Newsom to Struggling Parents: ‘Forget Rent and Groceries—Here’s a Box of Overpriced State Diapers’
Drew Allen
• May 11, 2026
(Left to right) Elizabeth Landsberg, Kim Johnson, Gavin Newsom, Kelly Sawyer Patricof, and Norah Weinstein fill diaper boxes at the Baby2Baby x Golden State Start event at Children’s Creativity Museum on May 8, 2026, in San Francisco. (Miikka Skaffari/Getty Images for Baby2Baby)
California is the most unaffordable state in the union, where the cost of living is a punishing 11 percent above the national average. Rents for an ordinary two-bedroom apartment average $2,200–$2,700 monthly statewide. Gas prices flirt with $6.16 per gallon—the highest in the nation—while electricity rates hover at 33–35 cents per kilowatt-hour, nearly double the U.S. average.
Factor in groceries, childcare, and health care, and the result is California’s shameful status as the state with the highest cost-of-living-adjusted poverty rate in the country and a homelessness crisis with more than 180,000 people living on the streets.
Families are fleeing in droves, packing up U-Haul trucks, and heading for cheaper lives in Texas, Nevada, and Arizona. This disaster, of course, is entirely of Sacramento’s own making.
Yet, faced with these crushing realities, California Gov. Gavin Newsom has chosen to ride to the rescue with 400 free diapers at hospital discharge—his big and bold idea that will surely turn the tide and save California.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2026/05/11/newsom-box-of-overpriced-state-diapers/
