Posted on 02/19/2018 10:41:32 AM PST by LibertyFound
How Immigration Turned California into America’s Poverty Capital
California is a land of untold opulence and splendor. Hollywood’s glitter dazzles the gawking masses, while the world’s most profitable companies, Google, Apple, and Facebook, funnel cash into the Golden State from every corner of the earth. It is the apotheosis of decadence.
And yet California is also desperately poor. One-in-five Californians live in poverty, the State’s income inequality is worse than Mexico’s, and untold thousands live on the streets. It is dystopia. How can so much wealth and poverty coexist? This is the California Paradox.
It was not always this way. California used to be home to America’s largest and most affluent middle class. Now it is a playground for the rich and a prison for the poor. This begs the question: how did the Golden State become America’s poverty capital?
Fear & Loathing in Los Angeles
According to the US Census Bureau’s Official Poverty Measure, California’s poverty rate hovers around 15 percent. But this figure is misleading: the Census Bureau measures poverty relative to a uniform national standard, which doesn’t account for differences in living costs between states—the cost of taxes, housing, and healthcare are higher in California than in Oklahoma, for example.
Accounting for these differences reveals that California’s real poverty rate is 20.6 percent—the highest in America. This is nearly twice the national average of 12.7 percent. Many Californians live in abject poverty. In fact, one-quarter of all homeless Americans live in California, according to a recent report from The New York Times:
More than one-quarter of the total homeless population nationwide lives in California, roughly 114,000. The vast majority are “unsheltered”—a more bureaucratic term to describe the thousands living on the streets, under freeways and tucked into grassy fields and parks in cities all around the state.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationaleconomicseditorial.com ...
Immigration doesn’t create wealth, but California is poor because the Marxist rulership of Delusional Lying Left creates POVERTY.
It’s South America. This is exactly the wealth gap and crazy social unrest they create there. Socialism.
Illegal aliens are bleeding US dry.
WE are paying the true cost of some companies “cheap labor” in both financial and human terms.
Taxpayers at every level are paying to support illegal aliens and they are sending home the proceeds from their illegal employment.
Some people are paying with their lives.
The premise is flawed.
Illegal immigration creates power.
Power accrues from counting illegal nonexistent votes.
“California used to be home to America’s largest and most affluent middle class.”
Stopped reading right there.
CA is STILL home to America’s largest and most affluent middle class.
AND homeless and poor.
Once you get out of the bottom 30%, you find a home owner with a job and two cars in the driveway.
Don’t be misled by somebody with an agenda, whatever it may be.
There is no paradox here at all. This is the natural state when socialism has taken over. The end goal of socialism/communism is for a small affluent class to live in luxury while the rest of the population barely scrapes by. Unless CA can dislodge the current socialist government, expect the gap between rich and poor to keep growing, and the middle class to keep shrinking.
“This begs the question: how did the Golden State become America’s poverty capital?”
Answer: Socialism! Works every time and any place it’s tried!
Next question?
That is so true.
I keep wondering how many Kate Steinles there have to be before the citizens have finally had enough and rise up against their corrupt AG who created their Utopia sanctuary state?
I guess quite a few?
Everything has a price.
It is just a matter of determining how much, when it is due, and who will pay.
Um... if the poverty class in CA is at 20%, or 8% above the national average, how do you figure that CA has the largest and most affluent middle class? Given those numbers, it appears that the middle class is at least 8% smaller than the national average.
Don’t they teach math or deductive reasoning in CA schools any more?
There are videos on youtube of people driving down LA streets and filming miles and miles of tent cities.
If you had the ability to read and research you would know California has over 7 million single family detached homes.
Over 80% owner-occupied.
Only Texas comes close with a little over 5 million. Florida has less than 4 million and New York barely over 2 million.
Given home prices in CA, how is that not the largest, most affluent middle class in the nation?
Immigration creates loyal voters.
Immigration creates smug, virtue signaling liberals.
Immigration without assimilation, if scaled up is an invasion and destroys the country as much as an army could.
California is unrecognizable from my youth.
And as a corollary to that, why is the homeless population in CA growing by leaps and bounds?
Its not a paradox
Its a lie.
Housing units, July 1, 2016, (V2016) 14,060,525
Housing units, April 1, 2010 13,680,081
Owner-occupied housing unit rate, 2012-2016 54.1%
Median value of owner-occupied housing units, 2012-2016 $409,300
Median selected monthly owner costs -with a mortgage, 2012-2016 $2,157
Median selected monthly owner costs -without a mortgage, 2012-2016 $517
Median gross rent, 2012-2016 $1,297
Large, because the population is large. A smaller proportion of a huge population is still huge.
But the proper metric is proportion, not an absolute number.
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