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- Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash The term “grifter” gets thrown around an awful lot, often as an insult for anyone who makes money expressing opinions, but has a different opinion from me. The truth is, there’s a lot more to grifting than that, and we’d do well not to misuse this word like we have so many others, like “racist” and “fascist.”
But grifting is a real thing, and the truth is that we have a prime example of what it looks like thanks to Gov. Gavin Newsom of California.
Shocking, I know.
Tilting At Windmills is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. See, there’s an issue that Newsom says he wants to resolve. Having babies is expensive, and diapers are part of that cost. No one wants to go back to cloth diapers, for obvious reasons, so that means parents have to spend a lot of money on disposable diapers, which takes money that some just don’t have.
Newsom says he wants to help these parents, so he’s kicked off a program that will provide free diapers.
Sounds good, right?
Wrong, because there’s a grift built in there. From the New York Post :
The founder of an organic baby formula company has branded Gavin Newsom’s plan to offer free diapers to all new babies born in the state as “grifting nonsense.”
Newsom announced the Golden State Start initiative on Friday, a partnership with nonprofit Baby2Baby that will give every newborn delivered in participating hospitals 400 diapers for free.
But the program has come under fire for using $7.4 million in taxpayers’ cash from the 2025-2026 budget, as well as seeking an additional $12.5 million for the next year.
Peter Basios argued it would be cheaper to hand “every low-income new mom $100 cash and told her to go to Costco” than have the state pay 50 cents per diaper.
“100,000 babies × 400 diapers = 40 million diapers,” Basios explained on X . “$20,000,000 ÷ 40,000,000 = $0.50 per diaper. Now walk into any Costco in California and you can buy the same quality diapers for .12 to .15 cents each!”
Bingo.
Plus, it seems that Kelly Sawyer, who runs Baby 2 Baby, is married to one of the Democrats’ top donors and campaign bundlers in the state. In other words, the woman who runs the NGO that will benefit from this state-issued largess just happens to be someone with close ties to the governor and his political party.
Rather than, say, provide a bunch of diapers at various hospitals that they can hand out to parents, or simply handing them a card that can only be used on diapers, and only for a set amount of them, he’s funneling all of that money toward the wife of a key supporter.
Not everyone is going to be able to go to Costco to get diapers, sure, but at least giving them the voucher or something like that would let people get them as they shop and minimize the expense of the program.
But no.
See, the reason Basios says this is grifting is that, well, it’s grifting. Newsom isn’t profiting off of it, sure, but his buddy’s wife is reaping the benefits. Those might or might not make it back in Newsom’s campaign coffers (read: pockets), but it doesn’t really matter. This is taxpayer money, and while I don’t particularly like taxpayer money being handed out as a general rule, if you’re going to do this, a responsible lawmaker would try to do it as cheaply as possible.
Why? Because then there’s more money to help those you say you want to help, if for no other reason.
That’s not what’s happening here. Newsom is going through a third-party to do this thing, handle it in a particular way, wherein they’ll take a cut of the funding—they have to in order to pay for the people who will run the program—and then provide diapers at a cost far higher than what the diapers should cost.
Then, when the money runs out, there won’t be calls from Newsom or his allies about how they need to reduce the costs somehow so the money can do more good. It’ll just be about shoveling more money into Baby 2 Baby.
There wasn’t even a “bid” process that I can see, which means it was always about paying this particular non-profit to handle this. That alone looks shady as hell.
And this is nothing new.
Over and over again, this is how politicians seem to reward their buddies, all while pretending they’re trying to do good for the communities they serve. Nothing about this is about benefitting those in need. They could provide about 1,600 diapers, at least, for the cost of the 400 they’re giving out, if they didn’t have to cover Baby 2 Baby’s overhead.
And no matter how much they try, it’ll always look like a payout to a major source of campaign money for Democrats.
Over the weekend, I decided that I didn’t like the tone of my content. I want to make the world better, and you can’t do that just by criticizing the other side, even if they truly deserve it. I want to be more positive and really just try to make life better for my fellow man, and I believe that free markets and less government intrusion into people’s lives are better for everyone. I think liberty is the winning strategy in that regard.
But I get that the left thinks otherwise. They think taxpayer money can and should be used for the public good. While I disagree, I also understand why many feel that way.
Yet it seems to me that we should all be on the same page when it comes to taxpayer money being used in such a way that it looks like a kickback to a donor, provides a service that won’t actually make a massive difference—any parent can tell you that 400 diapers won’t last long—and does so at a higher price tag than just handing the money to the mothers in the first place. Share Can’t we see eye-to-eye on that?
If not, then I don’t know that there’s any hope for a peaceful co-existence left. I didn’t figure there was, but I’d like to let my inherent optimism actually be right for once. So far, though, I’m not seeing many signs of it
That’s a shame, because I still hope to find a way to make the world, or at least some people’s lives, much better, and things like civil wars would make that almost impossible, but here we are.
Newsom needs to be pulled up short on this, if for no other reason than just how shady it looks.
Wanting to help is noble. Wanting to use taxpayer money to do so is less so, but using taxpayer money in a way that clearly benefits an ally, fleeces the taxpayer to do so, and does almost nothing for the people it’s supposed to help is anything but.
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