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.”
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