A bright sun, blue sky and equally blue Pacific Ocean formed the backdrop the other day when ex-President Donald Trump came to his golf course on the Palos Verdes Peninsula near Los Angeles essentially to run down California and blame everything he listed on Vice President Kamala Harris, whom he trailed by slim margins in most polls of that moment.
It was like listening to the ultimate “declinist” diatribe, to borrow a term for this state’s critics coined by former Gov. Jerry Brown.
Yet, for every claim Trump mentioned (true, false or partially correct), another observer might have named a positive, based on several recent independent studies.
For one example, Trump said California has “the highest inflation” in America. Incorrect. This state has seen significant inflation, but nevertheless had only the seventh largest price increases in the nation over most of this year.
Trump didn’t mention the WalletHub.com study indicating Californians had among the highest confidence in their own financial futures, based on personal spending and plans for it. Another sign of optimism: Californians ranked first in the nation, increasing their credit card debt by $4.5 billion in the second quarter of this year. Of course, California has by far the largest population among the states and therefore the most active credit card accounts.
Trump claimed, too, that California has the highest taxes in America. Not true. Yes, this state has the highest sales tax, 7.5 percent. But overall, the tax burden here ranks eighth among the states, largely because of the 1978 Proposition 13, which puts California property taxes in the bottom half nationally despite the state’s ultra-high real estate prices. The Trump golf course benefits directly from this.
But Trump neglected to mention that California ties Washington State as the best in the West for finding jobs, according to CommercialCafe.com rankings. San Francisco ranks in that study as America’s best city for starting a post-college career. Six other California cities ranked in the top ten of that category, including Sacramento, Stockton, Fresno, San Bernardino, Victorville and Menifee. And it had four cities ranked in the top 10 best places for working parents: San Francisco, Fremont, Irvine and Oakland.
Plus, California tops all states in the number of major corporations headquartered here, at 57, outstripping the 52 in New York and 50 in Texas.
The ex-President blasted this state for its homeless problems, saying that “After Kamala Harris and Gavin Newscum (sic) took charge of San Francisco, homelessness increased by 200 percent.” Yes, homelessness has risen in California, standing at 186,000 unhoused statewide in the most recent surveys, but in San Francisco, it was at its lowest level since 2015 when surveyed early this year.
At the same time, Trump never mentioned that California ranks in the top ten states for teachers’ wellbeing, according to another new analysis, this from the WalletHub website. California has the seventh highest teacher salaries, when adjusted for the cost of living. It ranks first in digital learning for schoolchildren, and fifth in the pace of teacher pay increases.
For Trump to have cited any of California’s many positives (none cited here are related to the state’s best-in-the-nation weather), would not have benefited him politically.
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Instead, he compared California’s forest maintenance with Finland, ignoring that country’s location in far more northerly Scandinavia, where forest fires are scarce. Thickly wooded forests with dense underbrush that Trump believes should be cleaned out also are uncommon in the far north. Trump, aware he has no more chance than ever of winning California’s 54 electoral votes this year, also threatened to withhold federal firefighting assistance if the state sticks with recently adopted clean water standards.
Trump’s anti-California riff was plainly designed for use in campaign commercials airing in other states where the positives of California life get short shrift on newscasts that often feature lurid video of wildfires and the mudslides that often follow. Not to mention car chases.
But Californians would be wise to remember that news coverage generally features negatives more than positives, which means that declinist visions of California will always get more exposure than the positives, no matter what or when.
Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com.