California

In 2008, California voters approved funding for a high-speed rail line between San Francisco and Los Angeles. A group of contractors donated tens of thousands of dollars to support the ballot measure. A state program manager projected that the initiative would create more than 100,000 construction jobs.

Eighteen years and more than $15 billion later, not a single mile of high-speed track has been laid. The state hasn’t even laid track on the rump Merced-Bakersfield line that it wants to open in the 2030s. In a recently resurfaced video from his time as lieutenant governor, Gavin Newsom said the full project was unlikely to “materialize in our lifetime.”

Canada’s Alto boondoggle will follow this plan.

Much of the unrest in the United States stems from unaffordability. Across every political contest from California to the East Coast, the affordability playbook is the same: “the cost of living is too high, and the opposition party is to blame.” The first part of this message ought to be beyond serious debate. The cost of housing, the biggest single expense most families face, has skyrocketed in recent decades. The median home price is now five times the median household income, double the ratio of home prices to household income in the 1980s. But the second part of this message is objectively false, because to the extent that a painfully escalated cost of living isn’t the result of bipartisan mistakes, it can be laid at the feet of progressives. Nowhere is this more evident than in expensive California, where progressives have wielded absolute power for a generation.

Gavin Newsom’s international globetrotting on the dime of wealthy benefactors has come under the microscope of federal investigators looking into California’s governor.

The US Attorney’s Office issued subpoenas in September requesting about six years of communications around the California State Protocol Foundation, a nonprofit that has paid for Newsom’s travel expenses with privately donated funds instead of taxpayer money, according to a report by the San Francisco Standard.

h/t Mauser

While California is the fifth-largest economy in the world, its days of being a business haven have long passed. More and more, companies big and small are forced to either shut down or move to a more business-friendly state. Take, for instance, the departure of Fortune 1000 companies like Tesla, Oracle, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, or a recent survey of CEOs ranking California as the worst state in which to do business. Things have gotten so bad that even providers of critical municipal services have been forced to stop doing business in the state. And in Los Angeles, the city may soon become a giant Skid Row, a dumping ground in every way.

It is hard to overstate the hope that followed the fall of apartheid in South Africa in 1994. The newly elected African National Congress was well positioned to move the country into a new era of equality and prosperity for all citizens. South Africa not only had abundant natural resources at its disposal but also boasted a well-developed industrial economy and the continent’s top university system.