Gov. Gavin Newsom has "failed California horribly," and if he's elected president one day, the United States would be in the same situation, state Rep. Brian Dahle, R-Calif., said on Newsmax on Thursday.
"Come to California if you want to see what America is going to look like and you'll be astonished," the Republican lawmaker told Newsmax's "National Report." "We've spent plenty of money trying to fix the problem, and we're just getting worse."
Newsom, who will debate Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Thursday night, is likely to promote the "California way," which is to spend billions of dollars without solving serious issues facing the state, such as homelessness, Dahle said.
"We spent $20 billion in the last three years on homelessness," Dahle said. "We had 130,000 homeless people in California and now we have 170,000, so we're [at a] 30% increase in homelessness."
That means the state is spending about $23,000 per student in California annually, while spending $42,000 per homeless person, he said.
During Chinese President Xi Jinping's recent visit to San Francisco, Newsom pushed to clear homeless people out of the streets there, but "all he did was just displace those people, wash the streets, and brought in the communist leader of China to share with him what California looks like," said Dahle. "It's really a sad situation here."
Meanwhile, the state spent $18 million to retrofit a San Francisco hotel, spending $250,000 per room to house homeless people, "and that's happening not just in San Francisco but throughout California," the congressman said.
"We need to stop fentanyl from coming across our border," Dahle said. "Republicans have put forth bills to do that in the Assembly and Senate and they've been killed by the governor and the one-party control here in California."
In addition, efforts are needed to ensure that people are not using drugs before they are allowed to live in housing projects, he said.
"We are not helping people get off their addictions and off the streets," said Dahle. "We're enabling them and giving them shelter while they're homeless."
He added that the money being spent on the homeless would be better used in areas that need more resources, such as law enforcement and education, rather than taking it from them and giving it to programs that don't work.
"That's the failure of Gavin Newsom and the California way that he claims is going to lead the nation," said Dahle. "He's trying to run for president. It's a joke."
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