We were the first voices to make this point just over a week ago originally in the Hotline and our analysis has now gone viral everywhere. It’s been picked up by Fox, Fox Business, the White House, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, and now even CNN.
Our message was pretty simple: Whatever it is – electricity, gasoline, rent, taxes – the costs are more burdensome in blue states.
Nine of the 10 highest cost states are run by the Left. So how can they solve the problem THEY created?
Last week, left-wing Washington Post columnist Fareed Zakaria opened his CNN show by repeating our riff that “if America has an affordability crisis, it tends to be in places Democrats govern, like New York, Illinois, and California, which all feature high taxes, soaring housing costs and stagnant outcomes.”
New York state mirrors the city. Its spending has risen from roughly $70 billion in 2000 to more than $230 billion today, about twice Florida’s budget even though Florida has several million more residents. When voters see that record, they conclude, not unreasonably, that more money is not the answer.
Yet Democrats’ instinctive response to every problem remains the same — spend more. The truth is that local government in the U.S. is already living on borrowed time. For decades, states and cities have traded short-term political harmony for long-term fiscal ruin. To keep peace with powerful public sector unions, they promise ever more lavish pensions and benefits, then quietly defer the bill to future taxpayers.
Across America these obligations act like slow motion fiscal time bombs. Invisible for now, but guaranteed to explode.
Meanwhile, daily governance suffers. In too many Democratic strongholds regulation has metastasized into paralysis. Housing is unaffordable because local zoning codes and environmental reviews, rent control and union carve-outs make construction painfully slow and expensive.
California has spent $24 billion on homelessness over five years, yet the problem has only worsened. More is spent per mile on subway construction in New York than in any other city on earth. Each new initiative layers another bureaucracy atop the last.
Here’s our more thorough analysis of the blue state out of control costs:
