The Great Red State vs. Blue State Debate was hard to watch, and even harder to listen to.
“You’re a liar!”
“You’re a bully!
“No, you’re a bully!”
“No, you’re a liar.”
It was so childish. Grown-up candidates call each other Hitler.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and California Governor Gavin Newsom sniped at each other for ninety minutes, and then Fox News Channel host Sean Hannity invited them to keep going for another half hour. It appeared that Newsom and DeSantis agreed, and the show went to a commercial break.
Thankfully, when the next segment began, Hannity said the governors had suddenly remembered that they had somewhere else to be.
Most of the TV audience probably said the same thing 45 minutes earlier.
At least DeSantis spoke in coherent sentences. Newsom was tightly wound, packed with memorized snippets that came springing out of him like one of those snakes-in-a-can jokes.
Even though I take fast notes, it was hard to keep up with how many things were 60% higher or 29% lower or $14 billion on day one. I think something was up 15% during a six-week period in 2021 and something was down 50% since 1990 and everything else was a problem he inherited from Republican governors going back to Reagan. Other than that, my notes say this:
“Your father-in-law likes me best!”
“I appreciate your wife.”
“When are you going to drop out and give Nikki Haley a shot?”
“You wish.”
“I am not a potted plant.”
That was Sean Hannity, declaring he was not a fern.
Hannity opened the program with slightly defensive remarks acknowledging that as “the longest running host” on cable television he is a well-known conservative. He emphasized that the questions would be “well-sourced and fact-centered.” It almost sounded like he was explaining to Newsom that things were not going to go well for him.
And they didn’t.
The selection of topics, the order in which they were presented and the framing of the questions was very different than what you would see if someone from the political left was running the show (“Before we get started, some ground rules. Do you denounce Donald Trump, fossil fuels and the Confederacy?”) Instead, Hannity opened the debate by asking why people were leaving blue states like California and moving to red states like Florida.
DeSantis denounced arrogant leftist governments and mentioned the French Laundry. Newsom ignored the question and said he was there to defend the Biden-Harris record.
The next question was about California’s high taxes, which Newsom answered with a mind-twisting statement asserting that working families pay lower taxes in California than in Florida or Texas.
This absurd claim appears to be based on calculations like the ones in a report last March from WalletHub, which tortured a lot of numbers until they broke down and said Texas has a higher effective state and local tax rate for a median U.S. household, at 12.73%, than California’s 8.97%.
Of course, this is sophistry. While Texas and Florida have no income tax, California taxes an individual’s first dollar of taxable income at 1%, doubles that rate above $10,412, then doubles it again above $24,684. Income above $38,959 is taxed at 6%. Over $54,081 the tax rate is 8%, and earnings between $68,350 and $349,137 are taxed at the rate of 9.3% on the way to a top tax rate of 13.3%.
California has the highest state sales tax in the country and the skyscraping gas taxes go up every year with inflation. So how can anyone conclude that taxes here are lower on working families than they are in Texas or Florida?
Here’s how the trick is done: WalletHub assumed a median income earner owns a median-value home, and then added property taxes into their calculations.
So it’s Proposition 13 that deserves the credit for averaging down the tax burden. The 1978 citizen initiative cut the property tax rate to 1%, capped increases in taxable value, and required voter approval of local tax increases.
The California government’s blithering idiocy has raised the cost of electricity, water, gasoline, food and housing. Taxes are high on top of that.
If Newsom is going to claim credit for the benefits of Proposition 13, he really should drop his lawsuit seeking to have a Prop. 13-related measure removed from the November 2024 ballot.
Newsom’s lawsuit says the Taxpayer Protection and Government Accountability Act would make it too hard to raise taxes.
Top that, Ron.
Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on Twitter @Susan_Shelley