When those the age of my parents bought houses in California in the late 1950s, it cost about $110,000 in today's money. Now the average is 700 percent more. In the early 2000s, health care was not cheap but if you didn't like the health care plan at your job, you could buy your own for a few hundred dollars per month. Since 2012, health care premiums have gone up 300 percent but access is now equal - equally bad. The list goes on.
Government says all the new taxes, regulations, fees, and bureaucracy are needed to solve things like the homeless problem - except 50 years ago, there were few homeless people because 'flophouses' existed. Government regulated them out by insisting they all have hot water. Mental hospitals were scuttled by government to where we are now back in the world of the early 1800s, where prisons are the mental hospitals.
Young people can't buy a house, they feel like they have to take a job they may hate for the health care they are required by law to have, because at age 26 government considers them adults. Now the high energy costs poor people need to have to subsidize solar panels for the rich are delivering another punch - cars that government is mandating are unaffordable. Many young people never expect to me able to own a new one.
There is no evidence any of this is improving public health or even the environment. The same environmentalists that lobbied for hydroelectric, natural gas, and biofuels turned on them the moment they became government policy - because lawsuits are where the money exists. They will turn on electric cars soon, while blindly ignoring the devastation that mining and energy use to manufacture an electrc car entails. There is no point in suing when something is only a tiny fraction of the market.
Populist rhetoric blames cars and dealers, but that is government too. The federal government is mandating high-priced electric cars so not only is there no free market incentive for those or conventional automobiles, there is a penalty. California and a dozen other states get an exemption from EPA standards so they can make their own special one, which has helped nothing but made cars more expensive. California mandates its own fuel blend and then politicians publicly criticize oil companies for charging more - and then privately has dinner with them.
It's the same old politics, but let's not pretend any of it is based on science.
