Good day all. Recently, representative Dickless Turban accused President Trump of calling Haiti a shithole. This set off the usual suspects. However, it looks like, as usual, Durbin the Turban lied about what was actually said.
The other problem for the Progressives and Uniparty types is that most of America and a fair number of Haitians agree. Haiti is a shithole. I’m not going into that debate, I’m going to discuss an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times titled, “Why is liberal California the poverty capital of America?” The title is the standard politically correct way of the LA Times asking “Why is California a shithole?”
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.
Oh, I know the answer, and anyone with the capacity for logical thought knows it as well, but lets see what the LA Times comes up with for an answer. First, the Times throws some numbers out there showing how much has been spent “Helping the poor” remain poor.
It’s not as though California policymakers have neglected to wage war on poverty. Sacramento and local governments have spent massive amounts in the cause. Several state and municipal benefit programs overlap with one another; in some cases, individuals with incomes 200% above the poverty line receive benefits. 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.
That’s a lot of money and it has achieved…nothing.
The generous spending, then, has not only failed to decrease poverty; it actually seems to have made it worse.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, some states — principally Wisconsin, Michigan, and Virginia — initiated welfare reform, as did the federal government under President Clinton and a Republican Congress. Tied together by a common thread of strong work requirements, these overhauls were a big success: Welfare rolls plummeted and millions of former aid recipients entered the labor force.
Funny how that worked out, isn’t it? Make people actually earn the money instead of sending them a check each month. Pity California didn’t go that route.
The state and local bureaucracies that implement California’s antipoverty programs, however, resisted pro-work reforms. In fact, California recipients of state aid receive a disproportionately large share of it in no-strings-attached cash disbursements. It’s as though welfare reform passed California by, leaving a dependency trap in place. Immigrants are falling into it: 55% of immigrant families in the state get some kind of means-tested benefits, compared with just 30% of natives.
An aside here. When I went through the immigration process to bring the former Mrs. Webmaster to the United States, one of the things I had to agree to was that she would not be a burden on the United States taxpayer. In other words, she wouldn’t get any welfare. Would someone please explain to me how more then half the immigrant families in California are on the dole? My second question is even more relevant. How many of them are actually in the United States legally?
Self-interest in the social-services community may be at fault. As economist William A. Niskanen explained back in 1971, public agencies seek to maximize their budgets, through which they acquire increased power, status, comfort and security. To keep growing its budget, and hence its power, a welfare bureaucracy has an incentive to expand its “customer” base. With 883,000 full-time-equivalent state and local employees in 2014, California has an enormous bureaucracy. Many work in social services, and many would lose their jobs if the typical welfare client were to move off the welfare rolls.
One of the problems with all this bureaucratic empire building in California is their pension system. It’s collapsing. The unfunded liability is massive and they also have a problem with Progressives wanting to use it for political purposes. The California pension system invests it’s funds in ways that are supposed to generate the maximum return possible with the smallest amount of risk.
The Social Justice Warriors would rather use that system to make political points. The results? Eventually, the money will run out. I won’t eve bother going into just how gold plated the whole government pension system is.
Further contributing to the poverty problem is California’s housing crisis. More than four in 10 households spent more than 30% of their income on housing in 2015. A shortage of available units has driven prices ever higher, far above income increases. And that shortage is a direct outgrowth of misguided policies.
“Counties and local governments have imposed restrictive land-use regulations that drove up the price of land and dwellings,” explains analyst Wendell Cox. “Middle-income households have been forced to accept lower standards of living while the less fortunate have been driven into poverty by the high cost of housing.” The California Environmental Quality Act, passed in 1971, is one example; it can add $1 million to the cost of completing a housing development, says Todd Williams, an Oakland attorney who chairs the Wendel Rosen Black & Dean land-use group. CEQA costs have been known to shut down entire homebuilding projects. CEQA reform would help increase housing supply, but there’s no real movement to change the law.
Of course not. In the socialist workers paradise that California is becoming, people owning property is a bad thing. The California housing shortages and the resulting ridiculously high prices are a direct result of Progressives policies. There used to be a joke that a listing for a house as a “Fixer upper” usually meant you were spending a million dollars for a concrete slab and a stack of lumber. People don’t find that funny anymore. Then we have the notorious California energy costs.
Extensive environmental regulations aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions make energy more expensive, also hurting the poor. By some estimates, California energy costs are as much as 50% higher than the national average. Jonathan A. Lesser of Continental Economics, author of a 2015 Manhattan Institute study, “Less Carbon, Higher Prices,” found that “in 2012, nearly 1 million California households faced … energy expenditures exceeding 10% of household income. In certain California counties, the rate of energy poverty was as high as 15% of all households.” A Pacific Research Institute study by Wayne Winegarden found that the rate could exceed 17% of median income in some areas.
It gets worse. Thanks to California’s idiocy, refineries find it easier to manufacture fuels that meet California standards and then force the other regions to use it. Those fuel standards raise the costs of manufacturing fuel for actual little gain. But it makes the Progressives feel good that they are doing something.
The next great progressive idea was raising the minimum wage to $15 dollars an hour. The results have gone about as you would expect. Businesses close to the margin either closed their doors or laid off workers and automated as much as they could. The Progressives, most of whom have never held a real job in their lives, never mind made a payroll, see businesses as nothing more then piggy banks that they can raid. It shocks them when these same businesses either close down or lay off workers to cut costs mandated by the ever so caring Progressive Social Justice Warriors. The results? Higher unemployment and more poverty.
Then we have all the Moonbat projects that the Progressives waste money on, such as Governor Brown’s personal full scale model train set. The High Speed rail debacle, and that’s all it can be called, went over-budget 10 minutes after approvals to build it were completed. Federal funding is, the last time I bothered to look, gone. This hasn’t stopped Governor Choo Choo and the moonbats.
Apparently content with futile poverty policies, Sacramento lawmakers can turn their attention to what historian Victor Davis Hanson aptly describes as a fixation on “remaking the world.”
The political class wants to build a costly and needless high-speed rail system; talks of secession from a United States presided over by Donald Trump; hired former attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr. to “resist” Trump’s agenda; enacted the first state-level cap-and-trade regime; established California as a “sanctuary state” for illegal immigrants; banned plastic bags, threatening the jobs of thousands of workers involved in their manufacture; and is consumed by its dedication to “California values.”
“California Values” can be summed up rather simply. “All for one and I’m the one!” California is a shining example of what happens when narcissistic Progressives who spent their formative years sucking on a crack pipe manage to get into positions of power. They take the goose that lays the golden eggs, release it so that it can “Run free!” and then wonder what happened when all the gold eggs they had been counting on stop appearing in the goose’s old nest. As for the goose? She’s moved to Arizona or Texas and is laying more gold eggs then ever before, all the while, enjoying some BBQ.
All this only reinforces the rest of America’s perception of an out-of-touch Left Coast, to the disservice of millions of Californians whose values are more traditional, including many of the state’s poor residents.
With a permanent majority in the state Senate and the Assembly, a prolonged dominance in the executive branch and a weak opposition, California Democrats have long been free to indulge blue-state ideology while paying little or no political price. The state’s poverty problem is unlikely to improve while policymakers remain unwilling to unleash the engines of economic prosperity that drove California to its golden years.
It’s to late for California. The state is dead, it just hasn’t fallen over yet. After President Trump won the election, much to the horror of the Progressive California Moonbats, they started talking about “Calexit.” The name came from “Brexit” which was Great Britain decision to leave the European Union. In point of fact, the moonbats were talking about seceding from the United States.
The “Political scholars” in the rest of the country generally remarked that “This idea was tried and it was determined that it wasn’t allowed.” The rest of the country has been saying, “Are you assholes still here? When the Hell are you leaving already?” With regards to secession, it’s gotten even more interesting of late.
Recently, there has been talk of splitting the state in two. One part, primarily the coastal “Blue” progressive areas, along with Sacramento, would be one state, and the remaining two thirds would be a new 51st state. The people pushing this idea want to use the creation of West Virginia as a template. Will it go anywhere? Doubtful.
What may end up happening is the Moonbats running the state, (Right into the ground), will do something that triggers the Federal government to come in and clean house. With California’s government flat out saying it was going to put illegal aliens ahead of American citizens and lawful resident aliens, and would protect them from ICE, things may be coming to a head.
ICE, (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), is about to start rounding up illegals in the Sanctuary cities and states. The Progressive politicians have stated flat out that they will not cooperate. The head of the Department of Homeland Security, Kirstjen Nielsen, has asked the Department of Justice if they can file criminal charges against city governments for violating federal statutes regarding illegal immigration. If a few mayors, some state legislators and the governor are criminally charged, and convicted…
One final remark. The story this post is based on originated with the L.A. Times. The comments I’ve seen elsewhere have basically come down to, “How the Hell did this get past the editors?” The L.A. Times reputation is currently worse then that of the New York Times, if that’s at all possible. If that organization allowed this to be published, then they have determined that things are even worse then the rest of us know.
Thatisall
~The Angry Webmaster~
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Went to school in CA. Interviewing for a job in SF bay area. Recruiter was honest enough to tell me (and this is almost 40 years ago) that I couldn’t live in the bay area on what they were going to pay me.
And a friend that still hasn’t escaped from the People’s Republic of Kalifornistan assures me that all I read is correct; it’s only gotten worse every year since.