Newsom’s Unease with Numbers
Though he’s still banging the drum for Joe Biden, California governor Gavin Newsom is fading from White House consideration in 2024. But 2028 is still in sight. And because four years is an eternity — in politics, for dogs’ lives, and to your average five-year-old kid — it’s good to mark now the governor’s problems with math.
Newsom has made no secret of his dyslexia; he regards it as a “strength,” something that links him to the downtrodden. Less well understood is his trouble with numbers — or perhaps the truth. Throughout the past year, he argued with the state’s own financial auditors about what ultimately emerged as the nation’s worst state-budget crisis ever. The auditors “won,” if you can call the ongoing chaos a victory.
That madness followed his 2022 claim that he had produced the nation’s greatest budget surplus ever, though he failed to mention the state’s massive bond and pension debt (totaling $1.6 trillion). Nor did he say that his failure (in that same moment) to repay a federal loan has stuck the state’s businesses with the bill — $20 billion plus interest in additional payroll taxes.
In June, Newsom unleashed his press office to attack critics of his imposition of a $20 minimum hourly wage on the state’s fast-food restaurants. If you looked at burger joints and taquerias from the governor’s mansion — in the fourth quarter of 2023 — the wage hike was a smashing success. If, however, you read the data accurately — that is, this year, when the law took effect — you’d see that the industry has already shed 2,500 jobs, just as critics predicted.
At the same time, Newsom crowed that he and Joe Biden had combined forces to put down a criminal uprising in the benighted City of Oakland. The city’s data showed that crime was down a remarkable 33 percent — a “clear and concrete example of the effective partnership with state, local, and federal law enforcement in Oakland and the surrounding East Bay.” Newsom considered Oakland’s success a beta test to be scaled up throughout California: “Ensuring the safety and security of Oakland residents, we will continue to make our communities safer by taking down crime and holding individuals accountable.” There was just one problem: An independent investigative reporter had already showed in May that Oakland’s books were incomplete — if not exactly fraudulent, then not “clear.”
“We cannot know yet if crime is up or down because the year-to-date crime data has not been tabulated fully by Oakland Police,” wrote Tim Gardner on Substack. “The mayor and the news media incorrectly compare partially counted 2024 data to fully counted 2023 data.”
Following Gardner’s lead, even the reliably anti-cop and pro-Newsom San Francisco Chronicle has dug in, declaring this week that “Oakland has been publishing misleading crime data for years.”
It’s worse than that in The Town, the city that Newsom holds up as evidence of his readiness to lead America: Oakland’s mayor is now the target of an FBI corruption probe. As reported in National Review, that sprawling scandal now includes a prominent waste-management executive, Newsom’s own attorney general — Oakland resident Rob Bonta — and the AG’s wife, Assemblywoman Mia Bonta.
There’s irony in the fact that even as this hits the NR website, and despite all evidence to the contrary, Newsom is defending Joe Biden’s mental acuity and such achievements as (Newsom asserts) “sustained low unemployment.” Newsom says this while California continues to rank No. 1 in the nation for joblessness.
The rest of us can see clearly the evidence of Biden’s declining memory. Newsom may pray that in four years all Americans will be similarly afflicted.
This article originally appeared in National Review Online.
Will Swaim is president of the California Policy Center and co-host with David Bahnsen of National Review’s “Radio Free California” podcast.