1) Gee, Gavin Newsom Sure Is a Great Governor (Not)
Many of our liberal friends (yes, we have some), are touting California Governor as their best presidential candidate for 2024. If they’re right — and they just might be — then that says a lot about the pitiful state of the Democrats’ “bench.”
Would Newsom run on a theme of “make America look like California”? That’s a loser.
A new report from our friends at Laffer Associates is a must-read on the financial and demographic collapse of the once-Golden State. This chart on the millions of Californians leaving for greener pastures tells the whole story. The stampede east is accelerating every year. Americans are voting with their feet in giant numbers out of one of the most beautiful places on the planet.
And the are taking their money with them in a kind of reverse gold rush.
Yes, Gavin Newsom has great hair. But his record is dismal.
Liberals have no plausible response to the blue state meltdown, as shown above. They can’t explain why their policies are causing people to say adios amigos.
We laughed when we saw the latest lame attempt by the leftist Center for Budget and Policy Priorities in a report entitled (State Taxes Have a Minimal Impact on People’s Interstate Moves). It attempts to refute the Laffer, Moore, and Jonathan Williams ALEC annual report called “Rich States, Poor States”.
CBPP claims that the outmigration from high-tax blue states to low-tax red states is misleading because many people move from red states for blue states. True. People do move to Manhattan, San Francisco, and Chicago.
But when WE count, it’s NET migration. How many people moved IN minus how many people moved OUT? Almost all blue states are net negative and most low-tax red states are positive.
CTUP demographer Wendell Cox ran the numbers on the ratio of in-migrants versus out-migrants for the biggest states. Here are the results. As an example, for every 10 people moved into California And New York, roughly 20 people moved out.
No matter how you slice or dice the data, blue states are losing big time.
3) Major Money Management Firms Fleeing From ESG Proposals in 2023
More evidence in the wake of our report card “Putting Politics Over Pensions,” the big money managers are increasingly rejecting leftwing ESG shareholder resolutions brought by climate change and social justice warriors. We rejoiced when we read that the country's second-largest fund manager, Vanguard, just reported:
During the 2023 proxy year, we saw a larger number of environmental and social shareholder proposals put forward for a vote at the funds’ U.S. portfolio companies: 359, compared with 290 in the 2022 proxy year. The funds supported just 2% of such proposals in the 2023 proxy year (down from 12% in the 2022 proxy year)... The most common subject of those proposals was target-setting for greenhouse gas emissions. Other common proposal topics focused on climate lobbying and fossil fuel financing.
It wasn’t just Vanguard and Blackrock that are worried about their CTUP grades and the bad publicity attached to receiving a bad grade. A report by the Financial Times several weeks ago found that the percentage of firms voting for ESG proposals fell by almost half this year. Fox Business analyst Charlie Gasparino writes this week that ESG is dying on the vine.
We’d call all of this real progress. One investment officer at one of the five largest Wall Street banks with more than $1 trillion of pension and retirement assets tells us: “Our goal is to get an A on the next CTUP report card.”
4) Climate Crazies Block Entrance to Iconic Burning Man Festival
Burning Man is an iconic annual, week-long get-away for people “seeking the personally transformative experiences of self-realization” at a site in the northwest Nevada desert. Some 80,000 people show up, including hippies, peaceniks, and celebrities, but also many middle-class Americans who just want to get away from the hustle and bustle of 21st-century living for a while. We have friends who attend regularly.
But this year the trek to the two-lane highway to Burning Man was barricaded by climate activists. They parked a 28-foot trailer in the middle of the road and chained themselves to the truck while demanding Burning Man ban private jets, plastics, and the use of propane.
One of the wackos was Will Livernois, of Scientist Rebellion, who lectured: “We have to shift away from Burning Man’s green capitalism and focus on degrowth.”
(As an aside, we’ve made the case that “green capitalism” — i.e., the trillions of dollars funneled to the climate change industrial complex — is the driving force behind the climate change movement. What this has to do with the Burning Man festival is beyond us.
In a rich irony, the climate activists were criticized by the Paiute Tribe, which owns the area. Man Chong, one of those eventually arrested, asked: “What is being late to Burning Man in comparison to having your entire planet on fire?”
Incidentally, one of the rituals at Burning Man is that the “party culminates in a symbolic burning of a large wooden effigy, after which all the attendees meticulously clean up after themselves.” Left-wing protesters almost never do that!
This story has a happy ending as you can see from this dramatic police intervention:
5) New Looney UK Climate Change Plan To Leave Brits “Colder and Poorer”
We’ve warned these Stalinistic controls were coming, we just didn’t know it would happen across the pond before the craziness hit these shores.
From the Daily Mail:
The policy is endorsed by Britain’s PM Rishi Sunak, who is obsessed with achieving green targets by reducing energy demand at “peak hours.” This is a clear back door scheme to ration energy.
Craig Mackinlay, head of the Net Zero Scrutiny group of Conservative MPs, said: “This latest advice to freeze ourselves on cold evenings merely shows the truth that the dream of plentiful and cheap renewable energy is a sham.”
'I came into politics to improve all aspects of my constituents' lives, not make them colder and poorer.'
The government has responded that “homes will still be warm and families will save money.”
Right. Do you want to stay warm in your home in the winter? Get a parka.
ERRATUM: In Friday's HOTLINE we reported the lifetime cost of median homeownership is $32,000 under Biden, and $50,000 in high-cost areas. We missed a zero. The correct figures are ten times higher, $320,000 and $500,000. We regret the error.
