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POINT OF VIEW - “History records no pity for parties that choose purity over competence, vengeance over vision, pathology over pragmatism. The long night is not coming. It is here…” — LHGrey on X
Done yet? Had enough? Fed up watching one of the most naturally gifted places in America rapidly collapse under the weight of ideology, incompetence, bureaucracy, corruption, illegal immigration, political arrogance, an epidemic of illicit drugs, red tape so thick and dense it makes building near impossible, stifling innovation, and human aesthetics?
Los Angeles is no longer a functioning world-class city. It feels like a city in another country, maybe the Ukraine, where a war was fought, and there is no longer the will or the money to fix obvious problems. But we know there’s plenty of money to fix the problems. The dislocation of money from the solution stems from theft, greed, and political patronage.
And the most infuriating part is that taxpayers are financing the destruction of their own quality of life.
The bills never stop coming. Gas taxes climb. Utility bills climb. Insurance rates explode, if you can even get insurance in an area deemed a fire hazard. Housing costs spiral out of reach. Fees multiply. Parking enforcement becomes predatory. Sales taxes rise. Bond measures stack endlessly on top of one another, while projects never get completed. Every election promises another round of “critical investment,” another emergency tax, another temporary measure that somehow becomes permanent.
Meanwhile, what exactly is improving? The roads are atrocious. Sidewalks are filthy. Streetlights stay broken for months. Entire intersections look abandoned, with stores galore closed. Encampments spread block by block. Open drug use is normalized. Retail theft is embraced as the new normal for equity's sake. Street takeovers erupt across the city while residents sit trapped in traffic, watching masked idiots burn rubber in stolen cars. Sheltering in place is the new norm.
This is not normal urban stress. This is governmental failure on an industrial scale. Los Angeles County alone controls a budget exceeding $45 billion. The City of Los Angeles operates another budget approaching $14 billion. California itself has one of the largest economies on earth, yet it also carries enormous debt obligations, unfunded liabilities, infrastructure failures, and recurring fiscal instability.
The public keeps paying more and getting less. That is the defining reality of modern California governance. People are finally noticing that the deterioration is not random. It is ideological.
For more than two decades, California has effectively operated under one-party rule. During that time, voters were promised compassionate governance, equitable outcomes, environmental leadership, criminal justice reform, housing justice, sustainable urbanism, and endless other politically fashionable theories sold as moral imperatives.
What did residents get? A collapsing middle class. An affordability crisis. Skyrocketing homelessness. Businesses fleeing the state. Declining public trust. Criminals increasingly emboldened. An exodus so large that California will lose Congressional seats. Infrastructure that increasingly resembles that of an undeveloped country despite some of the highest tax burdens in America.
Governor greasy hair the one with presidential aspirations, still speaks as though California is a model for the nation. But millions of residents increasingly experience daily life as an exhausting exercise in overpayment and underperformance. A dystopian hellhole with good weather.
People are tired of hearing campaign slogans and seeing false sincerity, while being fed outright lies as the city visibly deteriorates around them. Watch the recent mayoral debates, and the disconnect becomes impossible to ignore. The public is told that homelessness is improving because “the data” says so, even as residents step over addicts, mentally ill transients, discarded needles, human waste, and burned debris on their way to work or school.
Angelenos are told to ignore what they see with their own eyes and trust bureaucratic metrics instead. That is not leadership. That is gaslighting.
Nithya Raman has now spent years deeply embedded in the homelessness policy apparatus, including chairing the homeless committee, yet the average resident sees conditions worsening, not improving. The public keeps hearing that billions are being spent and progress is occurring somewhere in spreadsheets, dashboards, reports, and consultant presentations.
But where is it physically visible? Where are the safer streets? Where are the restored sidewalks? Where are the functioning public spaces? Where are the mentally ill receiving treatment? Where are the addicts entering recovery?
Encampments are never permanently gone; instead, they're simply relocated block to block in an endless taxpayer-funded shell game. Or they get cleaned up for about 4 hours before they are reinvaded by the same addicts that were just made to move.
Meanwhile, Mayor Karen Bass appears to operate with the political instincts of someone who still cheerleads for Fidel Castro’s disastrous takeover of Cuba. Mayor Basura believes slogans and press conferences can substitute for results. Her administration has presided over fires, encampments, street takeovers, riots, collapsing infrastructure, and visible disorder, yet still speaks in the language of “stakeholders,” “equity,” “engagement,” “inclusion”, and “partnership.” But where are the benefits to the taxpayers?
California’s environmental and energy policies increasingly resemble a war on affordability. Working families are relentlessly squeezed by fuel taxes, ever-increasing sales taxes, the highest state income tax, burdensome regulatory costs, utility mandates, development restrictions, insurance instability, and endless climate compliance schemes that elites can absorb easily but ordinary residents cannot.
Sacramento politicians lecture struggling residents about sustainability, while many Californians have no sustainability and live hand-to-mouth.
The state’s roads are another perfect symbol of the scam. Californians pay the highest fuel taxes in the country, supposedly to maintain infrastructure, yet drivers routinely navigate cratered pavement, broken asphalt, potholes, cracked concrete, and unfinished repairs. Cars bounce violently through intersections as state leaders continue to demand more transportation revenue for infrastructure that we all know will never be fixed. And the current Governor, Gavin, the worst, cannot even for a minute reduce gasoline taxes while people have to choose between going hungry and filling up their tanks.
Where did the money go? That question now hangs over almost every aspect of California governance. Because taxpayers look around and increasingly conclude that enormous sums are being consumed by administrative overhead, political patronage, nonprofit contracting systems, consultants, studies, commissions, and ideological projects that never produce measurable improvements in ordinary life. Failure is not punished. Failure is funded, lauded, and declared progress.
That may be the darkest part of California’s trajectory: the normalization of decline. Residents now casually discuss issues that would have sparked political revolts twenty years ago. Children walking past encampments on their way to school. Smash-and-grab robberies. Violent, mentally ill transients are threatening pedestrians. Massive retail theft. Entire intersections are seized for street takeovers. Fire hazards spreading through dense neighborhoods. Utility costs are becoming unaffordable. Families are leaving the state because they simply cannot survive economically anymore.
And yet the same politicians remain in power. The same ideological assumptions remain dominant. The same bureaucracies continue expanding. The same failed policies continue receiving more funding. Why? California voters are not that stupid. This begs questions and answers that the MSM and polite company do not want to discuss.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the homelessness-industrial complex. Los Angeles reportedly now spends more on homelessness than the entire LAFD budget. Enormous emergency-response resources are consumed dealing with encampment fires alone. Yet despite this spending, the visible humanitarian catastrophe continues.
Why? Because too many incentives are now aligned with prolonging the crisis rather than solving it. Entire nonprofit ecosystems, political careers, consulting firms, activist organizations, and public agencies depend financially and institutionally on the persistence of the problem. A permanent crisis justifies permanent funding and a new Mercedes every two years.
Meanwhile, ordinary residents pay the price in diminished safety, collapsing public spaces, declining property values, overwhelmed emergency services, and deteriorating civic morale.
For years, Californians were told that reducing enforcement, weakening prosecution, lowering bail standards, and reframing criminality primarily as a social condition would somehow produce a more humane society. Instead, many residents experienced exactly what common sense predicted: reduced deterrence, emboldened offenders, demoralized police, and declining public order.
Public safety matters. Civilization requires consequences. A functioning city cannot survive if large portions of the population conclude that laws are optional.
Yet instead of acknowledging the obvious failures, many political leaders continue to double down. The Los Angeles City Council recently proposed limiting traffic stops under the banner of equity and reform, even as residents already feel policing has become dangerously constrained.
At some point, voters must ask whether Democratic Socialist doctrines have entirely displaced reality. Because the current trajectory is unsustainable economically, socially, and psychologically. Residents increasingly experience Los Angeles as an expensive, chaotic, hostile, and exhausting gauntlet, the antithesis of prosperity and human flourishing.
And perhaps the greatest outrage is that this decline was not inevitable. It was probably not chosen by voters who only received the old switcheroo. Chosen through a policy that ignored public input and common sense. Chosen through dogma, the antithesis of mainstream desires. Chosen through decades of prioritizing theory over outcomes, bureaucracy over execution, and political virtue over practical governance.
The public was told compassion meant tolerating disorder. The public was told that good environmental stewardship required unaffordable energy. The public was told that public safety concerns were exaggerated. The public was told endless spending would eventually solve homelessness. The public was told the experts knew best.
And after decades of this experiment, many Californians are looking around and asking a very simple question: Are we done yet? Can we stop funding failure? Why are we rewarding incompetence? Are we done subsidizing bureaucracies that cannot perform basic civic functions? Are we done pretending visible decline is progress? Have we had enough of electing leaders who endlessly explain problems, say "trust me," but never intend to solve them?
Given this track record of mal-governance, not one incumbent should be reelected. Prove me wrong!
(Eliot Cohen is a longtime civic advocate who has served on the Neighborhood Council, the Van Nuys Airport Citizens Advisory Council, and the Board of Homeowners of Encino, where he was president of HOME for over seven years. A retired Wall Street executive with a 35-year career, Eliot brings a sharp eye to local governance. He critiques the bureaucratic missteps of City, County, and State officials. Eliot and his wife split their time between Los Angeles and Baja Norte, Mexico.)
