Is deep blue California earning itself a new title of distinction as the nation's pestilence capital?

Starting to look like it, given the latest news of a typhus outbreak among 64 of the homeless in Los Angeles County, according to The Guardian:

Los Angeles officials have pledged hundreds of thousands of dollars and created a dedicated taskforce to fight an outbreak of typhus, as a city of glittering wealth grapples with a disease linked to intense poverty.

"We're deploying every available resource to help control and stop this outbreak," said Alex Comisar, press secretary for Los Angeles's mayor, Eric Garcetti.

Many of those resources have focused on the city's large homeless population, considered most at risk for contracting the flea-borne illness.

The news follows San Diego County's sub-distinction as the nation's hepatitis capital, again a product of its homeless population, killing 20 and infecting 600, which was reported last year here.  Apparently there have been more cases since the press claimed they got it all cleaned up here.  Here's another news account:

A newly detected hepatitis A case prompted a public warning from the county health department Friday.

Health and Human Services Agency officials recommend vaccination for anyone who lived at the Volunteers of America Renaissance Treatment Center in National City from June 19 through June 21 because a client who was at the facility on those dates recently tested positive for the viral infection that can damage the liver if left untreated.

Then there's San Francisco, a city so covered in the excrement of homelessness it has 16,000 feces-related complaints from the public, complete with suitcases and trash bags full of excrement decorating its city streets, that the city now employs "poop patrols" as its solution to the problem.  It has undoubtedly created massive public health problems in the closely packed, densely populated city, things city officials don't talk about.  As American Thinker contributor Lee DeCovnick wrote yesterday, it's so gross in that city that "it'll make you cry."

It didn't use to be this bad in California.  The economy is Trumpian, so it's not the economy – California, after all, does have a 4.1% unemployment rate, not as good as the rest of the country, but certainly a figure the Obama economy could only dream of.

But it also didn't use to be this blue a state, and it's quite likely there's a connection.

Lefty governments have long had permissive policies toward homelessness and illegal immigration, culminating in the naming of all the top cities as sanctuary cities.  They've also failed to do anything to end homelessness other than throw money at the problem.  The dynamics have been simple: more homelessness, more bureaucrats to "serve" them, and more bureaucrats always create a bigger, more powerful, and less accountable state.  So homelessness, like illegal immigration, is de facto encouraged, because the state benefits.

Instead of instituting vagrancy laws, or institutionalizing people with long-term drug problems, at a minimum, just getting them off the street, the state feeds them by feeding more bureaucrats.  As economist Thomas Sowell has noted: you can have all the poverty you'd like to pay for.

The Californians are paying a lot now, and the evidence of it is in the pestilence that's growing.  There have even been stray reports of cholera, which is right in there with the other types of pestilence never seen in the state until Democrats took over.

The bottom line is that Democrats have no interest in ending homelessness except if they can benefit from it.  That's why money-shoveling is trumping the public's need for public health.  Living homeless goes hand in hand with pestilence, and it's no way for anyone to live.  But until the state puts an actual stop to it, regardless of the feelings of the homeless themselves, it's just going to get more intolerable.  Waiting for the next pestilence in the meantime.