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California is synonymous with superlatives: It’s America’s richest state, most populous, place with the most billionaires in the country, and producer of two-thirds of the fruit consumed in the country.
With its seasonal exceptions, Californian Treasurer Overall, it has thrived over the past few decades and while in 1991 it ranked ninth among global economies, in 2018 it rose to fifth (and remains, according to local experts).
The state’s political influence is also clear, with several state officials traveling to Washington to work alongside the Democratic president. Joe biden.
And for years, it has been accepted that the Democratic Party will win positions of power in a state where the population overwhelmingly votes for this option and thus expresses its progressive ideals.
The state’s efforts to create green economies and protect immigrant communities are frequently highlighted.
However, there are those who believe that California is far from being an exemplary model of society or governance.
And your democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, is about to be called for a recall referendum.
“If California is a vision of the kind of future that the Biden administration wants for Americans, we hope Americans will oppose it,” New York Times columnist Bret L. Stephens wrote in February.
“Like Republicans, Democrats do best when they rule from the center. Forget California, think Colorado, ”he suggests.
An unequal state
The wealth gap Californians is the state’s main vulnerability, according to Mark Baldassare, president of the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC), an independent organization.
“The distance between the rich and the poor has an impact on the cost of housing, the cost of living, the homelessness crisis and ultimately causes wonders if they have a future here“, dice.
Although California is at the center of the innovation in the fields of science, technology and business, he has also the highest poverty rate of the United States, considering the cost of living and housing.
More than one in six Californians is poor, according to a March report this year commissioned by Governor Gavin Newsom to a committee made up of different organizations and government entities.
On the other hand, in 2019 resident more billionaires in California than anywhere else in the country, according to Forbes.
“California’s economy is tremendously successful, but it hasn’t benefited a lot of people,” said Anmol Chaddha, senior researcher on the report commissioned by Newsom.
According to the same report, the main problem is the job quality.
“About a third of workers earn less than US $ 15 per hour“, Explain.
The outlook is deteriorating for Latinos; 44% earn less than $ 15 an hour.
A salary that does not compensate for the high costs of housing. In a city like San Francisco, the average monthly rent for an apartment is almost 3,000 USD.
According to Chaddha, only 40% of Californians have “good jobs,” which he defines as jobs that, in addition to what they pay, offer benefits, constant pay, and a set schedule.
Chaddha gives the example of tech companies like Amazon and Uber, whose executives earn very high salaries, “unlike the realities of those who drive cars or work in warehouses” in low-income areas of the state.
There is also a disagreement between where there are jobs and the availability of affordable housing in those places, experts note.
California in numbers
- 40 million people live in the state, the most populous in the United States.
- 500,000 people have left the state in the past two years.
- 39% of the state’s population is of Hispanic descent.
- 17.2% is the state’s poverty rate, the highest in the country considering the cost of living.
Opposition to the Governor
California has been governed by a majority of lawmakers and Democratic Party representatives steadily since 2011.
In general, Democrats are characterized by promoting policies that tackle inequality on the basis of government support.
Experts cite the economic bailout following the pandemic as recent examples 7.600 million US dollars implemented by Newsom, and millions of dollars in funds for undocumented immigrants, as well as a rent support program.
This is largely possible due to the tax burden imposed on Californians higher income, highlights Baldassare.
“We do not have a budgetary crisis. The budgetary gains have enabled the State to have a surplus to serve the people who need it,” he explains.
But these initiatives did not contain bell to delete Newsom of power, which already holds 80% of the 1.5 million validated signatures necessary to organize a recall referendum at the end of the year.
The effort was initially led by conservative activists and supporters of former President Trump, but now receives support from the Republican Party and includes disgruntled citizens. “from all the political spectrum“as stated by Orrin Heatlie, who filed the petition.
Although California as a whole is considered a Democratic stronghold, in the 2020 election Trump got the majority voices in rural areas in the center of the country, far from metropolises like Los Angeles or San Francisco.
Newsom’s management of the covid-19 crisis, with the closure of businesses and schools For months now, a scandal of fraudulent billions of dollars in payments from the unemployment office have been among the main reasons for those calling for its release.
Calls for governor recall referendums are common in California, but it is not until a governor has stepped out of office through this mechanism.
If approved, in the election, voters are asked if they want to remove the current governor, and then they vote for one of the candidates to replace him, which so far, they are all republicans.
Newsom has described the move as a “challenge” to its progressive policies, while the Republican Party says poverty rates, homelessness and gas prices are the real reasons.
“Lack of responsibility”
Some analysts see this political knot as a manifestation of dissatisfaction with the democratic hegemony.
Lanhee J. Chen noted in a recent Los Angeles Times column: “Lack of responsibility he comes from a one-party regime in a state where Republicans have not won state elections since 2006 and are a small minority in both houses of the legislature. ”
While it seems unlikely that Newsom will actually step out of power, experts agree that there are big issues Democrats haven’t been able to solve.
“Incentives in politics lead to doing things in the short term and here you need plan for the future, to prevent our cities from flooding or burning, or to solve the housing crisis or the pension problem, or to reform the tax system, ”says Bruce Cain, professor of political science at Stanford University.
Some companies and about half a million people they left California over the past two years to move to states with lower tax burdens and lower costs of living, such as Texas.
Cain acknowledges that there are complaints about the amount of regulations and high taxes in the state, “but you can’t do big things, technologically, green infrastructure” without imposing these measures.
It is not for nothing that they say that running California is like running an entire country.
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