California Update: The Beautiful People Republic

>> Jonathan Movroydis: It's Wednesday, June 28th, 2023, and you're listening to matters of policy and politics, a Hoover Institution podcast devoted to governance and balance of power here in America and around the free world. I'm Jonathan Movroydis, senior writer at the Hoover Institution. And I'm sitting in the chair of Bill Whalen, the Virginia Hobbes Carpenter distinguished policy fellow in journalism, so that he can answer questions and provide commentary about California policy and politics, in which he is well versed.

Bill Whalen, in addition to being a Washington Post columnist, writes weekly for Hoover's California on Your Mind web channel. Whalen is joined today by Lee Ohanian and Hoover Institution senior fellow and professor of economics and director of the Ettinger Family Program in macroeconomic research at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Ohanian also writes weekly about the policy environment of the Golden State for California on Your Mind. Good day, gentlemen. Let's talk about the latest developments in policy and politics in the Golden State. Bill, let's start talking about your column this week for California on Your Mind. You describe how Florida governor Ron DeSantis has not only come to California to fundraise, but also to show how San Francisco's decay is an example of progressive policies that he wouldn't do if elected president.

And you did so in a one-minute video from San Francisco's Tenderloin district. Leadership matters, DeSantis said, they are doing it wrong here. In the short notes, Bill, you said there's something funny about election years ending in four. The Democrat held their convention in San Francisco in 1984, we all know what happened, Ronald Reagan beat Walter Mondale in a 49 state landslide.

In 1964 the Republicans also held a convention in San Francisco at that raucous convention, splitting moderates and conservatives. The GOP ended up nominating Barry Goldwater, who famously said in the nomination speech, quote, I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

The campaign chronicler Teddy White put it this way, in the making of the president in 1964, quote, Goldwater was left from beginning to the end of the Republican Civil War in 1964, in command of the moral high ground. And so Goldwater and its Puritans were left alone to face the greatest pragmatist of all time, Lyndon Johnson.

Bill, is this smart politics for Democrats like California Governor Gavin Newsom to ardently defend their progressive policies, or will they be left to the same fate as those Puritans 60 years ago?

>> Bill Whalen: Good question, Jonathan. Hello, Lee. It's interesting, the presidential election, as we know, is underway and it's finally found its way to California.

It should be busy in California because our presidential primary has been moved up from June to the first week in March in 2024, it'll be lumped into the super Tuesday of a whole bunch of a lot of states that day. So, Governor DeSantis was out in northern California.

He did a stop in Woodside, which is south of San Francisco, that he was in Sandhya Francisco, then over to Sacramento to do what candidates do in California, since it's not a competitive November election, and that is to raise money. But here's what was interesting about DeSantis's visit to California, Lee and Jonathan, and it was that he didn't do any media.

Ordinarily, you raise money, yes, but you also talk to the press because you wanna get on the radar, our voters out here. But DeSantis's team didn't do that, but they did do one thing, and that was that he cut an advertisement. He stood on this in the Tenderloin district in San Francisco, which is kind of the heartbeat of a lot of problems in the city in terms of drugs and homelessness.

And he very simply said, here's what we just saw, that he ticked off just the messy streets, drug use and so forth. And what struck me as curious, gentlemen, was that Mayor London Breed quickly denounced the ad, but she didn't rebut anything that DeSantis said there, she just said that basically he is just doing the cheapest stunt in politics, which is complain about everything.

But she didn't really defend her city in that regard, and this, to me, raises two questions. One, will San Francisco kind of be a kind of recurring pinata in the Republican field? Because it is just sort of the lowest of, lowest hanging fruit for Republicans to complain about these days.

But then secondly, to what extent will Democrats come to San Francisco's defense? And you mentioned Gavin Newsom, former mayor of San Francisco, so he has not just a policy stake in this, but also a personal stake in this. He obviously harbors presidential ambitions, he is running this sort of shadow presidential campaign right now.

To what extent will he come in and defend San Francisco? And I think the problem here, Lee and Jonathan, is when you're talking about homelessness in San Francisco, when you're talking about crime, when you're talking about drug use. Where you're talking about just sort of decades of just bad progressive policy now coming to haunt life in the city, the business climate in the city, it really is indefensible.

And so that's kind of the question at this hour. Someone like DeSantis attack San Francisco, where's the defense of San Francisco? I don't know, Lee, what do you think?

>> Lee Ohanian: Bill, it's an interesting political issue because, as you know, San Francisco has become the poster child for what the right can point to as saying, take a look at what progressivism delivers.

All you have to do is look at San Francisco. They have an out of control budget, and they have an out of control homelessness problem. They have an out of control crime problem. They have an out of control drug use problem. You can't walk on the city streets safely.

You can't walk on the city streets without really, really worried about stepping on a used hypodermic needle. It is the bullseye, and it's an easy one to hit to the right. And what I suspect Newsom may do, because as we've talked about before, he just loves to try to poke at DeSantis, he loves to poke at that bear.

So I think Newsom will probably come back saying, you know what? San Francisco is part of my people, and I am the one who sent the highway patrol in to try to intervene more in terms of the drug trade. And seizures of fentanyl have gone up since I took that heroic stance.

And we are spending record amounts on housing and homelessness. And you can take a look at one neighborhood in San Francisco, and I'm not gonna be as low as DeSantis. I'm not gonna go to Miami and look for that one neighborhood in Miami that's going to look, I'll tell you, it'll look even worse than the Tenderloin in San Francisco.

So, I suspect you may come back with something like that. But San Francisco has become an embarrassment for the left, there's just no two ways about it. And it has been for years and years. Now you've got, I think it was about two or three weeks ago, CNN did a piece on San Francisco, and it was not at all favorable.

CNN, of course, is considered to be to the left among media sources, and what they looked at was very accurate. It's, San Francisco has, if not the highest, among the highest property crime rates, smash and grab, burglary, the police are overwhelmed, and drug use and homelessness is out of control.

There's just no two ways about it. And San Francisco's leadership is incapable of addressing these issues. The mayor has a, I think she has a better sense, London Breed, she has a better sense of what's going on. I think she's in over her head, but what really pushes her far below the surface where she's just drowning, is she's got a board of supervisors that are just living on another.

Not all of them, but enough of them are living on another planet to make it just impossible to try to do anything to save San Francisco.

>> Bill Whalen: So, interestingly, here you have DeSantis at San Francisco bashing, plain and simple. But that politically, I think that's very effective running in Republican primaries.

But California and San Francisco are also being criticized in blue states, Lee and Jonathan. Jay Inslee, who was the governor of Washington State, I think he ran for president in 2020 briefly, he decided a housing bill, and he used California's example not want to happen. You go to Vermont, very small state.

Actually has a republican governor, but it's decidedly blue. It's the home of Bernie Sanders earlier this month, it's Governor Phil Scott. He's a Republican. He signed a law that effectively bans single family zoning statewide. And what's interesting about this, Lee and Jonathan, the author of that bill is a state senator named Kesha Ram Hinsdale.

Senator Hinsdale is a Los Angeles native who also said she was inspired by personal experience. Her sister had experienced homelessness for several months while her father struggled to find affordable housing in dot, dot, dot, the San Francisco suburbs. She was asked about her bill, and here's what she said.

Quote, I look at California as a place where housing instability is just consistently escalating. When places like San Francisco and liberal bastions in California have held themselves up as standards for progressive policy. I've always felt like it's a bit of a sham when you think about the many people who experience income inequality in California and can't afford to meet their very basic needs.

This is a problem for Gavin Newsom, plain and simple. He wants to hold up California as the freedom state, as he calls it, in response to DeSantis playing Florida the freedom state. He wants the California to be seen as Ronald Reagan shining city on the hill and so forth.

But here you have in states that share his political sensibilities to a great extent, they're holding up California. Lee, as an example of policy gone bad.

>> Lee Ohanian: Right, yeah. What the left has to confront within California, I mean, Newsom is gonna have to confront this, given his wider political aspirations, is that the policies that have been implemented are delivering a social model that's just no longer functional.

And that's really the foundation of what's going on here. And San Francisco, again, is the poster child for this. What's been forgotten in California is that the purpose of government is to protect, is to protect property rights, is to protect civil rights, and it's to provide quickly and efficiently public goods and services.

And California government at the state level, at the local level, has just miserably failed on this. Crime rates are up. It has become egregiously expensive to build housing. And what's been forgotten is really the basic law of economics, which is economics is about people trying to deal with the problem of scarcity.

We're trying to survive, and once we get to survival, we're trying to enjoy life a little bit. And government's never been considered to be the solution to the problem of scarcity by no party outside of Karl Marx. And those days are gone. Everyone across the globe, outside of a few people here in California, understand that the problem of scarcity is solved by people's ingenuity and hard work.

And what's happened in California is the government has gotten in the way. And if I was advising DeSantis, I would have told him, you know what? You should have done one more commercial piece, which is to move a couple blocks away and go film an apartment building where units are being renovated at $1 million apiece.

Which is, of course, insane, because that delivers another message, which is, you know what? San Francisco's not just failing to deal with crime. It is horribly wasting taxpayer dollars. And those people who are living on the street, you should be able to house five or ten people if you're gonna spend a million dollars.

And yet that 300 square feet, if we were doing that in the state of Iowa, just think about how far a million dollars gets in terms of housing in the state of Iowa. So that's something that is completely the fault of government, is not the fault of the private sector.

And so Inslee and other people in blue states are right to say, this is just wrong. This is not working. Resources are being wasted. Human resources are being wasted. We're not gonna follow California. Gavin Newsome loves to talk about how we're leading. Nancy Pelosi has often said we're leading.

Well, California is not leading anymore. And it's just as simple as that.

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah, again, I'm struck by the response to the DeSantis ad. It's not like Mayor breed went into it point by point and just rebutted each and every allegation that DeSantis had. Local media did not do the same.

Lee and Jonathan, they didn't fact check the contents. What they did do is they questioned whether or not DeSantis was actually on the street in San Francisco. I think they used the one reporter used the word seemingly standing on a street. No, he was standing on a street in the tenderloin.

He filmed it there. So come on, guys. But this does play into the hands of one Gavin Newsom. I think, in this regard, every time Ron DeSantis attacks San Francisco or California, it's an opportunity for Gavin Newsom to respond. He could say out of the goodness of his heart, but also his just ongoing theory going back to last summer that Democrats need to fight and push back at all times.

So it's kind of an invitation for Newsom to continue his presence as a sort of shadow presidential nominee on the democratic side. I note, by the way, that while DeSantis was campaigning around northern California, as were Tim Scott and Nikki Haley, all just kind of out here chasing money at the same time.

Joe Biden also came into town. Yes, to raise money. He came into Palo Alto, then went over to Marin county. He did a couple of public events with Newsom, and Newsom was just attached to the hip with him. So as much as we criticize Gavin Newsom on this podcast, you have to give him credit for being politically very clever in this regard.

He has managed in about a year to really raise his national profile and get party people to buzz about him maybe being a good alternative to Joe Biden, maybe being the future of the party. He started out criticizing de facto the Biden administration for being too sleepy. Then when they didn't like that, he eased off it.

But he keeps finding ways to get back in the news. His attempt now to amend the Constitution, a 28th amendment for gun control. So he's got a talent for getting in the news and throwing ideas out there. It's just gonna be really curious to see as we move toward the end of 2023 and into 2024, how he manages to continue his presence.

At some point it'll be obvious that Joe Biden is running. It's not gonna drop out. And so can Newsom maintain the shadow presence? Does he ease off and heaven forbid, does actually California, which is his day job, does he actually have to pay more attention to his job?

Cuz that's one thing which is suffering here. And I'm noticing some local newspapers are out here starting to pick up in this city's something of an absentee governor, if not physically absent, just seemingly very distracted by national politics.

>> Lee Ohanian: Yeah, he hasn't punched the proverbial time clock for his day job in a long, long time.

And the media here is picking that up. The San Francisco Chronicle, liberal newspaper, wrote a left side editorial criticizing him for his lack of attention on the state and criticizing him for spending his time lambasting political leaders from the right in other states and effectively saying, what is your job?

Your job is not to go around criticizing DeSantis. Your job is to deal with problems here. And guess what? We've got plenty of them. Let's take a look at the laundry list of issues you said you're gonna make progress on. You haven't, you haven't made progress on that.

Yeah, obviously we've talked about housing before, but Newsom has been governor. We're close to what? We're close to four and a half years. He talked about a Marshall plan for housing, referencing the enormous investments the US made in western Europe to rebuild those countries after the war, which was done Extremely quickly, and where is that Marshall plan?

We're 80, I believe we're 87% below Newsom's goal, it's interesting, Bill, that even the liberal media, because homelessness is such an issue here, because even for those who are housed, lack of affordability is still an enormous issue. It's interesting the media here don't pick up and say, governor, we're 87% below our goal, what is going on with that?

Why haven't we made more progress? And Newsom, I think, is just gonna say, we keep spending, we spend and spend and spend and spend. And yet you can only say, I'm spending your money so many times before people ask, what am I getting? I paid the bill, I'm waiting for the plate of food to come out from the kitchen, I just paid $100, I got a bowl of Cheerios, there's something wrong with this.

That's effectively where California housing is, you're paying $100 for a bowl of Cheerios and you're waiting days to get that bowl of Cheerios. But Billy, he has become a master politician, I think he, he might even view himself as a 2000 and twenty's version of Bill Clinton. A guy that just was so engaging, who did so much to create political charm and grab people's attention, and now Newsom is doing that in his own way.

But he simply is gonna have to deal with the fact that there's a state that he represents that's fundamentally broken, and you can only govern by righteous indignation for so long. And I find it interesting that there's, even among liberal media, I don't know why they're putting him above the fact that homelessness and drug use and these just obvious out in the front, social problems are laid his doorstep.

And these things are, these are issues that he is not addressing, and I wonder why the press has been more critical about this.

>> Bill Whalen: That's a good question, I do wanna talk about the national press, but one final thought about Gavin Newsom. He does have to figure something out, though, between now and next year's voting, and that's where he is on Robert Kennedy Junior.

Gavin Newsom worships at the altar of the late Robert F Kennedy, Senator Robert F Kennedy, killed in California in 1968 after he won the California democratic primary. His son, RFK Junior is running for president, RFK Junior is, well, to be polite about it, he is, shall we say, a political outlier.

Has some very interesting thoughts when it comes to vaccines, to the war in Ukraine, the CIA possibly killing his father and his uncle and so on and so forth. He too was in California the other day, I don't know if you saw the photo, gentleman of him doing push-ups, and I think it was Venice beach, pretty remarkably good shape for age 69.

The question will be, will Gavin Newsom actually go after RFK Junior? Because the democratic primaries are kind of complicated this time around, not that Biden's not gonna get the nomination, but because they have moved South Carolina to the first primary in the state status. Biden may not be on the ballot in New Hampshire, he may not be on the ballot in Iowa, that means RFK Junior is gonna win those States.

Now, that might send a whiff of panic through democratic circles, but just maybe have the media talk about if there's any there there to him. At some point a reporter is gonna come to do some say, what do you think about Bobby Junior? Are you his kind of guy or not?

And I'll just be curious to see what he has to say, but the idea of national media, Lee and Jonathan, does fascinate me and how they look at California.

>> Lee Ohanian: When you mentioned RFK Junior, you're much more tuned in with these circles than I am. But I mean, off the top of my head, he seems to me to be somewhat of a gadfly.

I don't mean that a pejorative sense, but I just wonder how much attention at the end of that he can capture outside of the proverbial 15 minutes. And whether he'll end up being something like a Tulsi Gabbard, who's kind of flitting around the corners of the democratic party that aren't particularly well aligned with what the establishment of the party is and whether that's going to last very long.

 

>> Bill Whalen: Well, Tulsi Gabbard's last name is not Kennedy, so there's a certain mistake that he taps into. Tulsi Gabbard did not make her bones in democratic primary circles by going after pharmaceuticals and vaccines. And apparently there's an appetite on the democratic side as well, been living on this narrative that the Democrats, the party of science, the Republicans are not.

Well, turns out there are a lot of Democrats who also question science as well. And he's tapping into other things, the conspiracy gene we have in this country and so forth. So, he's not gonna go anywhere, but the question is gonna be how high can he climb? And again, he'll win those two early primaries if Biden doesn't run, but I suspect he solely peters out.

And the question will be if Newsom actually bothers to train fire or if the Biden campaign maybe asks him to do it, but actually, by the way. So, let's talk instead about Vanity Fair article caught my attention, Jonathan, do you wanna explain what that piece was about?

>> Jonathan Movroydis: Yeah, it's a piece entitled can anyone fix California, the author is Joe Hagin, and he profiles a series of voices in the state of California, from San Francisco's very own Nancy Pelosi.

Losing LA mayoral candidate Rick Caruso to a sharpshooting champion in Simi Valley and an investigative reporter in South Central Los Angeles. The long feature focused mainly on the state's crime and homelessness issues, but, gentlemen, I wanted to ask you about that. If Joe Hagin came to you and came to both of you and asked you about how to fix, can anyone fix California and how to fix it, what would you tell them?

 

>> Bill Whalen: Well, I would say you just have to, well borrow an Arnold Schwarzenegger phrase, you got to blow up the boxes. You have to change political leadership, you have to change the structure of special interest power in California. You might want to do something as bold as to hold a state constitutional convention and revisit a lot of these propositions, orsted has various ways to spend, be it education and so forth.

So that's what I'd go after, plain and simple, but Lee, I think you have some policy thoughts about where you'd like to go.

>> Lee Ohanian: Well, Bill, that was an interesting piece, California is getting a lot of attention, essentially because the numbers. Median home price in California is now, I believe, about 850,000, way, way above, at least twice as high as the median home price in the rest of the country.

And homelessness now is, I believe the counts are difficult because most of the homeless in California are living somewhere else. The weather is good enough here that you can live unsheltered, but the numbers are somewhere around 150,000 to 175,000 people. Essentially, the number of people homeless is somewhere around the size of a reasonable sized city, so that's got a lot of attention.

And that piece, and I urge people to read that because what that piece highlights, I think, is the fact that the Democratic Party really needs to get into couples counseling. That's what I took away from this article because the article discusses that the author interviews a number of sort of interesting people.

They don't talk to the media in Californian which they would be-

>> Bill Whalen: They talked to the beautiful people.

>> Lee Ohanian: They talked, yeah, yeah, that's a phrase I remember, they talked to the beautiful people.

>> Bill Whalen: Stacey Pelosi, it's Rick Caruso, it's people who kind of live swell, wonderful California lives.

 

>> Lee Ohanian: Yeah, yeah, exactly, they talked to film producer Jeffrey Katzenberg, and when I read the interview with Katzenberg, it just- Really struck me that the left really needs to have couples counseling because there's just a remarkable disconnect in the sense that the piece talks about how people on the left are getting very scared in California.

People on the left are buying guns. People on the left are going to shooting ranges. And then at the same time, people on the left, such as Katzenberg, he describes an evening where he's driving to Los Angeles Lakers game, and he mentions he's got $3,000 tickets, he's got floor tickets.

And then as he's driving under a freeway underpass, going to the laker, going to the Laker stadium, he sees a young mother and a child, and it's obvious the child needs some medical care. And it just, he talks about how this just shook him to his foundation. And after this, he spent some money.

He wrote a big check to UCLA medical school to go out and try to reach these people and provide health care, and that's terrific. Jeffrey Katzenberg can write those kind of checks, but the Jeffrey Katzenbergs of Los Angeles, of California, cannot, even if they wanted to, they do not have a big enough checkbook to solve all of the social ills in California.

And that's the basic fundamental law of economics. There's got to be a level of personal responsibility and social cohesion that institutions have to operate in a functional way, and they've got to spend taxpayer dollars in a reasonable way. And I don't think Jeffrey Katzenberg understands, or he probably doesn't know.

He's a busy guy, he's a very busy guy. I suspect he doesn't know just how many tens of billions of dollars the state has spent on housing in the last few years. I don't think he understands that we are spending a million dollars per unit to build housing for the homeless in his city of Los Angeles.

I don't think he understands that only one out of four California kids in public schools are at grade level in math. I don't think he understands that lesson one and three are grade level in reading. And he cannot write a check to solve these problems because they're not just problems with money.

California spends enormous amounts on these issues, and we have political institutions, Bill, as you noted, we've got powerful political interests that stand in the way of those dollars being spent in a constructive way. So that's why I say the Jeffrey Katzenbergs of the world, God bless him, he wrote a check to get some medical care for people.

They need to go and have a face to face and say, you know what? Our political vision is fundamentally failing. You and I. The proverbially, you and I, we've got a problem in our relationship. Let's figure out what the problems are and then let's fix it, because there are just enormous, enormous challenges that are not just about money.

 

>> Bill Whalen: I'd like to make two points here, Lee and Jonathan. Number one, how much money do we spend, Lee asked. Well, I have the answer for you, Lee. We have a new state budget. As of July 1, that new budget, Lee, pours $1 billion into round five of the state's homeless housing assistance prevention program, which hands out money to local officials to use for housing and outreach and encampments, emergency shelters and so forth.

Lee, this marks the third year in a row the program will receive a billion dollars from the state budget. Collectively, Lee the state has allocated nearly 21 billion, that's with a b, $21 billion to housing and homelessness since the 2018 to 2019 fiscal year. So Lee, it's not for a want of spending.

The second point, this gets back to Mr. Katzenberg, what caught my interest in reading about him in that column, he bemoans the conditions of Los Angeles. He talks about putting money into changing things. And yet when there's a mayor's race in California, I'm not stumping here for Rick Caruso, who ran in that race.

He had a choice of voting for either Rick Caruso, who was running as a businessman and an outsider, and somebody who really wanted to kind of shake up the city and the way it went about its business. Or he could have voted for Karen Bass, who is a Democrat.

She's a former member of the Assembly, a member of Congress. She's Alan Gore's shortlist for vice president. He raised money. He spent money killing the Caruso campaign, and he bragged about it in that piece. So this, to me, is the kind of great gas and break that the wealthy class of California does, Lee.

They bemoan the condition of California, and yet they pump money into the status quo at the same time. So maybe you understand it, but it just baffles me to no end.

>> Lee Ohanian: It does, and when I talked about couples counseling for the Democratic Party, the 800 pound gorilla that sits between those two sets of eyes and the therapist on the other side of the couch is the state's environmental movement.

Because when people from the outside ask, I mean, I've had reporters call me up and say, my God, how can one spend a million dollars on a 400 square foot apartment? How is that possible without putting in platinum bathroom accessories? And it comes down to the state's environmental movement, enormous amounts of money are burned up in the permitting process.

Enormous amounts of money are burned up in litigation. And when people ask me about the not in my backyard movement, and, my God, isn't zoning really the problem? And you have all these selfish people who aren't willing to have a four story apartment building across the street from them, what they don't ask is, hey, California is 6% developed.

So in other words, the square miles of California. Only 6% of California square miles are developed. And back in the day, including back in the day when there was Democratic leadership in at least part of the government, such as back in the day of Jerry Brown's dad, Pat Brown, in the 1960s, when California was growing so rapidly, what did California do?

California spread out. It turned out that we had agricultural land that was more valuable than what it produced, so that agricultural land was sold off. The farmer was happy to receive a handsome price for their land, and housing was built and new towns were built. The environmental movement today has made that virtually impossible.

So there's a not in my backyard player, the most important not in my backyard player, in my opinion, which is the environmental movement, because their backyard is open space. And it's over their dead bodies if any more open space in California is built on. And, Bill, to give you an example, there's a proposed development in Valencia for people with kids that's not far from Magic Mountain.

It's maybe a stretch to call it an LA bedroom community, but you might be able to do that. In 1994, developers had this, you know, again, we love people who have vision and imagination and who create value. Jeffrey Katzenberg is one of those people. He creates enormous value.

There's another set of people who wanted to create value by building a 60,000 person new community in California. Now, that would actually move 60,000 person community, as opposed to, hey, we'll put up a four unit. Yeah, we'll put up a triplex or a fourplex down the street. Plans were submitted in 19 1994, Bill, do you wanna guess how many houses have been built in that community nearly 30 years later?

 

>> Bill Whalen: I don't think I wanna know.

>> Lee Ohanian: And Bill, you can't guess below zero, obviously, but the number is zero. It's zero because there have been just one environmental lawsuit after another. And those people that had that vision in 1994 to do something that ostensibly we want California, ostensibly, politicians should want that.

Not one home has been built, not one. So again, in that couples counseling session, Jeffrey Katzenberg needs to hear 30 years later, not one home has been built. He's not waiting 30 years to produce another, I think he was one of the producers of Kung Fu Panda, big Hollywood success back in the day when Hollywood made these blockbusters.

He's not waiting 30 years to produce Kung Fu Panda. He would be furious if he had to step through regulatory hoops to spend 30 years producing the next Kung Fu Panda. But that's what we are doing to people who would like to build four walls and a roof.

 

>> Bill Whalen: Jonathan, in Vanity Fair's defense, it's an article, not a book. And I think what Lee and I are giving you the impression of is you could just do a book chapter by chapter on California's challenges. But one thing which was really noticeably absent in that piece, the author did not get into any words, any kind of depth about the really sorry condition of California public schools.

 

>> Jonathan Movroydis: Right, and let's talk about that, gentlemen. Lee, in your recent column for California on Your Mind, you talk about how one in four California kids are proficient in math. And less than one in three are proficient in reading, which means that 4.6 million kids in the state are below grade level competency.

44 of California's poorest performing schools are in Riverside County in southern California, where the state's Department of Education launched an investigation earlier this month. But this investigation had really nothing to do with failing schools, Lee, did it?

>> Lee Ohanian: No, Jonathan, I think I was reading The Chronicle, SF Chronicle, and I came across this story about how Tony Thurmond, who's the state school superintendent.

Interesting backstory about Tony Thurmond, he barely won in 2018, running against another Democrat who was very much a school reformer who had turned around a number of failing schools. Democratic Party pushed solidly for Thurmond, and I think he won, Bill, was it 51, 49, 50.5, 49.5?

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah, it was at about there.

And that's just in California statewide races, Democrats do not win by that narrow of a margin. He had a narrow margin. Kamala Harris had a very narrow margin when she was first elected state attorney general in 2010. But usually these races will foregone conclusions, you win by double digits.

 

>> Lee Ohanian: Yeah, so Tony Thurmond goes to Riverside, and I thought, that's interesting. And then the article goes on to say, there's gonna be an investigation. That's interesting, what's the investigation about? The investigation is about the Temecula School District. Temecula is an area in Riverside County. They happen to have a very highly performing school district, one in which many more kids than one in three are math proficient.

Many more kids than one in four are math proficient. Many more than one in three are proficient in reading. And so what was all this energy and money and time directed at the Temecula school district? It was because the president of the Temecula school board, a fellow named Joseph Komrosky, he is a philosophy, I believe, a philosophy and history professor at San Antonio College nearby.

And he was elected, he was elected to the school board. The school board was figuring out, along with the district, social studies curriculum. And one was proposed, in which it included a book that referenced a fellow named Harvey Milk, who was California's first openly gay person to be elected to public office.

Harvey Milk was a supervisor in San Francisco back in the 1970s. Milk and George Moscone, who was the mayor at that time, were assassinated. Milk had been in office, I believe, only about ten months.

>> Bill Whalen: Correct.

>> Lee Ohanian: So, Milk has achieved somewhat martyr status within several communities. It's not that he did a lot as a politician.

He was only in office ten months, but his assassination is what caught people's attention. And Komrosky, the head of the school board, said, this guy's pedophile. Why are we talking about a pedophile? So that one word, the word pedophile, triggered Tony Thurmond, the state's education department. It triggered Gavin Newsom, it triggered Rob Bonta, the state's attorney general, because the school board guy had called Harvey Milk a pedophile.

Why did he do that? Well, Harvey Milk had had a relationship with a 16-year-old male back in New York before he moved to California. So Komrosky's prime was to question a curriculum where they might be lauding a person who had a relationship with an underage person. And Newsom went to the point of sending out a tweet that was really quite threatening, saying, Mr Komrosky, you are offensive, you are ignorant, you are creating danger for the LGBTQ+ community.

Stay tuned, you have our attention. I mean, my God, can you imagine a political leader saying this kind of thing? And so Komrosky then said, I've had death threats. I've had people attacking me professionally, saying I should lose my job. When in the background, you've got a county, Riverside County, with 44 massively underperforming schools.

So, Jonathan, when you mentioned, hey, one out of four kids lacks proficiency in math, we're talking about 44 schools that are among the worst in the state. So that proficiency rate is somewhere around one out of ten in those schools. Not once is the state's department of education or Rob Bonta, attorney general or Newsom.

Not once are they talking about that or not once are they talking about, hey, Temecula's doing some stuff right. But instead, Komrosky becomes a perfect foil for the left in terms of saying, this is the guy you better be watching out for. This is the enemy. And who is the enemy here?

He's a fellow who's got a family of, I think, three kids. He's a professor at a local college. And his crime was just to object to having a curriculum in which Harvey Milk was to be celebrated because he felt, hey, he had a relationship with an underage person.

I'm uncomfortable with that. So, I don't know, Bill, when we talk about things like Big Brother, thought control, government just trampling on people. I suspect Komrosky wishes he hadn't used the word pedophile. And then you've got Newsom and Bonta threatening the Temecula school district over legal issues. There's no standing there.

The California law just says We should teach kids about the diversity in the state and particularly about success of minorities. Great idea, that doesn't mean you have to talk about Harvey Milk. So this just really, really struck me the wrong way. What the state politicians priorities are and what this particular episode showed is their priorities are not to deliver to kids.

Their priorities are to demonize people they don't agree with.

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah, they're engaging in virtue signaling. Interestingly, I've been thinking a lot about California education the past few days because I did a podcast earlier this week with Macke Raymond, who is a Hoover Fellow, a colleague of ours at the Hoover Institution.

Mackey also runs the Center for Research and Education Outcomes, or CREDO for short, at Stanford. And CREDO just published its third national study on charter school progress. It did one in 2009, one in 2013, and now their latest one is out, Lee and Jonathan. It's for the years 2015 to 2019.

And what's interesting is it shows progress in charter schools across the country. Charter school students are, on the average, getting learning gains from about an additional 6 days in math and 16 days in reading. And we'll talk more about charter schools. Lee, you have a lot of thoughts on that.

You just wrote a column on it. But that got me looking at kinda California education writ large. And I started looking at numbers put up by the National Assessment of Education Progress, which ties a lot of what you mentioned, Lee, in terms of just poor performance. NAEP also looked at fourth grade reading and performance gaps between white minority students.

And here's their conclusion. What they found was the gap was, and I'm gonna quote directly from NAEP, the gap was, quote, not significantly different from that in 1988. Let me repeat that for you, not significantly different from that in 1980. 1988, gentlemen, Gavin Newsom was a junior at Santa Clara University.

1988, Dianne Feinstein was not really on the California political radar. She'd run for governor two years later and Senate two years after that. So we're talking 35 years ago, and here's Nate telling us that this learning gap between white minority students has not really changed. It's not for lack of money.

Let's go back to the budget, for example, for a second, Lee. The budget which goes in law on July 1st includes a historic 8.22% cost of living adjustment for California's public schools. The total proposition 98 funding for the 23-24 fiscal year will be $108.3 billion. Lee and Jonathan, that's about $24,000 per kid in California.

And yet, what we're being told is we're not really achieving progress. And over 35 years, things are not changing. You just wanna throw your hands up in despair, if not disgust, when you hear things like that.

>> Lee Ohanian: Yeah, again, Bill, it's a symptom of a dysfunctional state government where, a few minutes ago, we were talking about just the massive amounts of money that just get burned up in the process.

The taxpayers on one side, the user of those tax dollars, whether it's the housing sector or whether it's the education sectors on the other. And somewhere in the middle, a lot of money just gets burned up. Bill, when you talked about the size of the budget, we spend roughly the same amount on education that the state of Florida spends on their entire budget.

So again, if I was advising DeSantis, I would say we're the third biggest state in the country. We deliver for less than California can create for their students. And guess what? Most of their students are failing miserably. So the amount of spending is just enormous. And Bill, as you rightly point out, the problem has been with us for decades.

There was a Iran corporation, which is a highly regarded nonpartisan think tank in Santa Monica, wrote a study, I think about 40 years ago now, it was in the early 1980s, about how California public education was failing. We have been living with this for 40 years. And you only have to go back about 12 years to when the state's budget on education was 47 billion.

Now, we're up to 108 billion, and there's absolutely no change in performance. And yet the world we live in gets more complex, gets more technically demanding. And when we talk about there's 5.9 million kids in the state, 4.6 million of them are getting left behind. How are they ever gonna get a job?

And how are they ever going to be able to live in California, where the price of a single family home median is about $850,000? And again, when we talk about couples counseling for the left, what should resonate with them is there's not just that one mom with her sick kid that Jeffrey Katzenberg is driving by in the underpass that leads him to go and write a big check to UCLA Medical School to go provide some healthcare.

 

>> Bill Whalen: Right.

>> Lee Ohanian: There are 4.6 million kids, 4.6 million that we are creating a potentially permanent underclass. So when Jeffrey Kasper talks about, I got so moved, that just hit me. It hit me and shook me to my bones, and I went and I wrote that big check.

That should hit Jeffrey Katzenberg, metaphorically, as well, because it's not just that one kid that needs help. There's 4.6 million, counting, because we've been doing this for 40 years. And it's not rocket science. It's not rocket science to help a kid figure out arithmetic and how to write and how to read.

It's not that difficult to do. And yet we're gonna spend $108 billion and we're gonna fail at the job. We talked about how Mayor Breed cannot really defend the indefensible in San Francisco.

>> Bill Whalen: Here's what the superintendent of public instruction, Mr. Thurman, can't really defend in California, Lee and Jonathan.

85% of black 6th grade students, 79% of Hispanic 6th graders do not meet state math standards. Economic disadvantaged 11th graders, 83.5%. Five out of six of those kids do not meet state math standards. 55% didn't meet state English language standards. So you can't defend that. What's curious about California is, for all we could talk about how it's stymied in terms of progress, back in the day, in 1992, it was cutting edge in this regard.

It was the second state in the United States to adopt charter schools. I believe Minnesota was the first. California was the second. Today, there are 1,300 charter schools across the state, about 11.5% of the school population. And Lee, charter schools caught your attention and you wrote about it for California on Your Mind.

Tell us what your column is about.

>> Lee Ohanian: Yeah, Bill, so yeah, back in the day when California was leader, California was on the forefront of creating charter schools. The idea behind charter schools was to confront the challenges public schools were having at that time and think of new ways to teach, trying to figure out what best practices are.

And then the idea was charters become somewhat creative and somewhat imaginative, and they try some different stuff out. And parents who were willing to put their kid in that kind of school, they were able to do that. And then what comes out of that pot? The best practices, the idea was those would be implemented by traditional schools.

But what's happened today is that a lot of parents are just fed up with public schools, traditional public schools, for the reasons we've just talked about. They wanna get their kids in charter schools. And guess what happens to the state's political education complex? Uh-oh, competition, we can't have that.

And Gavin Newsom is part of that political education complex. And a couple of years ago, we made it more difficult for communities to create new charter schools.

>> Bill Whalen: Right.

>> Lee Ohanian: And the reason was because it is just that they don't want competition. That's it. So what What interests me is that charter schools as you mentioned and Mackey is a great educational economics researcher, charters are doing better.

There's a charter that was created only about six or seven years ago up in Vacaville, California in the interior of, not far from, I believe, not far from Sacramento, relatively small community. A charter popped up there called the Kairos 's public schools and I was introduced to the head of Kairos 's public schools, Jared Austin.

And Bill, in just six years, they've created a school that has become so successful, they have a waiting list of 1000 kids to get into their school. They spend relatively little per pupil. They spend so little that they have been able to create a new campus to accommodate, help accommodate those thousand kids.

And this charter school is delivering learning outcomes including learning outcomes for kids with disabilities. A lot of critics of charter schools will say, charters just cherry pick kids. Well, no, that's not true. Kids go through a lottery. The charter doesn't know who the kid is whether they have a learning disability until after the family enrolls the kids.

So there's no cherry picking. The number of kids with learning disabilities in charters is about the same as in traditional schools. But at Kairos is 12% and rest of the state is 12.5%. Two other things I put about charter schools, Lee.

>> Bill Whalen: They're public schools, they're not private schools.

Some people think they're public schools. And secondly, they don't discriminate against minorities or socially white schools. You actually find, I think about 80% of charter schools across the country are in urban areas in, do actually cater toward minority students. And so a lot of myths surrounding charter schools.

 

>> Lee Ohanian: Yeah, I mean, they pop up where parents really want them. If there's a demand for charter school, then they try to get it to be done. And so they enroll whoever gets into the lottery and Kairos is delivering learning outcomes that are pretty close to those in Beverly Hills Unified School District.

I picked Beverly Hills, because they are remarkably well-funded. $56,000 per student per year, 56,000 per student per year in Beverly Hills. Kairos is spending a quarter of that per student and they're getting learning outcomes that are comparable not quite as good, but very, very close. And so I talked to Jared Austin, who's the director and he said, you know what?

The reason we can do so well is because we don't have to deal with the telephone book, size of work rules that come with union collective bargaining agreements. So their faculty, their staff are not unionized. Their faculty and staff have chosen not to be unionized. And because of that, they can be very flexible.

They can be very efficient. They don't have to worry about, hey, if there's a kid with a learning issue and they could really benefit from having another half an hour with a teacher, well, in a union setting, they couldn't do that because there's a work rule that says the school day ends at 255.

But in Kairos, the teacher will say, yeah, no worries. I'll spend another half hour with the kid. And so this is my California on your mind piece that came out today. What Austin ended up saying is that he said, you know what? They operate inside a straight jacket.

They can't get out of it, we can do what we need to do. Our faculty are really happy about being free to help the kids. Our staff are free to help the kids and they're delivering Beverly Hills level learning outcomes at one quarter of the cost. But when you talk about that $108 billion budget, if you adopted the Kairos model, that $108 billion budget, that would be equivalent to an over $400 billion budget based on their efficiency.

In other words, the state would need to spend $400 billion to get the same level of outcomes as what Kairos is doing.

>> Bill Whalen: It's a fascinating topic, Lee. If you talk to Macke Raymond about this, she will. She really is more of an expert on charter schools than I am, obviously.

She'll tell you that, look, charter schools are not a panacea. They're not a cure all, they're not elixirs. They're not magical. They have their problems too and the problems are several fold. They can have a problem based on just their structure. Who runs the charter school? They could have a problem based on where they're located in their facilities.

They have a problem based on the student population. So they're not caring for success, but they are innovative in this regard. By the way, I should admit that I have a bit of a bias here. I have a niece in Charleston, South Carolina, who teaches at a charter school, and her two sons go there, and they have a wonderful educational experience right now from what I can see.

So yeah, I'm a little biased here. But Lee, you mentioned the bill that Newsom signed. He did this in 2019 and what do governors do in their first year? They tried to make good on what they promised the voters, but they also make good to the people who got them, who bring them to the dance.

And so Newsom was looking ways to make the California Teachers Association happy. And boy, did this make them happy, why? The way charter schools work, very simply is this. It's a charter, it's a contract for a set amount of time. Maybe five years, maybe ten years, what have you.

And when the period comes up, the charter school has to go to the school district and apply for more readmission, but just kind of getting a new term. What Newsom's bill did was it makes it much more complicated to get re upped. It's not so much a threat to creating new charter schools, because there's a cap in California and how many charter schools you can have.

The real question is just trying to kill those that are in existence and this bill makes it easier. It gives the school districts much more latitude to say no to them. And so shame on Governor Newsom for doing this. It's a very interesting segue because Jerry Brown, who preceded Gavin Newsom before he was governor and before his attorney general, he was the mayor of Oakland.

And as I've talked about with Jerry on this podcast before, he kinda got mugged by reality during his time running Oakland and part of that was education. And under his watch, a couple of charter schools were created in Oakland. And so Jerry was soft on charter schools, much, much more so than Newsom.

I just kind of worry about what the future is going to be for charter schools in California if you do have a governor and an SPI who just do not seem friendly to them.

>> Lee Ohanian: Absolutely, you're right. Shame on Governor Newsom for doing this, because you're potentially damning millions of kids to a life where they just don't have the skills.

And if a kid falls far enough behind in math or reading, you're gonna lose them. And again, going back to the Jeffrey Katzenberg analogy, how can you find that conscionable, so that mother and that little kid that just shook him to saying, how can we live in a society where we have this kind of pain and misery?

He should be looking at those kids that don't know how to read, don't know how to write and they don't know how to multiply two numbers together, they have a decimal.

>> Jonathan Movroydis: Gentleman, let's end this podcast by talking about the weather. California has been enjoying very cool weather this June, but there's expected to be a heat wave by the end of this week and experts are forecasting an unusually hot summer.

Gentleman, what does this mean for the state's water supply and how the state is poised to deal with environmental disasters, droughts fires and the like? Sensing Jonathan, here we are recording on Wednesday morning and I got up very early to do some other hoover business and just turned on the national news just to make sure the world hasn't blown up or anything and they're talking about the weather.

 

>> Bill Whalen: There are horrible flight delays right now and it's a combination of a lot of smoke in Chicago on the east coast. But apparently, there is a ginormous heat wave which is overtaking the south and it's heading to the Midwest. And here in California, the temperature is gonna get hot.

Supper is finally arriving. I'm not sure, Lee, what it's been like in Santa Barbara, but here in Palo Alto, most of our days have been in the fifties and sixties. It's like we're about two months behind on the calendar, but now July is about to come rolling in, and it looks like summer is gonna make its appearance.

The first question when you live in California is, are we going to have electricity when the lights go off? The good news here is that, it'll appear that the winter flooding will save us unless we have just unusual heat. We have a lot of hydro power and reserve, and so we will not be looking at rolling blackouts.

But, Lee, just when you talk about the weather in California, it's just a reminder to me that at all times, despite how much the state does in terms of being forward looking, in terms of how wet we are to technology. How we're trying to create a better tomorrow, we are still at the mercy of the elements, be it the weather, be it the ground opening up and swallowing us, be it floods, be it drought and so forth.

 

>> Lee Ohanian: Well, yeah, what's ironic is that California is considered to be this temperate paradise. We''ve got what? We've got 300 days a year that a lot of people in the rest of the state have maybe 20 days a year, 70 degrees sunshine, no wind, low humidity. That's why everybody wants to be here, and yet we do suffer from occasional torrential rains, fires that leave hillsides barren, that lead to mudslides, which can be devastating.

And Bill, what state government is supposed to do is to provide investments to deal with that. And what we have done is we haven't thinned that forest, we haven't managed those acreages. And Bill you know Gavin likes to consider California to be at the forefront of climate change sensibility and regulations and making all the difference in the world.

And what he doesn't talk about is the fact that, as far as I can estimate, the accumulated reduction in carbon emissions the state has achieved through billions of dollars in taxes and regulations in the last 20 years. Those reductions have been eclipsed by the carbon emissions coming from forest fires in the state, and so there you have it.

California is not reducing carbon emissions, California is actually increasing carbon emissions because of wildfires. That's not a narrative that you see discussed, but it is what it is.

>> Bill Whalen: So on Tuesday of this week, I think the Dallas Fort Worth area set a record for power consumption, and it's supposedly gonna be warmer today, on Wednesday they're gonna set a new record.

Very tempting for Governor Newsom, who likes to take shots at Texas as well as Florida, to say, you guys in Texas are having a hard time keeping your lights on. We, California wouldn't have that problem, but here's why he shouldn't do this. Because when you're talking about the weather in California, you're really whistling past the graveyard.

I mean, it was just last fall you could go up and look at folks, last November we were looking at rolling blackouts, why? Because we were in the midst of a gigantic drought and we didn't have enough power to go around, now apparently we have abundant energy. But again, this changes and again, we're just at the mercy of the weather, plain and simple.

As much as we can talk about government planning and all kinds of great innovative things coming out of Sacramento, it comes down to one thing. And that is the weather, which we've yet to figure out a way to control.

>> Lee Ohanian: Yeah, no, all government can do is try to protect us to the best they can and they haven't done a very good job.

I mean, I can also mention the fact that most of our stormwater drainage in the state dates back to before 1940. All the technological advances within the state, and yet we get flooded because we have an adequate storm water drainage. And in the state that's subject to regular drought, we have regular occurring drought, 99.9% of storm water just goes off into the ocean.

Be captured, all those smart Silicon Valley people could probably figure out a way to do that. But gallon after gallon goes out to the ocean when it could be harvested and used in drought years. So again, there's a lot of money being spent in the state, you look around, education, floods, fires, where is that money going?

 

>> Bill Whalen: Jonathan, I know we're running long here, but I do wanna add one thing to the podcast, and the question is, what are you guys doing for the 4th July, Jonathan, you're gonna be in Arizona?

>> Jonathan Movroydis: I'll be in Arizona here, probably just see the fireworks and hang out by the pool because it's 110 degrees here.

But I was actually struck by something that you said offline regarding growing up in Washington DC and the 4th July celebrations. There are just much bigger in comparison to that of California, that which you say is understated. I remember being five or six years old, living in the DC area and seeing fireworks at the national monument, it was a pretty big spectacle.

And I agree, I'm not sure if it was as big in California when I lived there.

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah Lee, are you gonna be a Santa Barbara for the fourth, and what are you gonna do?

>> Lee Ohanian: We're going to visit my wife's family in San Diego, her youngest sister has two young kids and they happen to be born around this time, so there's gonna be a big birthday party for little girls.

One is three and one just turned one, and hopefully play a couple of rounds of golf with my youngest son who hits about 100 yards past me, and my nephew who also hits about 100 yards past me. So I just pick my ball up and I move it out where their ball is and I suddenly feel much better about myself.

 

>> Bill Whalen: So I am going to a colleagues party not far from Stanford and the fourth in California, I find it be interesting, then we'll end this podcast in this regard. As Jonathan mentioned, I grew up in the Washington DC area where the 4th July is a big deal.

And not just because it's a Federal holiday, because there is a big fireworks show, maybe one of the largest in the country. I think the Macy's one in New York may be the biggest, but the Washington one is very impressive. And it's just quite beautiful because you have the Washington monument, Lincoln memorials backdrops.

It's just very patriotic moment and it ties into the existence of that part of the country where you are kind of in the cradle of the country. That's you're in the midst of one of the founding colonies and you grow up there and you just really kind of have a very good understanding of American history, not so much in California.

And that raises the question of how patriotic California is, and I don't mean that in terms of California being a land of, crazy socialist America, flag burning, hating people. It's just a question of how rooted California is in kind of the roots of the republic, if you will?

There's a website called WalletHub, it's a personal finance website, and every year it tries to figure out what are the most patriotic states in America, it uses 13 metrics. And these are things like the number of military enlistees per capita, veterans per capita, voting rates, volunteer rates and so forth, you wanna guess where California came in, Lee?

 

>> Lee Ohanian: I'm guessing pretty close to the bottom.

>> Bill Whalen: A few years ago it was pretty close to the bottom, the good news, it's improved, but it's 37th in the country right now, behind Michigan and one ahead of Louisiana. The top three most patriotic states in the country are Virginia, Montana and Alaska.

Now, these are kind of skewed because Virginia has a very large military population, if you will, Montana and Alaska, very small population. So you probably that skews your per capita, and I'm not sure about all those results because Oregon came in as the 7th most patriotic state in America, Oregon.

 

>> Lee Ohanian: Interesting, Bill, California has a very large immigrant population, and a lot are from a lot of Spanish speaking from Mexico and South America. Very interesting, among Hispanic families, I've gotten to know they deeply love this country because they came from places where they just could not achieve what they have achieved here.

And they come from countries with governments that can be very repressive. So if WalletHub took that into account, maybe California would look a lot better. And perhaps some of our policymakers should think about that, should think about that as well, when they consider how they spend our money and how they deliver so little for what.

 

>> Bill Whalen: I've always found the fourth to be a complicated thing out here, Lee. Health minded people give you a stink eye when they see you eating a hot dog, doing fireworks in the Bay Area. For years, local government pleaded poverty so you didn't have fireworks shows. And then when it got very dry, they said it's not safe to do it, even though there's a thriving illegal fireworks industry in Oakland, of all places.

You try to set off fireworks in San Francisco and there's the coastal air, the low lying fog, so maybe don't see the fireworks or so forth. But it's just an interesting question to ask, if you are listening to this and you are a Californian, just ask your fellow Californians your 4th July gathering, how patriotic do you feel California is?

 

>> Jonathan Movroydis: Yeah, well, this has been very interesting and timely analysis, thank you as always, gentlemen, for your time.

>> Bill Whalen: Thanks, Lee, thanks, Jonathan.

>> Lee Ohanian: Fellas, fun as always, have a happy and safe holiday.

>> Bill Whalen: Yeah, safe travels.

>> Jonathan Movroydis: You've been listening to matters of policy and politics, the Hoover Institution podcast voted governance and balance of power here in America and around the free world.

Please don't forget to rate, review and subscribe to this podcast wherever you might hear it. And if you don't mind, please spread the word, get your friends to have a listen. The Hoover Institution has Facebook, Instagram and Twitter feeds. Our Twitter handle, is @hooverinst, that's hoover i-n-s-t, Bill Whelan is on Twitter, his handle is @billwhelanca, and Lee Ohanian is also on Twitter, his handle is @lee_ohanian.

Please visit the Hoover website@hoover.org and sign up for the Hoover Daily Report, where you can access the latest scholarship and analysis from our fellows. Also, check out California on your mind, where Bill Whelan and Leo Ohanian write every week, again, this is Jonathan Movroydis sitting in Bill Whalen's chair this week.

He'll be back for another episode of Matters of Policy and Politics, thank you for listening.

>> Speaker 4: This podcast is a production of the Hoover Institution, where we advance ideas that define a free society and improve the human condition. For more information about our work, or to listen to more of our podcasts or watch our videos, please visit hoover.org.