The sky is brown and the dirt is blue.

Gavin Newsom might as well have said that, when he claimed on Sunday that California’s taxes are lower than those in Texas and Florida.

Texas “taxes poor folks more than we tax our richest,” Newsom told the South by Southwest conference in Austin. “… Florida is the other regressive tax state. Your middle class pays more taxes in Texas than our middle class in California.”

What now?

The gov then doubled down on X, writing, “Fox News refuses to report the truth: Texas and Florida are the REAL high-tax states.”

Oh dear.

The Runaway Gov, who’s been on the road pitching himself/his memoir, should return to Earth –– and to Sacramento, where his day job waits.

“This is just a blatant, verifiable falsehood,” Tom Bevan, president of RealClearPolitics, wrote on X of the gov’s tax boast. “Here’s a Wallethub 2025 analysis of the overall tax burden by state.”

That study shows California is the fourth-highest taxed of the 50 states, with Texas ranking 40th and Florida 45th.

So how and why has Newsom dished a whopper?

He’s relying, perhaps, on a 2024 analysis on “tax inequality” by the left-leaning Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

That study dinged red states because low-income taxpayers there can pay a larger percentage of their incomes toward taxes (sales, property, income) than wealthier taxpayers do.

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That doesn’t mean poor and middle-income residents are paying “more taxes” in red states than in California, of course, as Newsom contends.

But the gov’s insistent. Why?

Does he think he can muddy the tax issue, and blunt criticism of the exodus out of California under his watch?

Does he need a distraction from the many crises besetting the Golden State?

Or is this just Newsom, the perpetual self-promotion machine, making constant headlines –– however inane –– to propel his ’28 presidential bid?

It could be he’s desperate to find some favorable comparison between his policies and those of red states, as people flee California in both trickles (billionaires) and streams (everyone else) for friendlier places to live, work, pay taxes and raise families.

Under Newsom, our state has lost at least 200,000 residents just since the 2020 Census, per the Public Policy Institute of California.

Given that reality, the gov’s tax claim “flies in the face of people’s revealed preferences,” as Jared Walczak, a fellow at the DC-based Tax Foundation adroitly put it.

In sum: To sell his record to a skeptical nation, the gov has to invert reality.

So in Gavin Newsom’s world, the sky is brown.