Politicians in trouble frequently wheel out the freebies ahead of a tough election.

California's Gov. Gavin Newsom, however, is taking it to 11.

Seems, he's not all that confident that Democrats will be able to rig him into victory to keep him in office in this year's coming recall referendum on him. Internals must be horrible.

Which is why he's now holding out monster goodie bag to angry voters as a last-ditch bribe to secure their votes.

According to National Review:

This week, Newsom began a statewide tour to brag about a $75.7 billion state “surplus” that is burning a hole in his recall jeans. That “surplus” alone is larger than the total expenditures of 44 other states in 2020. Combining substantial capital-gains revenues from the bank accounts of Big Tech billionaires and an embarrassing amount of federal stimulus funds, to the tune of $371 billion in total payments, the governor is taking credit for the windfall. Promising to hand out wads of cash and pay off overdue rent and utility bills while hoping middle-class voters will forget Newsom’s cavalier statewide lockdowns over the past year reeks of bribery.

It comes from a one-time slush fund surplus coming from the federal government, courtesy of Joe Biden and his congressional Democrats, and ironically, as Sacramento legislators are proposing tax hikes on normal taxpayers. Nice.

But he's got a recall referendum coming in November, so like Hugo Chavez, he's wheeling out the free washing machines and bags of beans, as Hugo and other corrupt Latin autocrats used to do to "win" elections.

Here's Newsom's own tweet advertising the crowd-pleasers he's holding out to voters; the electoral junk food:

$600 checks.

Wiping away rental debt.

Grants for small businesses.

Universal Pre-K.

Cutting the cost of college.

Housing for 65,000 homeless Californians.

Historic amounts to combat wildfires.

CA is coming roaring back. pic.twitter.com/WHkMeu78ns

— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) May 14, 2021

High as this spending is, and universal as these solutions are, they are nothing but Band-Aids onto the festering economic wounds he's inflicted on the state last year, through high taxes, lockdowns, and police defundings, all problems which now require tourniquets.

Anybody think the billions for the homeless he's proposing are actually going to fix homelessness in this state? It should employ a lot of bureaucrats and probably backfill some bloated public pensions, as has been the story in the past.

And where the heck is he going to get the permits to build all these free houses for the homeless in any case, given the state's other NIMBY-inspired laws. Malibu?

That's just one problem, and there are a ton of others:

Number one, it's unsustainable. According to the Associated Press:

But it is a budget on the edge. Nearly all of the $100 billion in extra money is a one-time surplus, meaning it won’t be available next year. Newsom and the Legislature have already approved a massive tax cut for small businesses that will reduce revenues by more than $6 billion over the next five years.

In the years to come, budget officials predict the state’s revenue will grow slightly while its expenses keep increasing. For now, they say the two sides of the budget will balance and not cause a deficit. But that leaves no room for error in a time when the pandemic has made it impossible to predict the future.

It’s enough for Keely Martin Bosler, Newsom’s budget director, to remark on “how incredibly uncertain things continue to be.”

He's basically proposing to spend now, get people addicted to freebie programs, and then either cut them off cold when the cash runs out, or drive the state into bankruptcy. Taxes, of course, already the nation's highest, will go into the stratosphere.

Number two, it sends terrible messages. The guy who practically killed himself in the pandemic to pay his rent after losing his job, maybe defaulting on his other bills in the process and paying that price through his credit rating, gets nothing. The deadbeat who didn't pay even though he could pay, or who didn't apply for otherwise free federal aid, taking advantage of the eviction moratorium instead, gets his back rent paid. And who knows if the landlords get paid. Based on Newsom's tweet, he might just pass a law or issue an executive action declaring that nobody needs to pay and let the landlords eat the losses. The unpaid traffic fines, meanwhile, giving the nominally poor a pass for speeding, bad driving, endangering others, expired registrations, parking in the middle of the road, taking up handicapped spaces, parking in red fire zones, any number of nightmare violations, get wiped out, while once again, the guy who moved heaven and earth to pay his parking fines at the expense of food or something, gets the news from Newsom that he's a sucker. The whole thing smacks of a program to increase contempt for rule of law. After all, if all you have to do is wait for relief from Newsom, same as if you're waiting for the next subway to stop, why pay anything at all?

Number three, there's a heckuva lot that he didn't mention. California is flooded with drug-addicted homeless, now seeping into ordinarily placid middle-class areas now. Yesterday I tried to cross a highway pedestrian bridge in San Diego into a poorer neighborhood to buy some fresh vegetables and was blocked at the entrance by three homeless people doing drugs together right in that pedestrian walkway, blocking it. Passing them by was so close that any of them could have pulled a knife on me and I went home by a longer way that involved a chancy highway underpass, which also could have been a home to bums, given that it was trash-strewn, meaning, it probably was at some point. I didn't even call the cops, given the knowledge that they aren't enforcing anything anymore. My conclusion from that is that it's going to get worse, way worse, spilling into the placid, previously crime-free areas and Newsom has no intention of backing up the police to enforce this very necessary quality of life measure for the law-abiding taxpayers who pay his big-budget bills.

 Newsom also didn't mention his big plan for free health care for elderly illegal aliens over the age of 60. Elderly people have the biggest of all medical bills, and rest assured, now with Joe Biden's border surge on, the dinner triangle has just been rung for the nation's illegals to bring in their ailing elderly relatives because the ride is now free. If you were a citizen of someplace like Honduras and heard this, and you will, you'd be a fool not to. California's Gov. Gray Davis was fired by voters in a recall referendum back in 2003 over the issuing of drivers' licenses to illegals. You can see why Newsom didn't quite put that as a selling point to voters in his tweet. But rest assured, he's got special interests who harvest ballots who are very, very happy with him.

Number four, there's a heckuva lot that he ought to be spending money on, yet he refuses to do. Where is the cash for more police to remove the riff-raff and criminal element that is plaguing both rich and poor areas now throughout California's cities and making life unlivable? Where are the tax cuts in this highest-of-all high tax states? He considers that "his" money, so no tax cuts of any significance for the tax-battered. What's he doing about monster health care costs for those who actually pay? Nothing, of course. Where is the housing and land-policy reform, which is keeping new housing from being built, and contributing to this state's monster real estate bubble, which is pricing ordinary families out of homes? Price controls create shortages, Gav. And of course, this fool is clueless.

It's such a bad picture, so cynical, so Peronist, (or just see that 1999 Mexican masterpiece movie "Herod's Law" about the "crumbling, rotting, 70-year old regime of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)" as one reviewer put it, to get a whiff) that one hopes that California's voters might just see through it. The fact that Newsom's doing this is proof, all by itself, that he's unfit to be governor.

Governors in this state, as National Review notes, are historically balancing elements who can say 'no' to spendthrift legislators, Jerry Brown before him being one example. The fact that Newsom also wrecked the state's economy through his fanatic lockdowns while red-state governors showed real judgment and leadership in doing all they could to keep their state's economies open is another strike against this clown. Now we have this budget-bankrupting spendfest to put the cherry on top of his rotten cake. He's so bad even Caitlyn Jenner looks like a better potential governor than Newsom is.

Throw him out. 

Image: Gage Skidmore, via Flickr // CC BY-SA 2.0

To comment, you can find the MeWe post for this article here.