California Is a Failed State

Tammany had honest graft: They said they would build a bridge or a park, and then they built it. The cost would be sort of not nakedly obscene, and no money would be missing if there was an audit. But by the most remarkable coincidence, the land where the park or the highway or the approaches to the bridge would go turned out to be owned by very close friends of the Tammany machine, who then got paid a nice little premium for the acquisition of land that was needed for a public purpose, and maybe the people who sold the concrete and the lumber and supplied the labor also turned out to be awfully close friends of the politicians who approved the project, but at the end, there’s the bridge. There’s the new highway, and it cost something within shouting distance of what you would expect the thing to cost. It added up, but they did some fairly polite stealing. There was respect in it. It wasn’t honest, but it wasn’t wide-open looting.

An extremely common form of graft in American politics is the “Three Bs” that Robert Caro famously described in Texas politics: beef, bourbon, and blondes. Cocktails, steak dinners, and maybe if you were a legislator who played ball a nice young lady came and visited your hotel room during the legislative session. But that graft was about topics like who got the state highway contract. Some money traded hands, there was dishonesty in the allocation of public resources, and the highway got re-paved.

The Quality Learing Center model, or the high-speed rail model, or the 800 hospices in Los Angeles with patients that never died, all represent a model of grift that comes from a culture of complete shamelessness. In California, nearly 700 non-profit corporations exist to provide shelter to the homeless, and over 500 non-profit corporations exist to prevent homelessness and provide social services to the homeless or to people who may become homeless. There’s quite a bit of overlap between those categories, so there aren’t 1200+ non-profits, but there are hundreds, and they have billions of dollars in income.

Some are entirely legitimate and do real work. There are people in California who will be fed and sheltered tonight by a non-profit corporation that will keep them from sleeping on the street. It’s not at all my argument that no one in any non-profit anywhere ever does anything real. But the overall picture is theft, and the premise that the flood of money is ending homelessness (or is meant to) is a lie, and a dark one. Gavin Newsom presented his ten-year plan to end chronic homelessness in 2008.

If you haven’t read it, take five minutes — maybe a little longer — to read this story I wrote this week about the massive system of overlapping fraud schemes that now define California. I was just getting started, and there will be more of this.

A state in which public institutions just nakedly and contemptuously fund a bunch of stealing with no other purpose behind it has no claim to legitimacy. It’s not bad government, or disappointing government: It’s illegitimate government. New Tammany takes money for a bridge that they aren’t worried about actually building. Yeah, screw you, there’s no bridge. Watch what the numbers do in these back-to-back search results:

• 2005: 188,299

• 2015: 115,738

• 2025: 181,394

Twenty years of homelessness spending in between. That decline in the middle was followed by increased intervention. Among other examples: Measure H, a 2017 ballot measure in Los Angeles County, increased the sales tax for the sole purpose of adding more funding to anti-homelessness programs. It was replaced by a bigger sales tax increase for the same purpose a few years later. More money to solve a problem / the problem grows again. Where did the money go?

The amount of stealing is becoming…very interesting. It’s a signal that tells you what the people who govern the state think they’re doing, and what they think their relationship with the taxpaying population is. It’s not enormously subtle, at this very late point. It has hatred in it, hardness and contempt. And it’s late-stage behavior. There’s a lot of ruin in a state, but there’s not a Gavin Newsom amount of ruin in it.