Saturday, July 28, 2018

SAN FRANCISCO - SANCTUARY STATE OF CALIFORNIA'S FILTHIEST CITY

PAUL KRUGMAN

The disintegration of California, a Mexican satellite welfare state of poverty, crime and high taxes

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2013/04/paul-krugman-look-at-california-under.html

"Chairman of the DNC Keith Ellison was even spotted wearing a shirt stating, "I don't believe in borders" written in Spanish.

According to a new CBS news poll, 63 percent of Americans in competitive congressional districts think those crossing illegally should be immediately deported or arrested.  This is undoubtedly contrary to the views expressed by the Democratic Party.

Their endgame is open borders, which has become evident over the last eight years.  Don't for one second let them convince you otherwise." Evan Berryhill Twitter @EvBerryhill.

 FORMER MAYOR OF S.F. GAVIN NEWSOM WANTS TO BE GOVERNOR OF MEXIFORNIA AS A STEPPING STONE TO THE WHITE HOUSE


https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/07/if_youre_going_to_san_franciscothink_again.html
July 28, 2018

If You're Going To San Francisco...Think Again


By Brian C. Joondeph

A few decades ago, Scott McKenzie sang one of the classic hippie anthems, “San Francisco,” back in 1967. It was sung during the heyday of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Flower power was the rage. Peace, love, and understanding were the mantras of the day, in response to the Viet Nam War and the oppression of The Man.
McKenzie sang, “If you're going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.” Back then, the flowers were for decoration, to match the tie-dyed clothing and sandals.
Flash forward fifty years, and residents of San Francisco may need to wear flowers, not only in their hair, but also covering their entire bodies. Not for decoration, however, but to mask the odor of a new feature of the streets of San Francisco.
Excrement.
And it's been making the national news, a veritable emblem of what the city has become. The newly inaugurated San Francisco mayor is London Breed, who, as an aside, has a perfect 1960s name. Interviewed after her inauguration, the Daily Caller noted that she observed that the streets of her city "are flooded with the excrement of the homeless.”
In other words, San Francisco has become Poop City.
Apparently this is not a new problem. The famous chronicler of the city, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen, occasionally would use the phrase in his daily screeds during the 1980s and 1990s, but it's far worse now. As the Daily Caller had the new mayor noting: “There is more feces on the sidewalks than I’ve ever seen growing up here.” And not just poop. Added to the mix is a “dangerous mix of drug needles, garbage, and feces.”
Lovely. In 1967, “If you're going to San Francisco, you're gonna meet some gentle people there.” Now you will meet a garbage dump mixed with a cesspool.
San Francisco has about 7,500 homeless individuals and is spending $280 million on homeless services for them. Some simple math reveals that the city could give each homeless resident just over $37,000 per year, a figure well above the minimum wage in most other places, and call it a day.
If you take out the salaries of all the bureaucrats administering these “homeless services,” there would likely be more than $100,000 available for each homeless person. But you know that won’t happen in a Democrat-run city, an administrative state, like San Francisco.
How can the city discourage the homeless from using the sidewalks as their toilets? In their minds, spend more money. The mayor assured her fellow progressives: “Harsher penalties for offenders are not on the table.” Instead the typical liberal solution, as the mayor promised, came to: “I work hard to make sure your programs are funded.” I wonder if we’ll see toilet paper dispensers popping up on the sidewalks?
This situation might seem to be a cross between funny and absurd, but it has economic consequences far beyond the necessary clean-up. Who might not be going to San Francisco because of the city’s pungent new attractions?
Start with conventions? San Francisco has always been a popular convention destination due to its fairly pleasant weather, its tourist attractions, its world-class restaurants, and of course, the cable cars. But in its current state, the bloom is off the San Francisco rose.
A major medical association recently cancelled its annual meeting which would have brought 15,000 attendees and $40 million to the San Francisco economy,according to the SF Chronicle. This, after many years of coming to the city. Think of that. A group of doctors, quite familiar with feces, needles, and the downtrodden, have said "enough."
These are things doctors can see in the medical ward and prefer to avoid when away from work, often with family, at a medical conference. It’s likely that other trade groups and industries will stay away from San Francisco as well.
Can you blame them? How many U.S. cities provide visitors with a public defecation map to help tourists steer clear of piles of poop littering the city’s sidewalks? Or which other city can boast of the 20-pound bag of poop found a few weeks ago on a city sidewalk?
How did things get this bad for the city that Tony Bennett left his heart in? When Tony recorded that song in the 1950s, San Francisco had a Republican mayor. Their last Republican mayor, George Christopher, left office in 1964, when the Beatles arrived in America. Since then, it’s been a hard day’s night for San Francisco, with nearly sixty years' worth of Democrats running the show.
At a national level, San Francisco is represented by House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, Senator Dianne Feinstein, and Senator Kamala Harris, all of whom are hard-core liberals. I am quite confident that there are no piles of poop on the sidewalks in front of their homes.
San Francisco is just another of many U.S. cities run by Democrats, and into the ground. Even liberal film maker Michael Moore observed about his home city in Michigan: “Flint has voted for Dems for 84 straight yrs. What did it get us?”
San Francisco is left with virtue-signaling in the name of compassion, tolerance and all the other liberal claptrap in a bid to try to hide third world conditions on city streets. Aside from visitors choosing to go anywhere but San Francisco, what about the residents living in such conditions?
Warm summer temperatures and open sewers become a microbiology laboratory. Toss in a bunch of undernourished and unhealthy homeless persons, sharing hypodermic needles, and pestilence follows. Such a shame for a once-magnificent city.
Rather than cleaning up its mess, San Francisco has just this week banned plastic straws. Poop and hypodermic syringes littering the sidewalks is just fine, but watch out for those nasty little plastic straws.
Once upon a time Scott McKenzie’s words rang true, “For those who come to San Francisco, summertime will be a love-in there.” Now it’s simply America’s version of a s***hole.
Brian C. Joondeph, MD, MPS, a Denver based physician and writer. Follow him on Facebook,  LinkedIn and Twitter.

But not everything is great for all Californians, with Breitbart News reporting that Silicon Valley has the highest income inequality in the nation and the U.S. News & World Report naming California as the worst state for “quality of life,” due to the high cost of living.


The Federation for American Immigration Reform estimates that California spends $22 billion on government services for illegal aliens, including welfare, education, Medicaid, and criminal justice system costs. 

                                                                                                                
And just recently, the state-funded University of California system announced it will spend $27 million on financial aid for illegal aliens. They’ve even taken out radio spots on stations all along the border, just to make sure other potential illegal border crossers hear about this program. I can’t afford college education for all my four sons, but my taxes will pay for illegals to get a college education. 

California became a Democratic stronghold not because Californians became socialists, but because millions of socialists moved there.  Immigration turned California blue, and immigration is ultimately to blame for California's high poverty level.

AMERICA: ONE PAYCHECK AND TWELVE ILLEGALS AWAY FROM HOMELESSNESS!

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/12/rick-moran-los-angeles-mexicos-second.html

 

A dashcam video of downtown Los Angeles on Christmas day reveals a stunning sight: hundreds of tents and lean-tos on the sidewalks that serve as shelter for the homeless. The scene is reminiscent of a third-world country. RICK MORAN / AMERICANTHINKER com

 

 

HOMELESS CRISIS IN LOS ANGELES, MEXICO’S SECOND LARGEST

 

CITY, WORSENS BY THE DAY…. Approximates the great depression

 

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/11/homeless-crisis-in-mexicos-second.html

HOMELESS AMERICA’S HOUSING CRISIS as 40 million illegals have climbed U.S. open borders.

 

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/12/homeless-in-america-hundreds-of.html

 

EVERY AMERICAN (Legal) only one paycheck and two illegals away from living in their cars.


 












The Hollowing-Out of the California Dream

For minorities in the Golden State, opportunity and upward mobility are hard to come by.
Joel Kotkin
July 26, 2018
California
Economy, finance, and budgets


Progressives praise California as the harbinger of the political future, the home of a new, enlightened, multicultural America. Missouri Senator Claire McCaskillhas identified California Senator Kamala Harris as the party leader on issues of immigration and race. Harris wants a moratorium on construction of new immigration-detention facilities in favor of the old “catch and release” policy for illegal aliens, and has urged a shutdown of the government rather than compromise on mass amnesty.
Its political leaders and a credulous national media present California as the “woke” state, creating an economically just, post-racial reality. Yet in terms of opportunity, California is evolving into something more like apartheid South Africa or the pre-civil rights South. California simply does not measure up in delivering educational attainment, income growth, homeownership, and social mobility for traditionally disadvantaged minorities. All this bodes ill for a state already three-fifths non-white and trending further in that direction in the years ahead. In the past decade, the state has added 1.8 million Latinos, who will account by 2060 for almost half the state’s population. The black population has plateaued, while the number of white Californians is down some 700,000 over the past decade.
Minorities and immigrants have brought much entrepreneurial energy and a powerful work ethic to California. Yet, to a remarkable extent, their efforts have reaped only meager returns during California’s recent boom. California, suggests gubernatorial candidate and environmental activist Michael Shellenberger, is not “the most progressive state” but “the most racist” one. Chapman University reports that 28 percent of California’s blacks are impoverished, compared with 22 percent nationally. Fully one-third of California Latinos—now the state’s largest ethnic group—live in poverty, compared with 21 percent outside the state. Half of Latino households earn under $50,000 annually, which, in a high-cost state, means that they barely make enough to make ends meet. Over two-thirds of non-citizen Latinos, the group most loudly defended by the state’s progressive leadership, live at or below the poverty line, according to a recent United Way study.
This stagnation reflects the reality of the most recent California “miracle.” Historically, economic growth extended throughout the state, and produced many high-paying blue-collar jobs. In contrast, the post-2010 boom has been inordinately dependent on the high valuations of a handful of tech firms and coastal real estate speculation. Relatively few blacks or Latinos participate at the upper reaches of the tech economy—and a recent study suggests that their percentages in that sector are declining—and generally lack the family resources to compete in the real estate market. Instead, many are stuck with rents they can’t afford.
Even as incomes soared in the Silicon Valley and San Francisco after 2010, wages for African-Americans and Latinos in the Bay Area declined. The shift of employment from industrial to software industries, as well as the extraordinary presence—as much as 40 percent—of noncitizens in the tech industry, has meant fewer opportunities for assemblers and other blue-collar workers. Many nonwhite Americans labor in the service sector as security guards or janitors, making about $25,000 annually, working for contractors who offer no job security and only limited benefits. In high-priced Silicon Valley, these are essentially poverty wages. Some workers live in their cars, converted garages, or even on the streets, largely ignored by California’s famously enlightened oligarchs.
CityLab has described the Bay Area as “a region of segregated innovation.” TheGiving Code, which reports on charitable trends among the ultra-rich, found that between 2006 and 2013, 93 percent of all private foundation-giving in Silicon Valley went to causes outside of Silicon Valley. Better to be a whale, or a distressed child in Africa or Central America, than a worker living in his car outside Google headquarters.
For generations, California’s racial minorities, like their Caucasian counterparts, embraced the notion of an American Dream that included owning a house. Unlike kids from wealthy families—primarily white—who can afford elite educations and can sometimes purchase  houses with parental help, Latinos and blacks, usually without much in the way of family resources,  are increasingly priced out of the market. In California, Hispanics and blacks face housing prices that are approximately twice the national average, relative to income. Unsurprisingly, African-American and Hispanic homeownership rates have dropped considerably more than those of Asians and whites—four times the rate in the rest of the country. California’s white homeownership rate remains above 62 percent, but just 42 percent of all Latino households, and only 33 percent of all black households, own their own homes.
In contrast, African-Americans do far better, in terms of income and homeownership, in places like Dallas-Fort Worth or greater Houston than in socially enlightened locales such as Los Angeles or San Francisco. Houston and Dallas boast black homeownership rates of 40 to 50 percent; in deep blue but much costlier Los Angeles and New York, the rate is about 10 percentage points lower.
Rather than achieving upward class mobility, many minorities in California have fallen down the class ladder. This can be seen in California’s overcrowding rate, the nation’s second-worst. Of the 331 zip codes making up the top 1 percent of overcrowded zip codes in the U.S., 134 are found in Southern California, primarily in greater Los Angeles and San Diego, mostly concentrated around heavily Latino areas such as Pico-Union, East Los Angeles, and Santa Ana, in Orange County.
The lack of affordable housing and the disappearance of upward mobility could create a toxic racial environment for California. By the 2030s, large swaths of the state, particularly along the coast, could evolve into a geriatric belt, with an affluent, older boomer population served by a largely minority service-worker class. As white and Asian boomers age, California increasingly will have to depend on children from mainly poorer families with fewer educational resources, living in crowded and even unsanitary conditions, often far from their place of employment,  to work for low wages.
Historically, education has been the lever that gives minorities and the poor access to opportunity. But in California, a state that often identifies itself as “smart,” the educational system is deeply flawed, especially for minority populations. Once a model of educational success, California now ranks 36th in the country in educational performance, according to a 2018 Education Weekreport. The state does have a strong sector of “gold and silver” public schools, mostly located in wealthy suburban locations such as Orange County, the interior East Bay, and across the San Francisco Peninsula. But the performance of schools in heavily minority, working-class areas is scandalously poor. The state’s powerful teachers’ union and the Democratic legislature have added $31.2 billion since 2013 in new school funding, but California’s poor students ranked 49th on National Assessment of Education Progress tests. In Silicon Valley, half of local public school students, and barely one in five blacks or Latinos, are proficient in basic math.
Clearly, California’s progressive ideology and spending priorities are not serving minority students well. High-poverty schools are so poorly run that disruptions from students and administrative interruptions, according to a UCLA study, account for 30 minutes a day of class time. Teachers in these schools often promote “progressive values,” spending much of their time, according to one writer, “discussing community problems and societal inequities.” Other priorities include transgender and other gender-relatededucation, from which parents, in some school districts, cannot opt out. This ideological instruction is doing little for minority youngsters. San Francisco, which the nonprofit journalism site Calmatters refers to as “a progressive enclave and beacon for technological innovation,” also had “the lowest black student achievement of any county in California,” as well as the highest gap between black and white scores.
Ultimately, any reversal of this pattern must come from minorities demanding a restoration of opportunity. Some now see the linkage between state policy and impoverishment, which has led some 200 civil rights leaders to sue the state Air Resources Board, the group that enforces the Greenhouse Gas edicts of the state bureaucracy. But perhaps the ultimate wakeup call will come from a slowing economy. After an extraordinary period of growth post-recession, California’s economy is clearly weakening, as companies and people move elsewhere. Texas and other states are now experiencing faster GDP growth than the Golden State. Perhaps more telling, the latest BEA numbers suggest that California—which created barely 800 jobs last month—is now experiencing far lower income growth than the national average, and scarcely half that of Texas, Colorado, Michigan, Arizona, Missouri, or Florida. Out-migration of skilled and younger workers, reacting to long commutes and high prices, seems to be accelerating, both in Southern California and the Bay Area.
One has to wonder what will happen when the California economy, burdened by regulations, high costs, and taxes, slows even more. Generous welfare benefits, made possible by taxing the rich, could be threatened; conversely, the Left might get traction by pushing to raise taxes even higher. The pain will be relatively minor in Palo Alto, Malibu, or Marin County, the habitations of the ruling gentry rich—but for those Californians who have already been left behind, and for a diminishing middle class,  it might be just beginning.

Joel Kotkin serves as Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and executive director of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (COU).




July 27, 2018

The Blue-State Housing Bubble


https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/07/the_blue_state_housing_bubble.html

By Michael Bargo, Jr.
Another housing bubble is beginning to burst.  Its financial characteristics are different from the 2007-8 housing bubble but it shares one thing in common -- that it is caused by government policies.
The 2007 bubble was caused by the Federal government insisting on home loan qualification standards changes.  Buyers who were not qualified to obtain traditional home loans were encouraged and even subsidized to get loans in states such as IL, CA, NJ, PA, and all other areas.  The details of these changes were documented by Pinto and Wallison.
The bubble burst because the easy money home loan qualification changes created two prongs of financial instability: 1) persons who were not qualified were allowed to obtain mortgages and 2) the easy money policies rapidly escalated home prices and placed many mortgage holders underwater when the artificially high housing prices crashed.
This bubble now being created in the biggest Blue states, while being driven by government policy, has a completely different financial dynamic.  This dynamic is best understood by looking at the financial condition of Illinois.
The financial insolvency of Illinois is directly linked to its public-sector pension system.  The unfunded public pension liability of the state is $251 billion.  But that one fact is only part of the story.  In addition to having this unfunded pension liability, the state now dedicates one-fourth of its annual state budget to pension costs. In order to finance the ongoing demands of the public pension system (Illinois has 650 pension plans throughout the state) the state seizes state grant money and state funds lawfully appropriated to pay for public services throughout the state and puts those into the pension fund located in the state capital, Springfield.  Since there are 4.8 million households in Illinois the average household owes $52,269 to the unfunded pension costs, and these go up every hour.  And in addition to that one-fourth of the Illinois state budget goes to pensions.
The amount of money the state has seized from public services can be seen by the fact that in 2016 the state owed vendors $15.9 billion and another $2.8 billionwas seized from funds allocated to pay for health care vendors.  This means the state literally seizes lawfully appropriated funds from state-mandated health care programs such as nursing homes and medication and places them in its pension fund.
Illinois has two state statutes that allow the state to seize both state grant money passed by the General Assembly allocated for state grants and another statute that allows the pension fund to seize state funds. 
In addition to these seized state funds, the Illinois Policy Institute, a watchdog group in Illinois, audited all 110-plus cities of Illinois and found that in the ten biggest cities, including Chicago, all the property taxes people pay go only to pay pensions, not to fund public services such as water and sewer, police and fire protection, and other essential services.
The core issue then is whether the demand for property-tax revenue made by the public pension plans will have an effect on housing values, and if this effect will be strong enough to create a housing bubble.
The best illustration of the current housing bubble can be seen with a specific example.  I know a person on the northwest side of Chicago, a middle-class neighborhood, who recently received, in his July 2018 property tax bill, a raise of $10,000 on his annual tax payment.  This was not a raise in the assessed value of his house, this was a raise in the tax that is due.  The house is 2,200 square feet and since the owner now wants to sell the house, it was recently assessed as having a fair market value of $348,000.  Before this $10K property tax increase, the property tax bill of the house was already at $13,800.  So if anyone wants to buy a house worth $348,000 they have to pay $1,983 per month in property taxes.  The mortgage will be about $1,350. per month, so the total payment will be $3,333 a month for a house worth $348K.  And each year the property tax will only go up.
What this means is that anyone who buys this house will already be paying a 7% property tax rate on the market value of the house.  That monthly property tax bill normally is for a house worth $1.2 million dollars at a 2% property tax rate.  No matter how one looks at this, it is foolish for a person to pay a property tax bill for a $348K house when at a 2% tax rate they could have a house worth $1.2 million.  While this is a quick back-of-the-envelope financial analysis, the trend is clear: Illinois has the highest tax burden of any state.
The Chicago Federal Reserve bank should be doing a precise analysis of this impending housing crisis, but instead recently suggested a 43% property tax hike. 
This is the bubble: homeowners are losing most, if not all, of the equity they have in their homes.  And once again it is being done by government.  This time it is not the federal government that is changing home mortgage loan lending standards but the Illinois state pension fund that is literally seizing home equity value to pay their pension demands.  And while this is happening, Illinois wastes over one billion dollars on interest needed to service what they've borrowed.
To understand how great the demand for tax revenue is in Illinois consider the fact that the largest pensions go to retirees from SURS the State University Retirement System.  The actual facts from Taxpayers United show that of the 200 top pensions going to university retirees, the lowest is $199,000 per year and the highest is $581,000 a year. This is not a projection, this is the information from 2017. To finance these pensions, young people who take out student loans are also seeing a drop in their long-term incomes. The Illinois Policy Institute reported that in Illinois public universities, half of the tuition goes to pensions.  So when students graduate from an Illinois public university, half their monthly student loan payment will go to extravagant pensions, and the voters of Illinois have no say in these pensions. 
This means these graduates have less money to purchase a home.  As a result, the young people in Illinois are the largest age group that is fleeing the state. They see the writing on the wall and cannot imagine they could ever afford a home and family in Illinois. More than 80% of Illinois counties saw population losses in 2017.
The bubble is bursting right now in Illinois and in CA, PA, MA, CT, NJ, NY, and all other big Blue states. California alone has a half-trillion-dollar unfunded pension liability. The financial mechanics are the same and cannot be stopped.
Image courtesy of Pixabay.

 


HALF THE POPULATION OF CALIFORNIA WAS BORN IN MEXICO!


California Passes UK to Become World’s 5th Largest Economy

by CHRISS W. STREET5 May 2018Newport Beach, CA2,199

California zipped past the United Kingdom to become the 5thlargest economy in the world in 2017.

The U.S. Commerce Department reported that California with a population of 39.54 million has a larger Gross State Product at $2.75 trillion, versus the United Kingdom with a population of 65.64 million and a Gross Domestic Product of $2.62 trillion.
A big advantage California enjoys is having a surface area of 163,696 square miles, compared to the UK with just 93,628 square miles of area. Although almost a third of California is uninhabited, about the same one-third of the UK is uninhabited.
Setting a new all-time highest ranking versus the world is a huge change from 2012 when huge swaths of California real estate was getting foreclosed and thousands of cars were getting repossessed. This knocked the not-so-golden state to a world economic ranking of #10.
But California’s Gross State Product jump by $700 billion and created 2 million jobs in the last six years. A huge piece of that recovery has been due to globalism, with the U.S. Commerce Department reporting that California exported $171.9 billion to 229 foreign economies in 2017.
Outstanding performing export sectors were Silicon Valley which passed $30 billion, Hollywood entertainment hitting about $16 billion, and the state’s agricultural sector recording a near-record $20 billion in exports.
The chief economist at the California Department of Finance Irena Asmundson told the Associated Press that California’s economy since the lows in 2012 hit new highs in 2017 that included $26 billion for financial services and real estate; $20 billion for the information sector; and a decade-high $10 billion in manufacturing.
Asmundson added that during the five-year period, California with 12 percent of the U.S. population created 16 percent of all new domestic jobs and the state’s share of U.S. Gross Domestic Product grew from 12.8 percent to 14.2 percent.
California’s unemployment rate was at a 17-year low of 4.8 percent in 2017 and has steadily declined to 4.3 percent at the end of March to set a 38-year low, according to the state’s Employment Development Department.

But not everything is great for all Californians, 

with Breitbart News reporting that Silicon Valley


nation and the U.S. News & World Report 

naming California as the worst state for “quality 

of life,” due to the high cost of living.

If California was a nation, the only countries left to pass would be Germany with a GDP of $3.69 trillion, Japan with a GDP of $4.87 trillion and China with a GDP of $12.02 trillion. Then the Golden State could try to pass United States that has a GDP of $16.64 trillion, without California.


If Immigration Creates Wealth, Why Is California America's Poverty Capital?




California used to be home to America's largest and most affluent middle class.  Today, it is America's poverty capital.  What went wrong?  In a word: immigration.
According to the U.S. 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 health care 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, and nearly twice the national average of 12.7 percent.

Likewise, income inequality in California is the second-highest in America, behind only New York.  In fact, if California were an independent country, it would be the 17th most unequal country on Earth, nestled comfortably between Honduras and Guatemala.  Mexico is slightly more egalitarian.  California is far more unequal than the "social democracies" it emulates: Canada is the 111th most unequal nation, while Norway is far down the list at number 153 (out of 176 countries).  In terms of income inequality, California has more in common with banana republics than other "social democracies."

More Government, More Poverty
High taxes, excessive regulations, and a lavish welfare state – these are the standard explanations for California's poverty epidemic.  They have some merit.  For example, California has both the highest personal income tax rate and the highest sales tax in America, according to Politifact.

Not only are California's taxes high, but successive "progressive" governments have swamped the state in a sea of red tape.  Onerous regulations cripple small businesses and retard economic growth.  Kerry Jackson, a fellow with the Pacific Research Institute, gives a few specific examples of how excessive government regulation hurts California's poor.  He writes in a recent op-ed for the Los Angeles Times:
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 ... found that "in 2012, nearly 1 million California households faced ... energy expenditures exceeding 10% of household income."
Some government regulation is necessary and desirable, but most of California's is not.  There is virtue in governing with a "light touch."
Finally, California's welfare state is, perhaps paradoxically, a source of poverty in the state.  The Orange Country Register reports that California's social safety net is comparable in scale to those found in Europe:
In California a mother with two children under the age of 5 who participates in these major welfare programs – Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps), housing assistance, home energy assistance, Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children – would receive a benefits package worth $30,828 per year.
... [Similar] benefits in Europe ranged from $38,588 per year in Denmark to just $1,112 in Romania.  The California benefits package is higher than in well-known welfare states as France ($17,324), Germany ($23,257) and even Sweden ($22,111).
Although welfare states ideally help the poor, reality is messy.  There are three main problems with the welfare state.  First, it incentivizes poverty by rewardingthe poor with government handouts that are often far more valuable than a job.  This can be ameliorated to some degree by imposing work requirements on welfare recipients, but in practice, such requirements are rarely imposed.  Second, welfare states are expensive.  This means higher taxes and therefore slower economic growth and fewer job opportunities for everyone – including the poor.
Finally, welfare states are magnets for the poor.  Whether through domestic migration or foreign immigration, poor people flock to places with generous welfare states.  This is logical from the immigrant's perspective, but it makes little sense from the taxpayer's.  This fact is why socialism and open borders arefundamentally incompatible.

Why Big Government?
Since 1960, California's population exploded from 15.9 to 39 million people.  The growth was almost entirely due to immigration – many people came from other states, but the majority came from abroad.  The Public Policy Institute of California estimates that 10 million immigrants currently reside in California.  This works out to 26 percent of the state's population.

BLOG: COME TO MEXIFORNIA! HALF OF LOS ANGELES 15 MILLION ARE ILLEGALS!
This figure includes 2.4 million illegal aliens, although a recent study from Yale University suggests that the true number of aliens is at least double that.  Modifying the initial figure implies that nearly one in three Californians is an immigrant.  This is not to disparage California's immigrant population, but it is madness to deny that such a large influx of people has changed California's society and economy.

Importantly, immigrants vote Democrat by a ratio higher than 2:1, according to a report from the Center for Immigration Studies.  In California, immigration has increased the pool of likely Democrat voters by nearly 5 million people, compared to just 2.4 million additional likely Republican voters.  Not only does this almost guarantee Democratic victories, but it also shifts California's political midpoint to the left.  This means that to remain competitive in elections, the Republicans must abandon or soften many conservative positions so as to cater to the center.
California became a Democratic stronghold not because Californians became socialists, but because millions of socialists moved there.  Immigration turned California blue, and immigration is ultimately to blame for California's high poverty level.








Golden State “Brownout”


Joel KotkinBrian C. Anderson
July 4, 2018
California
Economy, finance, and budgets

Joel Kotkin joins Brian Anderson to discuss California’s economic performance since the Great Recession, the state’s worsening housing crunch, and the impending departure of Governor Jerry Brown, who will leave office in January. After serving four terms (nonconsecutively) since the late 1970s, Brown is one of the longest-serving governors in American history.
While California has seen tremendous growth during Brown’s tenure, the state has big problems: people are moving out in greater numbers than they’re moving in, job creation outside of Silicon Valley is stagnant, and the state’s housing costs are the highest in the country.
Read Joel Kotkin’s story, “Brownout,” in the Spring 2018 Issue of City Journal.

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