SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California’s political leaders continually replay the following scenario: Identify a serious problem. Propose massive new government spending programs to address the identified problem. Spend the money without much tracking or oversight. Declare great progress, even though such progress is impossible to find. Ignore oversight reports explaining that the money has been poorly spent or has yielded few results. Rinse and repeat. It’s frustrating living in a state that measures success by how much public money is spent — rather than by the progress the spending has made in reducing problems, but here we are. This is a constant theme when it comes to the state’s education programs. The state continually spends more money, then calls for even more spending when test scores provide bleak results. It continually ramps up spending to address climate change, then calls for even more money as the state misses its air-quality goals. Myriad examples abound. The latest involves mental health funding and homelessness. In March 2024, California voters approved — at the behest of the governor and Legislature — a $6.4 billion bond to fund such programs to address the state’s homelessness crisis. It sounds sensible. The vast majority of California’s homeless population suffers from mental health and addiction issues. Getting people treatment is a reasonable step toward getting them off the streets. “California does not have enough places where people can get this care and treatment. This shortage means that many people wait for care or do not receive care at the right type of place. To address the shortage, places for treatment in California would need to be able to see over 10,000 more people at any one time than is possible today,” according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office.  Opponents raised the right points: Such programs are better funded by the general fund rather than using debt spending. The bond ties the hands of counties by reallocating existing resources and local programs tend to be most effective. The measure incentivizes institutionalization and was rushed through the Legislature, per the League of Women Voters. Nevertheless, voters approved Proposition 1 by the slimmest margins, so that’s life in a democracy. The main question, for the purpose of this essay: Has the bond provided — or is it on track to provide — the promised number of treatment beds? According to Gov. Gavin Newsom, the answer is a resounding yes.  “Proposition 1 is doing exactly what we promised it would do: transforming California’s behavioral health system,” according to a March 11 statement from the governor’s office. “In just two years, we didn’t just meet our goal of creating 6,800 treatment beds; we exceeded it. That means we’re finally closing the gap that’s left too many communities without the care they need.” Yet a March 12 report from CalMatters came to a starkly different and less encouraging conclusion: “None of the projects expected in 2025 under … Newsom’s mental-health ballot measure have opened.” The administration boasted that 10 of the first 124 projects would be done last year, but the publication found that nine of them were delayed and another one was cancelled. What about those 6,800-plus beds that Newsom touted? “[T]hose projects, though they have now been funded, have yet to come to fruition,” per the publication. That last line says it all: Funding projects is not the same metric as building them and making them operational. There are plenty of plausible excuses, of course. But I’m not persuaded. State and local bonds often fall short of their promises, with officials blaming inflation and other economic conditions. There’s always some unexpected variable that poses challenges to construction projects. Typically, however, public officials typically overpromise results to gain political support, then move on to other pipedreams after the bonds fail to deliver the desired results. A 2024 CalMatters report looked at the 2018 “No Place Like Home” bond measure to provide homeless housing: “Voters who read the Yes campaign’s description of the measure that November saw a bold promise: 20,000 new units of permanent supportive housing. More than five years later, the state has completed just 1,797 No Place Like Home units.” The numbers have gone up since then, but it’s always wise to take any initiative’s promises with a grain of salt. In January, the governor touted a major drop in the homeless population, which sounds like good news. But his numbers might be as shaky as his Proposition 1 numbers: “[T]he official counting process is so limited — searching for the unhoused on a single day in January — it is a dubious data point at best. Its only value is to compare current bad numbers to previous and equally bad totals,” argued Tom Philp in a Sacramento Bee column following Newsom’s announcement. Whether or not his numbers were right or wrong, at least Newsom was commenting on outcomes — e.g., the number of homeless people — rather than the state government’s usual fixation on programs and spending. The state still embraces a counterproductive “housing first“ approach that prioritizes the construction of permanent housing for homeless people, rather than providing them with the mental health and addictions services they need to get their lives on a sustainable path. So I’d like to see these mental health programs succeed, as they offer an obvious solution. But if history is a guide, there’s no sense having much optimism that the state government can come close to delivering on its promises. Steven Greenhut is Western region director for the R Street Institute. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org. READ MORE: Maybe the Pension Mess Can Go on Forever Will Congress Keep on Trucking? Trump Touts ‘Housing-Ban’ Buncombe

I try to be fair to people I disagree with. Emmanuel Saez — the famous UC Berkeley economist who’s considered an architect of California’s proposed billionaire wealth tax — is someone I read carefully, even when I find his income-inequality work unconvincing. So, when I say that his arguments for the wealth tax are not just biased or misleading but egregiously wrong, I’m not being careless. I mean it. In a recent debate at Stanford University, Saez offered his central justification (apart from, you know, “billionaires are unfairly rich”): California’s hospitals need it because the federal government cut Medicaid through last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill. As Economic Policy Innovation Center researchers have repeatedly documented, under the Biden administration, Medicaid spending expanded by almost 60 percent, going from roughly $409 billion before the pandemic to $656 billion by 2025. Using the most recent Congressional Budget Office numbers reflecting the OBBB — the supposed instrument of destruction — these researchers now project Medicaid spending to reach $905 billion in 2034. Calling a 38 percent increase between 2024 and 2034 a “cut” is not an honest argument. California’s hospital funding crisis has nothing to do with whether the state adds a billionaire tax. It’s driven by a third-party payment system in which roughly 90 cents of every American health care dollar is paid by someone other than the patient, removing incentives to discipline costs or question whether services are even worth their price. Then there’s a financing structure that rewards expanding the program and punishes restraint. The federal government also happens to cover 90 cents of every dollar spent by states on Affordable Care Act expansion enrollees (including able-bodied adults without dependents). That gives states an irresistible incentive to grow the program, but it doesn’t provide funding at a level that covers the cost of care. California’s leaders have taken the bait, expanded Medi-Cal aggressively and covered populations well beyond the traditional needy Medicaid population. Eager to achieve universal coverage, the state eliminated its asset test, enabling middle-class retirees to qualify for a program designed for the poor. Eligibility was phased in for undocumented immigrants over the last decade. Unfortunately, the program has no comparable mechanism to fund what it has promised. The financial consequences of its growth are now impossible to ignore. Last year, California was $6.2 billion over its Medi-Cal budget. One government report places the cost of covering immigrants without legal status alone as a $10 billion drain from the General Fund — double what the state initially estimated. Advocates for more Medicaid respond by saying the cost overruns prove the program is working and more people are covered. It’s also evidence of a system that will continue to deteriorate fast. Hospitals that are serving growing numbers of Medi-Cal patients and covering the gap between what the program pays and what the care costs will face the same cost pressures after the tax is implemented. So, what did the OBBB actually cut from Medicaid? It closed a financing shell game that states like California had been running for years: taxing Medicaid insurers, reimbursing them for what they paid, and pocketing the federal match based on inflated figures. California alone extracted $19 billion in federal money over three years while contributing essentially nothing of its own. It used those funds, in part, to cover the enrollee extension that’s now blowing a hole in its budget. Taxpayers should be furious. It’s become clear that the revenue math being used by Saez and the wealth-tax crowd is wrong too. Stanford’s Joshua Rauh and several coauthors find that the California wealth tax’s projected revenue is a fantasy. Supporters advertised $100 billion in collections. Building on sound analysis as opposed to wishful thinking, Rauh’s team saw billionaires already leaving and, as a result, other future tax revenues disintegrating. By driving high earners out permanently, the most likely “net present value” of the wealth tax is negative $24.7 billion. Whether politicians and voters want to admit it or not, the real problem is still spending. California’s revenue has surged by 55 percent since 2019, but Sacramento has expanded state spending commitments by 68 percent. It patched budget deficits in three consecutive years ($27 billion, $55 billion, and $15 billion) not by fixing the underlying problem but by drawing down reserves and applying onetime fixes. The Legislative Analyst’s Office now projects a fourth consecutive deficit, this time reaching nearly $18 billion in 2026-27 and growing to $35 billion annually by 2027-28. Medi-Cal alone will hit an all-time high, taking $49 billion from the General Fund. The wealth tax will not save the hospitals. It will not fix Medi-Cal. It will accelerate the departure of a taxpayer base California is already dangerously dependent on. Real fiscal problems require honesty. Contrary to what you are told by eminent economists, this wealth tax isn’t one. Veronique de Rugy is the George Gibbs Chair in Political Economy and a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. To find out more about Veronique de Rugy and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2026 CREATORS.COM

One wonders what Paul Ehrlich thought about his death. He died at the ripe old age of 93 — an achievement he probably considered well-nigh impossible, given that he predicted that, by 1980, the average life expectancy would be less than half of that. At the time of his death, he was surrounded by some 8.3 billion people on this beautiful planet, despite his prediction that the global population would number just 1.5 billion by 1985.  It may have been some solace that cancer — a disease he thought would take the majority of the globe by 1980 — was what eventually killed him. Had Ehrlich spent his life quietly studying butterflies in California, he might have deserved a generous obit. He would be one of those affable professors whom Stanford grads had the good fortune to remember with fondness — apparently his lectures on ecology were rather riveting — and to mourn briefly. But he didn’t.  Instead, he dabbled in apocalyptic predictions of a scientific flavor, about which he was horribly wrong. Ehrlich, of course, was the author of the tiny paperback book that took the world by storm in the 1970s. The Population Bomb claimed, quite simply, that the “battle to feed all of humanity is over.” The globe was vastly overpopulated, and the result would be widespread death in the coming decades. People would starve — so many people that, “by 1985 enough millions will have died to reduce the population to some acceptable level, like 1.5 billion people.”  The timing of the book was perfect. We were coming to the end of the post-war baby boom and humanity had recently been forced to reckon with the potential for its imminent end via atomic war. Ehrlich’s message struck a nerve — one that NBC’s Johnny Carlson recognized when he decided to have the scientist on The Tonight Show more than 20 times.  And yet, more than half a century later, most of us can safely say Ehrlich’s predictions were mistaken (although the New York Times insisted in his obituary this week that they were merely “premature”). Global hunger rates are much lower than they were in the 1970s (today, just one out of every eleven people goes hungry) and the population of the earth is more than double what it was when he published his book. If anything, we’re more concerned about underpopulation, rather than overpopulation. (READ MORE by Aubrey Harris: We Could Be Doing Something About Our Birth Rate Problem. But We Aren’t.) Unfortunately, The Population Bomb wasn’t just an obscure scientific paper with no impact. It sold millions of copies, and its arguments were seized by groups like the International Planned Parenthood Federation, the Population Council, the World Bank, the United Nations Population Fund, and other programs, which threw enormous amounts of funding into making sure babies weren’t born.  In China alone, hundreds of millions of children were aborted when the government coerced their mothers into doing so. In India, proof of sterilization was required to obtain water, electricity, ration cards, medical care, and other basic amenities — a policy that was so successful that, in 1975, “more than eight million men and women were sterilized.” In the Philippines, birth control pills were dropped from helicopters over remote villages. Was Ehrlich really responsible for all this? Maybe not directly, but these kinds of policies didn’t come out of nowhere. They were born in a global intellectual climate shaped by men like Ehrlich who proclaimed that drastic measures were necessary for human flourishing. “Doses of the antidote would be carefully rationed by the government to produce the desired population size,” Ehrlich wrote in The Population Bomb, before dismissing a program of government sterilization as being premature due to lack of research. In 1977, he proposed adding sterilants “to drinking water or staple foods,” and wrote in favor of semi-sterilization, which would “reduce fertility by adjustable amounts, anywhere from 5 to 75 percent, rather than to sterilize the whole population completely.”  If scientific methods wouldn’t work, Ehrlich thought, maybe onerous taxes on cribs and diapers might do the trick.  You’d think that, after we reached the 2000s without any widespread death and destruction, Ehrlich might have seen the error of his ways. After all, the man had predicted that “England would not exist in the year 2000.” Instead, he doubled down. In 2015, he told the New York Times that, while he didn’t think everything in The Population Bomb was perfect, his “language would be even more apocalyptic today,” and in 2018, he assured the Guardian that the collapse of civilization “is a near certainty in the next few decades, and the risk is increasing continually as long as perpetual growth of the human enterprise remains the goal of economic and political systems … As I’ve said many times, ‘perpetual growth is the creed of the cancer cell’.”  And so, Ehrlich doesn’t get a generous obituary willing to overlook his few faults. His legacy wasn’t that he was horribly wrong about his apocalyptic predictions, but that those predictions gave intellectual legitimacy and a “scientific” basis for killing hundreds of millions of innocent babies and the forced sterilization of so many helpless women — facts that never persuaded him to back down on those predictions or his radical political prescriptions. One hopes, for the sake of his soul, that coming face to face with death enlightened him to his errors and that Divine Mercy will consider what ignorance he had of his own influence.  The rest of us ought to wholeheartedly reject his legacy and seek to right its wrongs. READ MORE by Aubrey Harris: New Survey Says Gen Z Men Aren’t Interested in Being Wimps  

This has the internet talking! On Wednesday afternoon, it was disclosed that the White House has purchased two domains that involve aliens. The first domain that was purchased was aliens.gov, and the second was aliens.gov. Take a look: As reporting by Steven Greenstreet: 'The White House and the Executive Office of the President has registered the websites https://t.co/BZK9dh18Kh and https://t.co/vp3nMhvH8d' pic.twitter.com/PI4WlFS2Gq — Christopher Sharp (@ChrisUKSharp) March 18, 2026 Yahoo News reported more on the White House buying the domains: The Executive Office of the President quietly registered the domain aliens.gov on Wednesday, just after 6:30 a.m.—and while the site sits empty for now, the move didn’t go unnoticed. A domain-monitoring bot flagged the registration. No website, no announcement, no explanation. Just a domain. Decrypt has reached out to the White House for comment, and will update this story if we hear anything back. 404 Media first reported on the registration, following the bot flag. The registration comes roughly a month after Trump posted on Truth Social that he would direct the Defense Department and other federal agencies to “begin the process of identifying and releasing” all government files related to alien life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and UFOs. That announcement was itself triggered by something stranger: a podcast clip of Barack Obama saying, offhandedly, that aliens are “real.” Obama later clarified on Instagram that he was talking about statistical probability—the universe is big, life probably exists somewhere—and that he saw zero evidence of extraterrestrials making contact during his presidency. “Really!” he added, as if anticipating the chaos that would follow. Earlier in the year, President Trump chastised Obama for discussing aliens because the information was classified. Take a look: BREAKING: Trump says Obama made a "big mistake" by revealing "classified information" that aliens are real.pic.twitter.com/Dv9UvmxkHa — Polymarket (@Polymarket) February 19, 2026 Here’s what Trump was responding to: Barack Obama on aliens: “They’re real” “But I haven’t seen them. They’re not being kept at Area 51. There’s no underground facility — unless there’s this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the President of the United States.” pic.twitter.com/c6t0DYxewU — UAP James (@UAPJames) February 14, 2026 PBS reported that President Trump previously ordered the Pentagon to release all the files it had on aliens: President Donald Trump said Thursday that he’s directing the Pentagon and other government agencies to identify and release files related to extraterrestrials and UFOs because of “tremendous interest.” Trump made the announcement in a social media post hours after he accused former President Barack Obama of disclosing “classified information” when Obama recently suggested in a podcast interview that aliens were real. Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One, “I don’t know if they’re real or not,” and said of Obama, “I may get him out of trouble by declassifying.” In a post on his social media platform Thursday night, Trump said he was directing government agencies to release files related “to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and any and all other information connected to these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important, matters.” Obama, who made his comments in a podcast appearance over the weekend, later clarified that he had not seen evidence that aliens “have made contact with us,” but said, “statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there.”

'a lot of political messaging'

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