probably doesn't.
Eventually, the pleasures of a Mediterranian climate aren't enough to overcome a toxic political climate. Things have been that way in California for natural-born Americans, who two decades ago for the first time started leaving the state in greater numbers than moved in. Only immigration kept California growing, but now even that isn't enough to hide the exodus.
New York has lost political clout in every census since 1950 when its 47 Electoral College votes got whittled down to 45. When voters there almost inevitably go for Joe Biden (or whoever) this November, they'll have just 28 votes — two fewer than Florida. Americans have been telling New York that they'd rather live almost anywhere else for a long time.
But why change when Wall Street and other New York City cash cows were enough to get the good times rolling for the well-connected?
That might quickly change, too, after Judge Engoron's massive $454 million judgment against Donald Trump. If it's possible to forget for a moment the unconstitutional size of the penalty for a "fraud" in which no one lost money and that Trump must pony up the full amount just to file an appeal. The worst part, so far as New Yorkers ought to be concerned, is the chill Engoron sent down the spine of every New York developer.
As Jonathan Turley noted last week:
Faced with high crime and high taxes, the spectacle in Manhattan is only likely to accelerate the exodus of businesses and high-earners from the city. That prospect has already alarmed Gov. Kathy Hochul who declared "business people have nothing to worry about, because they’re very different than Donald Trump and his behavior."
That sounds a lot like "you are fine so long as you are not Trump." Yet, that is not reassuring to businesses who want a legal system that is based on something other than selective and arbitrary enforcement.
Months before Engoron issued his decision last week, the New York Post reported that for real estate developers, "the ramifications of possibly losing their properties is no joking matter."
“Canceling business certificates is carte blanche to go after anyone for anything,” one developer told the paper. “I’m not defending Trump. But now they have another tool in their toolbox. Where does it end? It’s a little scary.”
Investor and "Shark Tank" host Kevin O'Leary asked on Fox News, "Do you think any foreign institution or any private equity firm or any pension fund would touch New York? No. That’s why New Yorkers should be concerned."
Meanwhile, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis probably just ordered up another 100,000 Welcome mats for fleeing New Yorkers.
So after years of bad management, how much ruin is still left in New York and California? We might find out sooner than anyone in Albany or Sacramento would expect.
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