President Biden Should Have Identified These Problems in California

President Biden Should Have Identified These Problems in California
President Joe Biden departs after inspecting flood damage from recent storms, at Moffett Federal Airfield in Santa Clara county in Mountain View, Calif., on Jan. 19, 2023. (Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images)
John Seiler
1/23/2023
Updated:
1/23/2023
0:00
Commentary
President Biden visited California’s Central Coast areas devastated by the record rains on Jan. 19. The previous week, he declared California a disaster area and “ordered Federal aid to supplement State, tribal, and local recovery efforts in the areas affected by severe winter storms, flooding, landslides, and mudslides beginning on December 27, 2022, and continuing.”

He won the state in 2020 by 63 percent to 34 percent over President Trump. That was better than the 62 percent to 32 percent by which Hillary Clinton also beat Trump in 2016. So it’s Biden’s state.

As a heavily Democratic state, California is a blueprint for what Biden could do to all of America if he continued to have a Democratic legislature instead of one, starting this month, divided between a Democratic Senate and a Republican House.

Here are the other issues he could have identified in California.

After Air Force One lands, he could have looked around the airport and seen planes leaving with passengers, many of whom never will return to what no longer is the Golden State for them. It lost 113,000 people in the year between July 2021 and July 2022. I know many who have left, all with regrets for leaving what once for them was paradise, but had become unbearable.
As Biden rode around in the Beast, the presidential limousine, if he rolled down his tinted window, he would have seen homeless people almost everywhere in the cities. For example, in San Francisco Magistrate Judge Donna M. Ryu, appointed in 2010 by the Obama-Biden administration, “temporarily banned San Francisco police from clearing most homeless encampments, citing people for sleeping in public, or enforcing several other laws aimed at homeless people while a federal lawsuit against the city moves forward,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Mayor London Breed complained, “Mayors cannot run cities this way. We already have too few tools to deal with the mental illness we see on our streets. Now we are being told not to use another tool that helps bring people indoors and keeps our neighborhoods safe and clean for our residents.”

If the president would have ventured into a grocery store, he would have seen eggs that cost $7 a dozen—at least when they’re even on the shelves. A year ago prices were as low as $2.35 in California.

“An avian flu outbreak and increasing costs of fuel, feed and packaging have contributed to an egg supply shortage and high prices in some parts of the country,” reported the New York Times. Well, flus happen, to birds and people. But the inflation, in food and almost everything else, is the result of Biden’s wild spending of many trillions of dollars.
Especially devastated have been “millions of cage-free hens California relies on to comply with Proposition 12, the 2018 animal welfare initiative that took effect last year,” reported the Los Angeles Times. Prop. 12 mandates the special treatment, meaning a special, isolated market for chickens—much as state law requires special gasoline blends. Such special markets by definition are smaller. And smaller markets are subject to greater price swings.

Also, “Since Proposition 12 passed, at least six other states have voted to prohibit the sale of conventional eggs. Three of those bans are now in effect, including in Colorado and Washington, where conventional eggs were outlawed Jan. 1.

“That means, between this week and the last, almost 14 million more Americans began competing for a product that was already scarce.”

Especially harmed by the higher prices have been the poor people Democrats claim are their major constituency.

Next, if the president had looked closely, maybe he would have seen some street crime. Crime is up everywhere in Joe Biden’s America, not just in California. But here are some recent events:

Jan. 17: “17 cars broken into on a single night in this San Francisco neighborhood.”
Jan. 17: “Police: Suspect speeds through Bay Area in stolen S.F. ambulance.”
Jan. 17: “SFPD: Catalytic converter theft in Richmond district results in chase, gunfire.”
Jan. 13: “San Francisco Police Commission votes to restrict low-level traffic stops.” That only will encourage erratic driving, leading to more traffic accidents and deaths.
Jan. 11: “San Francisco MS-13 Associates Sentenced To Prison For Roles In Gang-Related Murders And Attempted Cover-Up.” That’s a story from Biden’s own Justice Department website.
Biden recently for the first time visited the U.S.-Mexico border. As The Epoch Times reported:
Biden spent several hours touring the border in El Paso, Texas, which has become a major entry point for those aiming to enter the United States illegally. The president, who visited the El Paso County Migrant Services Center, also was scheduled to meet with nonprofits and faith-based charitable organizations that help illegal immigrants when they arrive in the United States. …

The situation at the border has been a source of great contention, as evidenced by Biden’s reception from Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. According to border officials, a record 2.2 million illegal immigrants were apprehended at the border in fiscal 2022, which ended Sept. 30, 2022.

Abbott hand-delivered a letter to Biden that began with, “Your visit to our southern border with Mexico today is $20 billion too late and two years too late.” Immigrants usually don’t linger along the border, but move inland, including to California’s Central Coast. Even Gov. Gavin Newsom warned in December against Biden ending President Trump’s Title 42 policy of allowing quick extraditions of illegal immigrants. He said:
The fact is, what we’ve got right now is not working and is about to break in a post-42 world unless we take some responsibility and ownership. I’m saying that as a father. I’m saying that as someone that feels responsible for being part of the solution and I’m trying to do my best here. …
We’re already at capacity at nine of our sites. We can’t continue to fund all of these sites because of the budgetary pressures now being placed on this state and the offsetting issues that I have to address. ... The reality is, unless we’re doing what we’re doing, people will end up on the streets. As Biden departed California, zooming up on Air Force One, perhaps as he looked below he not only reflected on natural disasters that have afflicted California, but even more so his own policies. The disaster damage can be repaired. The political disasters will take much longer to fix, if they ever are.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
John Seiler is a veteran California opinion writer. Mr. Seiler has written editorials for The Orange County Register for almost 30 years. He is a U.S. Army veteran and former press secretary for California state Sen. John Moorlach. He blogs at JohnSeiler.Substack.com and his email is [email protected]
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