California has the highest, or nearly so, taxes in the country and is still failing these kids. How much higher do Cali taxes need to be to fix the issues that other states can do for cheaper?

It's not an issue of taxation but of efficient governing. There are many examples around the world where high taxation does lead to better public services, the USA is an outlier compared to its developed peers in that.

So now the question is: what are the differences between the US's model of government to its developed peers that creates such failures in governance? It could be the lack of trust in government (which is inherent in America, it's a government for people who historically don't want to be governed); it could be a failure of the two-party system not allowing a plurality of parties to have to agree on issues, becoming a tit-for-tat power play; it could be a general misalignment between the incentives of civil servants putting forth project proposals to be worked on, and politicians to act on those projects (they can be temporarily unpopular which echoes into their party's national sentiment), creating failed projects since they can't be popular and efficient at the same time.

It's easy to blame "the government" without looking deeper into what exactly creates this malfunctioning government in the USA, for the past four decades the only solution is "make it private" and even after four decades of doing that it seems public goods and services only worsened in the USA so it's not looking like it's the solution either.

There's definitely a whole other conversation to be had about which administrations are actually competent, but it's very hard to have that conversation in a two party system when the dominant conversation is still at the "Should the state even provide these services?" stage.

Why not?

He's signalling to the Trump regime this time. "Look I'm not woke now". All it does is make him look like an opportunist that doesn't believe in anything except money. The first mission of any Democrat government should be to break up the internet giants.