Once again, 500,000 students couldn't go to school due to a teacher's strike. Teachers are government employees, at least 40 percent and over 50 percent (if you count colleges) of the state budget goes toward education, but a lot of that has nothing to do with teachers. Much of the $129 billion is everything except education, it is nebulous state programs like $250,000,000 to "improve the quality of reading for students" which, like a 2014 voter mandate to add water storage, means years and years of proposals with little being done. 

A year after Governor Newsom bragged during his re-election campaign that his progressive policies were Making California Great Again, he says there is no money for teachers, but there is money for new government agencies.

Instead of dealing with his education problem, he decided to try again to penalize energy companies, blaming them for the nation's highest prices - while leaving out that taxes, fees, and regulations are why California consumers pay among the highest prices, not "gouging" by companies. Companies are forced to create a special blend in order to be sold in California. It does nothing for the environment, and companies know this is just politics, they pass along the costs.

Sure, if costs are higher and the margin remains the same, that is more profit, but the number one price gouger in that case is not Exxon, it is California. California has refused to budge on its onerous taxes and the taxes cost more than the oil. His flat tax on gasoline and energy is why he was able to brag his progressive efforts were a success, but now he is saying that teachers can't get a raise. And that energy companies are the problem, not his engineering a mass exodus from the state, an entire Congressional seat.

To make them pay, he is eating up even more of the California budget that he won't put toward education. His newest plan - his original was so unworkable that his own government, usually as unwilling to defy him as Vlad Putin's in Russia, balked - is to create a new "watchdog" agency. His constituents love anything that sounds anti-business, and lawyers sending subpoenas, and accountants sifting through refinery data to determine if the market has created a price the state agency does not like. When it happens - and it is going to happen, that is the mandate of the agency - the Attorney General will sue and the state will say they stuck it to energy companies.

Except they won't stick it to energy companies, the same companies that provide 80 percent of California's energy. The settlement costs will be passed along to the consumers Governor Newsom says he is protecting.