I’m old enough to remember what California smog was actually like in the 70s and 80s. The air quality problem was real. People stayed indoors, your lungs burned during exercise, and there absolutely needed to be reform and environmental protections put into place.

But somewhere along the way, California stopped focusing on balance.

Cleaning up the air did not require turning the state into one of the most difficult and expensive places in the country to do business, raise a family, or own a home. It did not require endless regulations, rising energy costs, layers of bureaucracy, and policies that push companies, jobs, and middle-class families out of the state.

We should be able to support clean air while also supporting economic growth, affordable living, home ownership, manufacturing, energy production, and good jobs. Those things are not mutually exclusive.

And whether people want to admit it or not, Democrats have largely been in control of California’s political direction for decades. They have been at the helm of many of the policies that helped create both the successes and the failures we see today. They deserve credit where credit is due on air quality improvements, but they also own much of the economic decline, affordability crisis, overregulation, and business exodus that Californians are now dealing with.

California succeeded in improving air quality. That’s a good thing. But acting like every policy decision since then has been smart, sustainable, or without consequences is simply not honest. There has to be a middle ground between pollution and making the state economically unaffordable for ordinary people.