Yesterday, Gavin Newsom blasted out a bewildering claim. He tweeted that California created “nearly 40%” of all new jobs “in the NATION” last month.
It was fake news. The true “unadjusted” figure is 14 percent. The jobs report actually paints a dismal picture for California: Our unemployment rate is worse than every state but Hawaii and isn’t improving.
Yet that didn’t stop the Governor from gloating we are “leading the nation’s economic recovery.” The Legislative Analyst also just caught him overstating the surplus by a paltry $38 billion. Welcome to Gavin Newsom’s Potemkin Village.
It’s like in Animal Farm, when the pig-ruler Napoleon tries to make his starving farm look prosperous by filling up the food bins with sand, adding grain only at the very top.
That’s Newsom’s plan for the Recall: to make it go away before anyone notices it’s just sand in the bins. Incredibly, after months of delay tactics, he has done a complete about-face and now wants the vote sooner. His allies are openly trying to manipulate the election date to boost his odds of survival.
But whenever the vote is, Californians aren’t about to be fooled by Orwellian doublespeak. In the fine print of his January Budget, Newsom says it will take five years for our economy to recover with him as Governor. I say we can be back stronger than ever in five months with a new Governor.
And we just got some hope from Pennsylvania, where voters passed a constitutional amendment to limit their governor’s emergency powers. Now is the time for a revival of liberty and self-government.