Gov. Gavin Newsom punched back at critics of California’s economic climate — and by extension his leadership of it — in a fiery speech to a top state business group Thursday morning, while unveiling a plan to provide more pandemic relief to small business owners.
In a remote address to the California Chamber of Commerce, Newsom announced a proposal to direct an additional $1.5 billion from the state’s record budget surplus to small business COVID-19 relief grants worth up to $25,000, bringing total funding for that program to $4 billion. He proposed over $1 billion more for new tax credits, infrastructure improvements and other efforts to bolster the economy.
But he spent much of the speech defending the Golden State, and himself, from those Newsom called “the haters.”
Facing a recall election, Newsom touted California as a cradle of innovation that is home to some of the world’s biggest and most influential companies — a far cry, in the governor’s telling, from Republicans’ arguments that high taxes, stringent regulations and exorbitant cost of living are driving businesses and people out of the state.
“Don’t believe all those headlines of people that have been trying to take us down for decades,” Newsom said, citing figures showing the state leads in venture capital funding and new start-ups. “Someone described it like hating on the Yankees or something — that’s the attitude people have about California. But with all due respect, we are at a whole other place of opportunity.”
While the recall campaign has largely been driven by frustration over Newsom’s handling of the pandemic, Republicans have also seized on plans from big employers such as Oracle and Hewlett Packard to move jobs out of California, saying it shows the state dominated by Democrats is driving businesses away.
In response to Newsom’s small business grant proposal, California Republican Party Chairwoman Jessica Millan Patterson accused the governor of “prescribing a Band-Aid for a broken leg that he caused,” pointing to high unemployment rates and a massive backlog of claims at the state’s embattled Employment Development Department.
“Gavin Newsom’s job-killing policies devastated small businesses during this pandemic, and now he thinks he can paper over facts with press conferences,” Millan Patterson wrote in a statement. “With Gavin Newsom, it’s always politics first. Small business owners and workers have learned that lesson the hard way.”
With a windfall $75.7 billion surplus to spend, Newsom has turned the rollout of his May budget revision into a weeklong media blitz.
He announced a plan to send stimulus checks to two-thirds of the state’s residents on Monday, new funding for initiatives to address homelessness and clean up highways on Tuesday, and a $20 billion slate of new education initiatives on Wednesday. The full budget revision will be released Friday.
“People want to take cheap shots? Take cheap shots — but we’re going to push back,” Newsom told the Chamber. “People think our best days are behind (us)? You’re full of it. You have no idea what this state represents, and what it’s going to represent to the rest of the world over the course of the next 10 years, 20, 30, 40 years.”
