Posted on 12/01/2002 8:51:10 AM PST by RICK77
EDITORIAL A Tragedy of Two Cities Times Headlines
Los Angeles' Toilet-to-Tap Fear Factor
Los Angeles is home to multimillionaire movie execs and billionaire developers. When it comes to the overall value of its goods and services, L.A. County does better than Switzerland, Sweden or Austria. It is also the poverty capital of the nation.
To measure the widening gap between the region's haves and have-nots, the United Way of Greater Los Angeles crunched numbers from dozens of government and private studies. Its recently released report, "A Tale of Two Cities: Promise and Peril in Los Angeles County," found that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.
Everyone is familiar with studies showing that wages increase with education and English fluency, but lack of formal learning is not the sole reason for the gap. The United Way study found that wages for those with the lowest level of education are actually declining.
Some industries never recovered from the recession of the early 1990s. Many high-paying aerospace jobs disappeared for good. Seven of the 10 fastest-growing occupations -- retail sales clerk, security guard and cashier among them -- pay less than $25,000 a year.
An estimated 811,000 residents work off the books as day laborers or nannies, earning substandard wages and no benefits. Almost 2 million people -- more than in any other metropolitan area -- eke out an existence on less than $18,100 a year, the federally defined poverty level for a family of four. The majority of these in the greater LA are of Latin American ancestary. The burden is even greater in this area, topped only by New York City and San Francisco in cost of living.
In a time when lack of education increasingly means a life of poverty, over 30% of county residents over 25 have never finished high school. Among the 36% who are foreign-born in L.A. County, many are immigrants from Latin American countries with very low levels of education.
The worst-case scenario is that Los Angeles becomes a city divided between ghettos and gated communities (very likely). But the United Way study also paints a city of promise, where immigrants contribute youth and vitality to the workforce and forge a multiethnic, multilingual version of Los Angeles that has strong links to an ever more global economy. The way to get from peril to promise is for all of Los Angeles to recognize the benefits of narrowing the rift between very rich and very poor, (Very Unlikely).
United Way supports literacy classes, quality child care, affordable housing and other ladders to the middle class. And a strong middle class makes the best bridge between what would otherwise be two cities doomed to isolation and fear of "the other."
Ahhhh... The Joys of Diversity, LA & SO-CAL is going down the Toilet. It may take the whole of California and the Border States with it. Bottom line is LA and California will increasingly become like Latin America, where you get very affluent areas, and very poor areas "NOTHING IN-THE-MIDDLE". To be honest LA is already 2 CITIES, the Western, Coastal and Nortern parts of the city are ALL AMERICAN and Affluent, and the South, South Central & Eastern portions of the City is Mayor Hahn's "LA is a Mexican City" (LOL).
What do you guys think ???
I think the above is what happens when government begins taking a hand in regulating too much of everyone's lives, as is the case when leftist ideals are applied. Could be a result of the increasing leftism of "Kalifornia," especially combined with the thousands of illegal immigrants who are brought in to increase the rolls of Democratic voters.
D'OH!
Pick a place... any place.
If this loser organization of leeches does a "study", I can predict the results.
"Women and the poor hit the hardest" will always be part of the boilerplate.
As a matter of fact that will be the result of their next study too... LOL
Of course you have never guessed wrong before...
And the consequences of a wrong guess are trivial.
You don't get out much, do you.
I don't believe the current "invaders from the south" are any more industrious than the previous generation of "invaders from the south." Industriousness does not matter ... when the supply of "invaders from the south" exceeds the demand for "invaders from the south," their wages will go down. They will endure endless generations of poverty until the invasion stops.
If they will endure generations of poverty in Mexico and Latin America, they will endure generations of poverty in the United States.
SOCIALISM ALWAYS FAILS.tm
True, but in the United States they will live in a more wealthy poverty.
Idiots, they can "paint" that pig any color they want to and it still won't sell. Youth and vitality to the workforce? What work? There are no jobs, no manufacturing, I would like to know how the fastest growing jobs, sales clerk or security guard is going to attain the status of middle class, by giving them free middle class homes, auto's, and monthly welfare checks I suppose. Given that illegal mexican children do not stay in school or graduate even now that they have the opportunity, just how many sales clerks and security guards are needed anyway?
If there were still any Americans in Cali, they should take the State Supreme court out and hang them for their treasonus supplanting of their vote to protect themselves from the mess that is there now.
This is consistent with the whole globalization program.
In the past there have been "rich" countries and "poor" countries. When you remove borders and allow free movement of goods and people, this is no longer possible.
Instead, what you wind up with is a more uniform global society with rich and poor closer together. As such a global society matures, it will become approximately like Brazil or India.
The leading political and business classes of the US look fondly on this prospect, since they believe that they will be living in the lavish gated compounds on the hill.
United Way supports all the above but turns its back on groups like Boy Scouts who promote the moral precepts that made this country great in the first place.
Let it sink, there is some more cancerous US cities which should be allowed to sink, one of them is San Francisco.
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