California wants cancer warning labels on coffee cups.

I’m inclined to mock the presiding judge as an incompetent captive of the food phobia conspiracies that infect California, as well as someone who never took a basic statistics course. However, that may be unfair.

The judge may have followed the letter of the law precisely as it was set forth in Proposition 65, which California overwhelmingly passed in 1986. I happened to live in California at the time, and passage of this measure was one reason I left.

Though Prop 65 was well intentioned, it included language that allows legal firms specializing in such lawsuits to extract settlements from companies that sell products with trace elements of potentially carcinogenic compounds.

Critics claim most of the settlements collected under the law go to pay plaintiffs’ attorney fees.

Whatever the judge’s reasoning, labeling coffee as a cancer risk will discourage consumption of the most effective geroprotector available to the average consumer, other than vitamin D3.

It’s also a step backward for biogerontologists who are promoting the concept of geroprotection, or the holistic treatment of aging as a pathology.

Instead, it pushes the obsolete disease-focused medical model into every coffee shop in California.

More than any other state, California needs to adopt a 21^st century medical model that prevents age-related diseases rather than treat their symptoms. The state’s finances are in shambles, and the 22 percent of the population who live below the poverty line depend on an already strained Medi-Cal program.

By the way, one-third of U.S. welfare recipients live in California.

Even worse, one-third of all Californians admitted to a hospital are either prediabetic or have Type 2 diabetes (T2D). That’s twice the rate of any other state, and the cost of treating diabetes in California is approaching $30 billion a year — if it hasn’t already surpassed that level.

The long-term impact of T2D on California’s healthcare costs will be enormous and eventually ruinous. T2D is a precursor to numerous other serious and expensive diseases and presages an explosion in the most expensive of all diseases, Alzheimer’s. In fact, some researchers are now calling Alzheimer’s disease Type 3 diabetes.

California’s budget problems are complicated by the overreliance of the state on tax revenues from the narrow tech sector. If Google and Facebook are hit hard by anti-trust action, due to recent revelations of data misuse, California’s tax base could be seriously degraded.

The new cap on state income tax deductions is already leading to an outflow of taxpayers.