California Democratic leaders like Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein seem to think their extreme progressive policies are in line with the ideals of most Americans. Glenn Beck would argue just the opposite. In fact, Californians are fleeing the Golden State in droves. According to a recent poll, nearly half of the Bay Area's residents want to move out; unaffordable housing and sky-high taxes have driven more than 138,000 people out of the state in one year alone, and over a million since 2007. On today's show, Glenn touched on some of the progressive policies that are driving California's mass exodus.
- California's Democratic leaders claim to be the champions of the poor, and yet California has the highest poverty rate in the nation. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, when California's stratospheric cost-of-living, housing and taxes are accounted for, the poverty rate is a shocking 20.6 percent.
- Most expensive place to live: Homes in California cost on average 44 percent more than the U.S. average, and rental rates are 37 percent above average. According to a Kiplinger report, San Diego has the highest housing cost in the country, a whopping 138 percent above the national average.
- Insane individual and corporate taxes: California's state tax is at 8.25 percent, income tax goes as high as 13.3 percent, and corporate taxes are at 8.84 percent. Out-of-control taxes and policies have driven countless companies out of California in the last two years, including Carl's Jr., Toyota, Nissan, Jamba Juice and Chevron.
- California's homeless population has ballooned to more than 134,000 people living on the streets. Meanwhile, the government keeps dumping funds (to the tune of $700 million) into programs that not only fail to address the problem of homelessness, they actually perpetuate it.
"Instead of getting to the root of the actual problem, like housing costs, regulations, insane taxes and the free handouts, the California brain trust has just decided to give people more money and hope the problem goes away somehow," said Glenn, adding that current homeless programs just "make the casualties of [their] progressive experiment a little harder to notice."
- Safe injection sites: On July 1, San Francisco's Department of Public Health plans to open the nation's first two "safe injection sites" in which drug addicts will be able to shoot up under supervision.
"This is the very definition of sweeping and hiding your problems under the rug," said Glenn. "Forget the fact that they're providing a place for people to break the law, but they're also enabling people that are dependent on some sort of a drug to stay dependent on that drug. Did they actually mean to create the perfect metaphor for progressive government? …They keep you dependent. That's entirely what leftism is all about."
- One California city has a brilliant plan to combat their poverty problems by handing out a "no strings" guaranteed basic income of $500 a month to its residents. Apparently, Stockton's mayor didn't get the memo about Finland's recent failed attempt at a similar plan, which you can read more about here.
- California's new law limiting toilet flushes: And just recently, California became the first state in the nation to pass a law that will limit water usage to 55 gallons per-person, per-day, starting in 2022. By 2030, the amount falls to 50 gallons.
Watch the clip above to learn more.
