Is California’s high cost of living due to Newsom’s bad policies?

High costs of living in California are caused primarily by taxes, housing, utilities and gasoline.

Poorly designed land-use policies and housing bills that are stripping local control over zoning and development decisions are main reasons for increased housing costs.

Instead of focusing, for example, on connecting East the East Bay to the Peninsula by restoring the railroad bridge next to Dumbarton and then focus on building housing in the East and public transportation everywhere — Newsom wasted billions on “HSR to nowhere.”

Utilities costs are highest in the nation due to failing green energy projects, complex regulatory environment and no planning for reliable water supply.

Raising the fast-food worker minimum wage to $20 an hour created a negative economic impact, leading to higher prices and job cuts.

Enormous amount of money wasted in general.

Homeless population keeps growing despite $24 billion spent — and unaccounted for to this day. Failure to upgrade the EDD software allowed $20 billion-$32 billion losses to fraud during pandemic. Enormous funds and resources spent on medical and social services for illegal immigrants.

Wasteful policies, coupled with incompetent budget planning, created a tremendous state budget deficit — with no easy solutions available, other than more and more various taxes, from sales taxes to gasoline taxes — which are already the highest in the nation, yet do not help!

Even the grandiose tax increase scheme, Prop. 19, designed to raise tax flow by forcing children to sell their inherited properties — failed miserably. It increased taxes — but neither the firefighting fund, nor the counties have received any promised money.

Zinovy Fichtenholz

San Carlos