A Stern Warning to the Nation. Governor Newsom Failed California. Don’t Make the Same Mistake.
By California State Assemblymember David Tangipa
America, listen carefully. There is a man in California who presents himself as the embodiment of progressive elegance. Impeccable suits, polished rhetoric, and a vision that sounds transformative until you look at the results. His name is Gavin Newsom. For eight years he has governed the Golden State with a style that puts spectacle ahead of substance. Now the rest of the country is being courted by his ambitions, and it falls to those of us who have watched this administration up close to sound the alarm: a Newsom presidency would be a fiscal and governance disaster of historic proportions.
This week the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office released its latest Fiscal Outlook. The numbers are brutal: an $18 billion deficit in 2026-27 that widens to roughly $35 billion in annual structural red ink starting in 2027-28. These are not passing problems. They are the direct result of a governing philosophy that treats taxpayer dollars as unlimited and accountability as optional.
Consider the evidence.
California High-Speed Rail was sold as a world-class project: Los Angeles to San Francisco in under three hours for $33 billion, finished around 2020. A great idea in theory. Why shouldn’t the richest state in the richest nation have modern infrastructure? I was twelve when voters approved it in 2008 and had no say in the matter. Today I’m twenty-nine. The price tag has exploded past $135 billion, the timeline is a decade late, and not one mile of true high-speed track is running. What we have instead is a monument to mismanagement. Expensive, endless, and going precisely nowhere fast.
Then there is homelessness. Since Newsom took office, California has spent roughly $36 billion trying to solve it. The result? More than 180,000 people on our streets. Over a third of the entire nation’s homeless population. We didn’t bend the curve; we broke the bank and made the crisis worse. That isn’t compassion. That’s incompetence in a caring mask.
And the bitter punchline: when you adjust for cost of living, California has the highest poverty rate in America. The wealthiest state in the wealthiest country has perfected the art of being extravagantly broke. Every time reality bites, Governor Newsom reaches for the same playbook: eloquent deflections, blame shifted to Washington or “systemic” forces, followed by demands for more spending, more programs, more taxes. Always more. It’s the political version of a guy who has maxed out every credit card insisting the answer is a higher limit.
This is not vision. This is vanity.
The LAO report is crystal clear: reserves are gutted, the gimmicks are used up, and California is living on borrowed time and borrowed money.
America, do not be seduced.
Gavin Newsom is the slickest salesman California has ever produced, but he is peddling a product that has already failed in the biggest laboratory available. Put him in the White House and he will simply nationalize California’s dysfunction: soaring deficits, billions flushed on vanity projects, and lectures about sacrifice from a government that refuses to make any itself.
We deserve better. You deserve better.
Do not hand this man the keys to the country’s future. The bill would be astronomical, and every American would end up holding it. Consider yourself warned. Heed it.
