Somehow I missed “Why is liberal California the poverty capital of America?” (LA Times, January 14, 2018) until now. My California friends are always heaping scorn on the rest of the nation (“stupid” is the most common adjective applied to non-Californians). California has always been a poster child for technocratic government and collecting the best American minds into top-down bureaucracies to get stuff done. What’s the result, according to the article?
Guess which state has the highest poverty rate in the country? Not Mississippi, New Mexico, or West Virginia, but California, where nearly one out of five residents is poor. That’s according to the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure, which factors in the cost of housing, food, utilities and clothing, and which includes noncash government assistance as a form of income.
California state and local governments spent nearly $958 billion from 1992 through 2015 on public welfare programs, including cash-assistance payments, vendor payments and “other public welfare,” according to the Census Bureau. California, with 12% of the American population, is home today to about one in three of the nation’s welfare recipients.
Maybe there are some statistical issues here? California has a lot of immigrants and immigrants are usually eligible for welfare:
55% of immigrant families in the state get some kind of means-tested benefits, compared with just 30% of natives.
Also, I wonder if these numbers accurately factor in the market value of the free housing provided to California welfare recipients. If you live rent-free in an apartment in San Francisco or Berkeley that would sell for $1 million on the open market, are you “poor”? Maybe your consumption of resources is unbalanced, but you’re certainly consuming a lot.
But the problem may be solved soon by revised central planning:
Looking to help poor and low-income residents, California lawmakers recently passed a measure raising the minimum wage from $10 an hour to $15 an hour by 2022 — but a higher minimum wage will do nothing for the 60% of Californians who live in poverty and don’t have jobs.
I’m not sure it is interesting that Californians are good at collecting welfare. I do think it is interesting that Californians maintain their “everyone else is stupid” attitude when they put up such high “percentage living in poverty” numbers. If the folks running the government in California for the past decades are smart, committed to equality, and backed by enormous sources of taxpayer-derived cash, why are there any poor people at all in California?
Related:
- War on poverty hasn;t been given a fair chance?
- Visit to Berkeley, California (2010): “For roughly 60 years, Berkeley has offered more services to its residents than virtually any other city in the U.S. The schools are expensively funded. Welfare programs have been lavish. People can borrow a full set of tools from the public library. There is a non-profit organization on every block. Yet Berkeley has a poverty rate of 21 percent, higher than the state average of 12 percent (source). The school system tracks student performance by race and ethnicity so that they can reveal to local employers that “white students are doing far better than the state average while black and Latino students are doing worse” (source). Anywhere else in the country one would be considered a vicious racist for claiming that black and Latino high school students are intellectually inferior to white and Asian students, but in Berkeley broadcasting this information marks one as a concerned humanitarian. Sixty years of failure had not daunted any of the East Bayers with whom I spoke; all were in favor of even bigger and more expensive government.”
California has so many people in poverty because the weather is nice so the homeless can stay outside and not FREEZE to death. Plus they get great benefits for doing nothing so why leave or go to work. And the other issue is housing has become so expensive that the working poor cannot find rentals at prices they can afford. So many working people are now living out of a old car or old mobile home. So lots of poverty. Same thing is happening in Hawaii…..
https://voiceofoc.org/2017/08/mission-viejo-toughening-its-homeless-anti-camping-ordinance/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jun/29/low-income-workers-rvs-palo-alto-california-homeless
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2018/02/13/judge-visit-homeless-camp-california/334780002/
https://www.wsj.com/articles/jerry-browns-legacy-a-6-1-billion-budget-surplus-in-california-1515624022
LOS ANGELES—California Gov. Jerry Brown appears poised to exit office next year with a top political priority in hand: free from the massive budget deficits that had weighed on his predecessors.
Buoyed by tax increases passed under his administration and a strong economy, Mr. Brown said Wednesday that the state is projecting a $6.1 billion surplus for the next fiscal year, which begins July 1.
Oh and Berkeley is so poor because all those old shipping warehouses from the 1940s are still there but vacant and run down. There is just lots of bad old buildings there that have never been razed. So many of them are used as illegal housing and homeless camps and drug dens and so forth. So good almost free housing for the poor where the weather is not too cold or too hot.
Yet a lot of Berkeley single family housing is set up against the hills and on the mountain tops so they are nice but expensive. So lots of medium to rich people live there as well.
And yes the liberal city council and California crazy laws prohibits much redevelopment of this old stuff. So the owners make use of this old stuff the only way available. But I am not sure the liberal benefits are much of the issue. San Jose has similar issues.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/06/20/san-jose-advocates-say-wall-to-keep-homeless-from-campsite-is-no-solution/
https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/06/30/san-jose-huge-surge-in-homeless-silicon-valley-youth/
Unbridled compassion is the highest form of cruelty. When being a failure and a bum qualifies you for free shit, failures and bums will want to stay failures and bums to continue to get free shit. When being successful is penalized with exorbitant taxes and scorn, the successful tends to want to go be successful someplace else. Therefore, pumping a city full of free shit guarantees that it stays a shit hole. What’s so difficult to understand about that?
Can people legally translocate from state to state? If that is the case, what is stopping homeless person X to move from X state to California, for the simple reasons that California offers more support, better weather and far more intelligent people (allegedly)?
@Federico
In the USA people are free to travel anywhere and live anywhere. I think the only concern for a new resident is having to change one’s driver license and license plates.
To my surprise, in the Old World, the European Union citizens must register with the local authorities about their place of residence when they move in. They must also deregister when they move out.
@Dwight Looi – “failures and bums will want to stay failures and bums to continue to get free shit” – sounds like you don’t have much real world experience with (or compassion for) homelessness or those at the bottom rungs of society.
It rarely, if ever, is a “choice” or simply due to laziness. The overwhelming majority of homeless and truly impoverished have some mitigating circumstance, such as mental illness, PTSD, substance abuse or some combination thereof.
Easy to criticize, a bit harder to actually try to objectively consider what got these people into their situation, and how we as a society might best help them.
as always the major problem is rent control and government price controls. I saw if you are tired of cockroaches stop putting out more food. But Gov. moonbeam won’t listen.
The vast majority of long term homeless people busy begging and pooping on our streets would have been in the loonybin 50 years ago. Involuntary committed for psychiatric treatment. Time to bring it back. The pendulum had swung a bit far, when they were lobotomizing and ECT shocking merely extreme eccentrics. But it’s clearly time for the pendulum to swing back. No, you don’t get to poop on the sidewalks because you mostly like to do drugs every day. You go to the loonybin until you demonstrate intention to not do that anymore. No courts.
In part due to beggar-thy-neighbor antics like these:
http://www.sacbee.com/news/investigations/nevada-patient-busing/article2577189.html
California has a gubernatorial candidate who shares your dislike of liberal hypocrisy. Will be interesting to see how his campaign goes.
https://mobile.twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD/status/969981239733047297?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet
The author of that article is part of the Pacific Research Institute, which is funded by ALEC, Koch Brothers, etc. You don’t suppose he has a bone to pick, do you?
Californians will often say the source of the homeless issue is other states – whether by busing or just by being a more comfortable state to be homeless. If free interstate immigration has made CA the most poverty afflicted state in the country, that should be a warning to what free international immigration can do to the position of the US in the world.
“Nearly 70% of the state’s projected revenue of about $135 billion next fiscal year is derived from personal income taxes, according to the governor’s office.”
Interesting. I wonder how many pay no income taxes…
I guess this goes straight to moderation, but … enjoy!
Riding through the Homeless Camps in Anaheim California on the Santa Ana River Trail
Orange County California Homeless 2017
Skid Row Downtown Los Angeles Christmas Day 2017
Fast Tour: From Mission District Homeless Camps through Mission Dolores; San Francisco, California (not as bad, I’d say)