The "Golden State" under Democrat rule, is now the socialist "Garbage State" in America.
It has surpassed Mississippi as the poorest state in America. This did not come from some right-wing blog, but from the pages of the Los Angeles Times.
In an Op-Ed of January 14, writer Kerry Jackson spelled it out.
She wrote:
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.
Given robust job growth and the prosperity generated by several industries, it’s worth asking why California has fallen behind, especially when the state’s per-capita GDP increased approximately twice as much as the U.S. average over the five years ending in 2016 (12.5%, compared with 6.27%).
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. And research indicates that it could cause many who do have jobs to lose them. A Harvard University study found evidence that “higher minimum wages increase overall exit rates for restaurants” in the Bay Area, where more than a dozen cities and counties, including San Francisco, have changed their minimum-wage ordinances in the last five years. “Estimates suggest that a one-dollar increase in the minimum wage leads to a 14% increase in the likelihood of exit for a 3.5-star restaurant (which is the median rating),” the report says. These restaurants are a significant source of employment for low-skilled and entry-level workers.
The Conservative Tribune noted in their analysis of the Jackson article:
“Unfortunately, California, with 12 percent of the American population, is home today to roughly one in three of the nation’s welfare recipients. The generous spending, then, has not only failed to decrease poverty; it actually seems to have made it worse,” Jackson continued.
“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.”
Other reasons for California being the new capital of poverty? Californians spent 30 percent of their income on housing in 2015, in part because of government regulations around land use and the environment.
“Counties and local governments have imposed restrictive land-use regulations that drove up the price of land and dwellings,” analyst Wendell Cox said. “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.”
That’s not the only place where the state’s exigent environmental regulations have hurt the middle class and poor. Some estimates have energy prices at 50 percent more than the national average due mostly to regulations.
The great irony at work here is that this has been the Democrat playbook for decades now. We’re told that if we give the poorest among us welfare, it will spark the economy more than tax cuts because the impoverished will put that money back into the economy. Green energy — adopted in expedited fashion due to environmental regulations — was supposed to create new industries and economic growth as far as the windmill-trained eye could see.
Instead, what we’ve seen is homelessness, shantytowns, extreme income inequality, joblessness, deficits, and all without discernible benefit to the state and the nation at large. Which raises the question: isn’t this what they said the conservative agenda would lead to?
This is what happens when you have only one political party, filled with lunatic socialists, running a state. There is no effective opposition to stop them from turning California into another Venezuela.
To read more, go here.
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