New in GOP logic: Antipoverty programs worked so well, we
must get rid of them
By SASHA ABRAMSKY
According to “Expanding work
requirements in non-cash welfare programs,” comprehensive antipoverty programs
are no longer necessary because 50 years of antipoverty programs — yes, those
same interventions long hated, and their effectiveness belittled, by the GOP —
have succeeded so spectacularly that poverty is largely a thing of the past.
The report claims that the War on
Poverty led to “the success of the United States in reducing material
hardship,” but “that it also came at the cost of discouraging
self-sufficiency.” It proceeds to lay out a case for limiting access to
benefits and setting in place work requirements in exchange for basic
nutritional and medical benefits.
This is beyond disingenuous. Yes, in
the years after 1964, when President Lyndon Johnson launched the War on
Poverty, the percentage of poor Americans did significantly decline;
by some measures it was cut in half from about 22% of the population down to
about 11%. But over the last 40 years it has rebounded with a vengeance.
Only a government stocked with billionaires and reveling in its
lack of empathy could conceivably claim that real poverty no longer exists in
the U.S.
Hunger is up again. Homelessness is up again – though the report
claims erroneously that, “[f]ortunately, homelessness is rare in the United
States.” The number of casual and hourly laborers one accident or sickness away
from a financial disaster is up, the number of elderly Americans financially
unable to retire is increasing, and the proportion of the workforce with secure
salaries and guaranteed pensions is down.
Income inequality in today’s America
is as extreme as it has been at any point since the Gilded Age. In an era of
flamboyant affluence and dot.com billionaires, the Princeton sociologist
Kathryn Edin has found that at least 1.5 million Americans live on incomes of
under $2 a day.
In the downtowns of cities such as Los
Angeles, tens of thousands of homeless live on the streets. Meanwhile, high-end
homes in those same cities sell for tens of millions of dollars. All of this
and more was pointed out in the recent United Nations report on the dangerous
levels of extreme poverty and inequality in the United States.
Somewhere between one in six and one
in seven Americans live below the government’s own, extremely cautious
definition of the poverty line: less than $13,000 for a single person, just
over $25,000 for a family of four. That’s vastly higher than in most other
developed economies. Somewhere around one in five American kids live in
poverty, and in many counties that number surpasses one in four.
While reporting on American poverty, I
encountered people in New Mexico who lived without running water in their homes.
I met grandparents in Idaho standing for hours on food bank lines so they could
feed their grandchildren. I met Wal-Mart workers earning so little they
qualified for food stamps. I met a man in Pennsylvania bankrupted by bills from
his quadruple bypass heart surgery. I met schoolchildren in Nevada who were
homeless. I met day laborers working for far below the legal minimum wage.
In Fresno and in Orange counties, I’ve
seen dozens crammed into two-bedroom houses. I have talked to old men and women
who have lost homes and cars to predatory payday lenders. A couple of months
ago, I interviewed the director of a medical clinic in Oakland, most of whose
clients were impoverished immigrants. She talked of a poor patient so terrified
of medical bills that he refused to go to the hospital even after she told him
that he was having a stroke right in front of her.
Only a government stocked with
billionaires and reveling in its lack of empathy could conceivably claim that
real poverty no longer exists in the United States.
Trump’s ghastly regime is
seeking to shred the food stamp system, Medicaid and other vital benefits. It
is proposing to triple the rent for large
numbers of poor families who live in public housing. It is about to unveil a
new definition of “public charge” that would allow the administration to deny
permanent residency to any legal immigrant who uses, or whose children use,
food stamps, public health systems, low-income heating assistance or other
vital programs. And it is aggressively pushing to impose onerous work
requirements for benefits, not because the country is genuinely strapped for
cash, but because, abetted by a far-right Congress, they have handed out
hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts to the wealthiest among us and are
now looking for a way to pay the bill.
All of this is guaranteed to
exacerbate the country’s already stark income divides, and to make the quality
of life for America’s least fortunate even worse.
I wonder how President Trump, Ben
Carson, Steven Mnuchin, Jared Kushner, and the other architects of America’s
war on the poor would cope were they to try to live on $2 a day.
Something tells me that these pampered
princelings would then quickly find that poverty is indeed something all too
real, all too pervasive, all too soul-destroying.
Sasha Abramsky’s most recent book is “Jumping at Shadows: The
Triumph of Fear and the End of the American Dream.”
PROTECTING
OUR BORDERS!
Our
government is too busy easing illegals over the borders!
THE NEW PRIVILEGED
CLASS: Illegals!
This is why you work From Jan - May paying taxes to the government
....with the rest of the calendar year is money for you and your family.
Take, for example, an illegal alien with a wife and five children.
He takes a job for
$5.00 or 6.00/hour. At that wage, with six dependents, he pays no income
tax, yet at the end of the year, if he files an Income Tax Return, with his
fake Social Security number, he gets an "earned income credit" of up
to $3,200..... free.
He qualifies
for Section 8 housing and subsidized rent.
He qualifies
for food stamps.
He qualifies
for free (no deductible, no co-pay)
health care.
His children
get free breakfasts and lunches at school.
He requires
bilingual teachers and books.
He qualifies
for relief from high energy bills.
If they are
or become, aged, blind or disabled, they qualify for SSI.
Once
qualified for SSI they can qualify for Medicare. All of this is at (our)
taxpayer's expense.
He doesn't
worry about car insurance, life insurance, or homeowners insurance.
Taxpayers
provide Spanish language signs, bulletins and printed material.
He and his
family receive the equivalent of $20.00 to $30.00/hour in benefits.
Working
Americans are lucky to have $5.00 or $6.00/hour left after Paying their bills
and his.
The American
taxpayers also pay for increased crime, graffiti and trash clean-up.
Cheap labor? YEAH RIGHT! Wake up people!
Will
Californians Prevail Against the Little Picture of Hell?
https://townhall.com/columnists/arthurschaper/2018/06/05/draft-n2487359
The one topic Democrats
don't dare bring up in today's SoCal primary
It Pays to be Illegal in California
Maybe if California and New York Cared as Much about the Middle Class as
They Do About Illegal Alien…
California Goes Rogue
By Mark Krikorian
How the Golden State defies immigration law
‘I will hang the first man I can lay my hand on engaged in such treasonable conduct, upon the first tree I can reach.” That was President Andrew Jackson’s response to South Carolina’s intention to prevent enforcement of a federal law within the state. Despite his admiration for Jackson, President Trump hasn’t yet threatened to start hanging California politicians. But that state’s “sanctuary” policies protecting illegal immigrants and obstructing enforcement of federal immigration law echo the long-ago fight over nullification and states’ rights.
The passage of three sanctuary bills last year by the state legislature in Sacramento is now the subject of a lawsuit brought by the U.S. Department of Justice. It was the culmination of a decades-long process, as mass immigration transformed California’s politics from reddish purple to deep blue.
The first measure that could be described as a sanctuary provision was the Los Angeles Police Department’s Special Order 40, enacted in 1979, which prohibited officers from arresting a person for the federal crime of illegal entry and, unless he was arrested for another crime, from even inquiring as to legal status. But that order merely instructed police to abstain from involving themselves in immigration enforcement. In the 1980s, a more proactive conception of illegal-alien sanctuary spread, as Central Americans fleeing war in their homelands snuck into the U.S. but did not qualify for asylum.
At first, only some pro-Sandinista churches postured as sanctuaries for these illegal aliens. But in late 1985, Mayor (now Senator) Dianne Feinstein signed a resolution declaring San Francisco a “city of refuge” for illegals. She ordered that “City Departments shall not discriminate against Salvadorans and Guatemalan refugees because of their immigration status, and shall not jeopardize the safety and welfare of law-abiding refugees by acting in a way that may cause their deportation.” The declaration was followed four years later by a city law formally prohibiting city employees from assisting federal immigration authorities.
Even measures such as this, which were adopted by other big cities over the years, were of largely local interest until a new system, developed at the end of the Bush administration and completed in 2013, went online. The fingerprints of every person booked by police throughout the country have long been sent to the FBI. But under the new system, dubbed Secure Communities, those fingerprints now also go to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). So while in the past the feds didn’t necessarily know whether cops in San Francisco arrested an illegal alien for, say, a drug offense, now they do. Every time.
There will still be some illegal aliens who elude detection if ICE has no record of them because they’ve never interacted with the immigration authorities. But if police arrest anyone who’s in the Department of Homeland Security database — who was deported previously, got turned down for asylum, was picked up by the Border Patrol, overstayed a visa, or appeared before an immigration judge — ICE learns about it.
There are only so many hours in the day, so not every arrested illegal alien can be taken into custody. But if ICE wants the alien because, for instance, he has previously been deported or is a fugitive from a deportation order, it notifies the local authorities to hold him, as they would for any other state or federal law-enforcement agency, up to 48 hours after they would otherwise have released him, so that agents can collect and deport him.
With this new fingerprint-matching system in place, instead of receiving the occasional hold notice, or “detainer,” cities and counties with large numbers of immigrants started hearing from ICE constantly. In some states where large-scale immigration was a recent development, the political culture had not yet shifted to the left to such a degree that this new level of cooperation with ICE met objections. But immigration, legal and illegal, has transformed California’s population and political culture so profoundly that the pushback there was inevitable.
Of California’s 40 million people, about 15 million are in immigrant households (immigrants and their children under 18), accounting for more than 37 percent of the state’s population. Not only is that by far the highest percentage in any state, but the increase in people in immigrant households in California from 1970 to today — just the increase — is nearly twice as large as today’s total population in immigrant households in Texas, the state in second place.
Survey after survey shows that immigrants are disproportionately big-government liberals. As one overview of the data concluded, “solid and persistent majorities of Hispanic and Asian immigrants and their children share the policy preferences of the modern American Left.” As a result, as University of Maryland political scientist James Gimpel has demonstrated, in the nation’s largest counties (which are where immigrants tend to settle), “Republicans have lost 0.58 percentage points in presidential elections for every one percentage-point increase in the size of the local immigrant population.”
The results in California are plain to see. There hasn’t been a Republican in statewide or federal office since Arnold Schwarzenegger (and he was only nominally Republican). Only 13 of 40 state senators and 25 of 80 state assemblymen are Republicans. This has enabled leftist maximalism on a wide range of issues, including immigration.
Even in this environment, the effects of Secure Communities in identifying deportable aliens were blunted for a time by the Obama administration’s lax policies. Despite the anti-borders Left and its kabuki protests that Obama was the deporter in chief, his administration effectively exempted most of the resident illegal population from immigration law. Even though ICE continued to be notified of arrested illegals, administration policy was to ignore all but the worst cases. In the words of John Sandweg, who headed ICE during part of Obama’s term, “If you are a run-of-the-mill immigrant here illegally, your odds of getting deported are close to zero — it’s just highly unlikely to happen.”
Then came Donald Trump.
It wasn’t just that Trump pledged tough immigration enforcement in his raw and often coarse manner. It wasn’t just that Hillary Clinton, who said publicly that she would not deport anyone who hadn’t first been convicted of a violent felony, won California by 30 points. It was the whiplash from Obama to Trump that supercharged the sanctuary push in the state legislature. Democratic politicians, their activist allies, and illegal aliens themselves had gotten used to Obama’s arrangements and had come to think that was the way things were going to be from now on. Trump’s reversal of Obama’s laxity fell on them like a bucket of ice water.
The state took a variety of steps in response to the return of immigration enforcement. Lawmakers appropriated $45 million for a fund to help illegals fight deportation. And the state senate appointed an illegal alien to a state education commission.
But most consequential were three laws designed to limit the federal government’s ability to enforce immigration law. The best known is Senate Bill 54, the California Values Act, the most sweeping measure of its kind in the nation, making the entire state a sanctuary for illegal aliens. It prohibits state and local law enforcement from complying with ICE detainers in most cases. It prohibits notification to ICE about an alien unless in the past 15 years he’s been convicted of one of a list of the most serious crimes. It prohibits state and local authorities from allowing ICE to use space in their jails and from providing ICE any non-public information on suspects. It restricts state and local participation in any multi-agency task force that includes ICE.
The second of the three measures attempts to impose state oversight on any facility ICE uses to detain deportable aliens. And the final law seeks to shield illegal-alien workers from detection by, among other things, prohibiting private employers from voluntarily allowing ICE agents into any non-public area of their business.
The Trump administration has pushed back. The first step was to threaten to cut off certain Justice Department grants to sanctuary jurisdictions nationwide; longstanding doctrine limiting the withholding of federal funds to coerce states makes a broader cutoff unlikely. A few jurisdictions outside California have changed their sanctuary policies in response to the funding threat, but the administration’s initiative is tied up in litigation and, in any case, is unlikely to hurt sufficiently to persuade hard cases such as California to mend their ways.
That’s why in March the Justice Department filed suit against California to strike down all or parts of the three sanctuary laws, claiming that they were preempted by federal law and that they violate the supremacy clause of the Constitution. (Interestingly, the complaint cites, among other things, the Supreme Court ruling overturning parts of Arizona’s SB 1070, which was intended to assist in enforcement of federal immigration laws, on the same grounds of federal preemption.) But it will be a long time before the case reaches the Supreme Court; the defendants no doubt hope to drag things out long enough that President Maxine Waters or Dennis Kucinich can reverse the policy.
But change may come sooner than that. The legislature’s overreach has sparked a rebellion of communities seeking sanctuary from the sanctuary law. The small Orange County city of Los Alamitos got things rolling by voting to opt out of SB 54 and join the federal lawsuit. A growing list of other cities has joined the suit as well, as have Orange and San Diego counties. More cities and counties are likely to join them.
In an attempt to harness this political energy, two people whose children were killed by illegal aliens have launched a ballot initiative to repeal the sanctuary laws. Don Rosenberg, one of the parents, told the Washington Times , “This will be David versus Goliath. We’re clearly David on this side. But there are millions of Davids here.”
While the steady stream of preventable crimes by illegal immigrants protected by sanctuary policies keeps the issue before the public, the very extremism of the Left may supply the five smooth stones this army of Davids will need to slay the sanctuary Goliath. In February, for example, Oakland mayor Libby Schaaf warned illegals that an ICE raid was planned for the Bay Area. Such brazen acts delegitimize sanctuary policies in the eyes even of moderate voters.
South Carolina eventually repealed its Ordinance of Nullification. The state’s subsequent acts of resistance against legitimate federal authority also failed. It’s too early to tell whether California will succeed where South Carolina did not.
THE INVISIBLE CALIFORNIA
De facto apartheid world in the Golden State.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270265/invisible-california-bruce-thornton
Will
Californians Prevail Against the Little Picture of Hell?
https://townhall.com/columnists/arthurschaper/2018/06/05/draft-n2487359
The state of California has descended into
a modern-day version of Dante’s Inferno, where treachery of all kinds occupies
the bottom circle. Public sector unions are running (or rather ruining) the
state into bankruptcy, betraying the public trust while charging the taxpayers
for the perverse privilege. Republicans collude with the supermajority of
Democrats to raise taxes, fees, and unrelenting regulatory burdens.
The public schools indoctrinate their
young charges to hate this country and the rule of law. Illegal aliens continue overwhelming the state, draining California’s
already depleted public services while endangering our lives, the rule of law,
and public safety for all citizens. The federal government has filed
lawsuits against Sanctuary California, and ICE is rounding up illegals in their
homes and in workplaces. However, demonic pro-illegal forces still parade in
the streets and cross our borders, defying American sovereignty. Larger cities
have more homeless than homes for citizens.
The natural disasters are hitting crisis
level, too. The Bible depicts torturous flames with respite in hell without
respite, (Luke 16: 24). So too parched conditions have engulfed California.
Wildfires have become a year-round terror, yet the state’s leadership refuses
to prepare emergency water storage. This past week, two hundred firefighters
had to quell another massive conflagration in south Orange County, and summer
hasn’t even begun yet. To make matters legislation to make the current drastic
water rationing permanent!
Even wealthy coastal elites have found
that the cost of living in California is slowly exceeding its value. Money
can’t create water, and financial gain provided nothing for West Los Angeles
socialites when a few homeless transients set a blaze along the 405 Freeway
overpass along the Santa Monica mountains.
All of this is a testimony to the damage
wrought by progressive policies which have transformed California into a
picture of hell. That’s precisely what Evangelical preacher Franklin Graham
called California … or at least that’s what he called the sanctuary cities.
During an interview on the Todd Starnes Show, Graham
commented:
"People are leaving the state. The
tax base is eroding. They are turning their once beautiful cities into
sanctuary cities, which are just a little picture of Hell," Graham said.
"Just go to San Francisco and go to this once-beautiful city and see what
has happened to it."
But why did the son of the renowned
Reverend Billy Graham take time to comment on the harrowing horrors of
California? For his latest Gospel Crusade, he visited ten cities in the
once-Golden State. Starting on May 20 in Escondido (one of several cities to
challenge SB 54, aka the Sanctuary State law over the past three month), Graham
is bringing the message of the Good News to the dispirited wasteland along the
Left Coast.
Returning to Pastor Graham’s signature statement
from the Starnes interview, finally a pastor of stature and renown is
condemning sanctuary city policies, and a welcome response from the
all-too-quiet church leadership in California and across the country. Pastors
should be the first to denounce this misnamed, misleading agenda. The concept
of sanctuary comes from the Bible, better known as “cities of refuge” (cf.
Numbers 35:11-28), locations reserved for those who had accidentally killed
someone. To avoid retribution, they would flee to those cities.
In California, sanctuary policies bar
local and state law enforcement from cooperating with federal immigration
officials to arrest and deport illegal aliens. These cities are not
safeguarding otherwise innocent people, but are protecting criminals who have
broken into the United States and reside illegally to this day. Pundits left
and right contend that these policies actually protect otherwise law-abiding
residents to seek help and report crimes. Nothing could be further from the
truth.
However, is it fair to tie the long list
of hellish outcomes from these left-wing enclaves to their refusal to enforce
federal immigration laws?
Yes.
What has happened to sanctuary city San
Francisco, for example? The progressivism that made God nothing and man’s “ideas”
everything created the s***-hole dystopia that resides there today. It’s an
overpriced progressive utopia, to put it charitably. For the vast-majority of
residents, even for those who can afford it, a salary of $100,000 a year barely
pays the rent. Roommates doubling up is the norm, especially among the Big Tech
interns who take the bus to Silicon Valley to work all day on the latest app
for the Google, Facebook, EBay overlords.
For the price they pay to live in the
city, San Franciscans aren’t getting their money’s worth. Intravenous drug
needles litter the streets everywhere. Homelessness is more common than
homeownership. “S***hole” better describes the streets of the city, where the
feces piles have so overwhelmed the streets, that visitors receive maps on how
best to navigate away from the crap and corruption. Street fights among
transients and the mentally ill have exploded, rampant moral decline has
overshadowed the once great city. Tourists find enough to see, then flee.
Freedom of speech and freedom of religion
have lost their place, even though Graham’s latest crusades have succeeded in
otherwise unfriendly territory, like Berkeley. Last year, the Patriot Prayer
movement, headed by Joey Gibson, attempted to throw two rallies for freedom of
speech and thought. The elected officials of San Francisco (including Nancy
Pelosi) and the now-deceased mayor Ed Lee, smeared the peaceful program as a
“White supremacy rally.” Gibson is half Japanese, by the way.
Where Gibson had tried and failed,
Graham’s message of hope accomplished peaceful gatherings with a call to action
to California’s Christians. And I say it’s about time. There have been flickers
of hope in spite of the deranged left-wing agenda ravaging my home state.
Californians in general, and Christians in particular, need to step up. They
are called to be light in a dark, hellish world, but nothing good will happen
if they don’t vote for their values, then educate the public how to fight
against the devilish lawlessness foisted upon us by our political leaders and
the cultural elites running—or rather ruining—the state.
The one topic Democrats
don't dare bring up in today's SoCal primary
The airwaves in Southern
California are flooded with Democratic candidate ads, with most openly touting
extremely loony far-left positions – promises of free health care for all, free
college for all, beefed up public funding for Planned Parenthood, full gun
control, pretty much the full Bernie Sanders plate of pie-in-the-sky
goodies. Democrats, whether in the House, Senate, governor, or
assembly races, are all openly offering all the free stuff on the far left's
wish list, not holding back at all. Fiscal discipline isn't in
fashion with this bunch. If I had to speculate, I'd say it's because
at the time these platforms were formulated, Democrats were convinced that a blue
wave was upon them. In a crowded field, and at primary time, where
only the most committed voters show up, extremism seems to be the way to stand
out and get ahead of the pack.
There's one topic among
these offerings that isn't being touched – not even in one campaign ad:
Illegal immigration.
As the sign says:
"Caution."
We all know that Democrats
favor open borders, given the potential for muscling mendicant votes in the
state's poorest cities from their well oiled political machines. Democrats
favor DACA, DAPA for the parents, amnesty, state benefits for illegals – from
driver's licenses to free health care – an end to deportations, and no border
wall, let alone National Guardsmen at the borders. You can find
vague admissions of these stances on candidates' websites, buried deep.
But somehow, this topic
isn't one they want to bring up in the heat of the primaries, at least not in
ads, where they have an overcrowded slate of candidates on the June ballot, and
face the real prospect of seeing no Democrats making it to the slate in
November.
Illegal immigration seems to
be the electric third rail.
That says a lot about the
sentiment of the voters in illegal alien-filled California, which houses one
quarter of the nation's illegals. Nobody's brought up the Democratic
plan for free health care for illegals, now wending its way through the
California statehouse. Nobody's asked Gavin Newsom, the frontrunner
for the Democratic nomination for governor, what he thinks of the state's
inundation of illegals, and he's certainly said nothing to the broad public
about it in his ads. The costs of illegal
immigration are being carefully
hidden by Democrats.
Meanwhile, city after city
and county after county in Southern California has joined the lawsuit against
the state for its "sanctuary state" laws, which require them to house
and feed illegals instead of turn them over to the feds for breaking the
law. It's probably significant that increasingly blue San
Diego and Orange Counties, the two areas Democrats have placed all
their hopes and cash on for winning the House back, have joined this movement.
It all suggests that this
topic is dry tinder among voters, the internal polls look bad for Democrats on
their free everything for illegals, and the Democratic Party line is far more
unpopular than anyone on the left is willing to admit.
President Trump should have
a field day enacting his orderly immigration agenda, even in California, when
crunch time comes at the November midterms.
It Pays to be Illegal in California
It
certainly is a good time to be an illegal alien in California. Democratic State
Sen. Ricardo Lara last week pitched a bill to permit illegal immigrants to
serve on all state and local boards and commissions. This week, lawmakers
unveiled a $1 billion health care plan that would include spending
$250 million to extend health care coverage to all illegal alien adults.
“Currently,
undocumented adults are explicitly and unjustly locked out of healthcare due to
their immigration status. In a matter of weeks, California legislators will
have a decisive opportunity to reverse that cruel and counterproductive fact,”
Assemblyman Joaquin Arambula said in Monday’s Sacramento Bee.
His legislation, Assembly Bill 2965, would give as many as 114,000
uninsured illegal aliens access to Medi-Cal programs. A companion bill has been
sponsored by State Sen. Richard Lara.
But that
could just be a drop in the bucket. The Democrats’ plan covers more than
100,000 illegal aliens with annual incomes bless than $25,000, however an
estimated 1.3 million might be eligible based on their earnings.
In
addition, it is estimated that 20 percent of those living in California
illegally are uninsured – the $250 million covers just 11 percent.
So, will
politicians soon be asking California taxpayers once again to dip into their
pockets to pay for the remaining 9 percent?
Before
they ask for more, Democrats have to win the approval of Gov. Jerry Brown, who
cautioned against spending away the state’s surplus when he introduced his $190 billion budget
proposal in January.
Given
Brown’s openness to expanding Medi-Cal expansions in recent years, not to
mention his proclivity for blindly supporting any measure benefitting
lawbreaking immigrants, the latest fiscal irresponsibility may win approval.
And if he
takes a pass, the two Democrats most likely to succeed Brown – Lt. Gov. Gavin
Newsom and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa – favor excessive social spending and are actively courting
illegal immigrant support.
Maybe if California and New York Cared as Much about the Middle Class as
They Do About Illegal Alien…
TWEET
Economists Arthur Laffer (the guy with the famous curve) and Stephen Moore, a leading libertarian voice for mass
immigration, predict that some 800,000 people will pack up and leave California and New York over the next three years. The
reason they cite for the exodus in their Wall Street Journal op-ed is that the new federal tax law, which eliminates
deductions for state income taxes, will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
Implicit in their assignment of blame to the federal tax
overhaul is that the people who will be leaving are the ones who pay taxes –
the sort of folks that state and local governments rely to provide a revenue
stream. As such, one would think that these would be the people whose concerns
would get a lot of interest in Sacramento and Albany. But clearly that is not
the case.
For the privilege of living in places like the Bay Area, Los
Angeles, or New York City, you must bear some of the most ridiculous housing
costs in the nation, along with crushing state and local taxes. In California, be prepared to turn over as much as 13.3
percent of your income to the state. High-earning New Yorkers fork over a more
modest 8.82 percent, but if you live in the five boroughs you can tack on an
additional 3.87 percent in city income taxes. California and New York also have some of the highest sales tax rates in the country at 8.54 percent and 8.49 percent
respectively (and higher in many cities). And now, as Laffer and Moore point
out, you can’t even deduct those costs on your federal taxes.
One might also think that for all these state and local taxes,
residents could expect the most modern infrastructure, efficient public
transportation, world class public schools, affordable housing, and other
amenities. Ha. No, in Sacramento and Albany they prioritize an ever-growing
list of public benefits and services to immigration law violators; subsidies
and grants to go to college, and legal aid for illegal aliens in deportation
proceedings. In New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo is even threatening to sue the federal government (with taxpayer money, of course) for even trying to
enforce immigration laws.
Some $23 billion of California taxpayers’ money and $7.5
billion of New York taxpayers’ money is expended on illegal aliens and their dependent
children. For the benefit of the trolls at the Southern Poverty Law Center, the problems of California and New York cannot entirely be
blamed on illegal aliens. Many, many factors have led to the middle class
flight from these states. But one has to wonder why states wouldn’t want to do
as much to woo their tax base into staying as they are doing to attract,
protect, and reward illegal aliens.
Cutting back on benefits and protections for illegal aliens
would not solve all of these states’ problems, but it certainly wouldn’t hurt.
In the meantime, every U-Haul packing up a middle or upper-middle class family
headed out of California and New York represents a loss of vital revenue
necessary to address myriad needs of both citizens and legal immigrants.
Steinle’s
murderer, Jose Zarate and been deported 5xs!
California Goes Rogue
By Mark Krikorian
National Review
Online, April 26, 2018
How the Golden State defies immigration law
‘I will hang the first man I can lay my hand on engaged in such treasonable conduct, upon the first tree I can reach.” That was President Andrew Jackson’s response to South Carolina’s intention to prevent enforcement of a federal law within the state. Despite his admiration for Jackson, President Trump hasn’t yet threatened to start hanging California politicians. But that state’s “sanctuary” policies protecting illegal immigrants and obstructing enforcement of federal immigration law echo the long-ago fight over nullification and states’ rights.
The passage of three sanctuary bills last year by the state legislature in Sacramento is now the subject of a lawsuit brought by the U.S. Department of Justice. It was the culmination of a decades-long process, as mass immigration transformed California’s politics from reddish purple to deep blue.
The first measure that could be described as a sanctuary provision was the Los Angeles Police Department’s Special Order 40, enacted in 1979, which prohibited officers from arresting a person for the federal crime of illegal entry and, unless he was arrested for another crime, from even inquiring as to legal status. But that order merely instructed police to abstain from involving themselves in immigration enforcement. In the 1980s, a more proactive conception of illegal-alien sanctuary spread, as Central Americans fleeing war in their homelands snuck into the U.S. but did not qualify for asylum.
At first, only some pro-Sandinista churches postured as sanctuaries for these illegal aliens. But in late 1985, Mayor (now Senator) Dianne Feinstein signed a resolution declaring San Francisco a “city of refuge” for illegals. She ordered that “City Departments shall not discriminate against Salvadorans and Guatemalan refugees because of their immigration status, and shall not jeopardize the safety and welfare of law-abiding refugees by acting in a way that may cause their deportation.” The declaration was followed four years later by a city law formally prohibiting city employees from assisting federal immigration authorities.
Even measures such as this, which were adopted by other big cities over the years, were of largely local interest until a new system, developed at the end of the Bush administration and completed in 2013, went online. The fingerprints of every person booked by police throughout the country have long been sent to the FBI. But under the new system, dubbed Secure Communities, those fingerprints now also go to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). So while in the past the feds didn’t necessarily know whether cops in San Francisco arrested an illegal alien for, say, a drug offense, now they do. Every time.
There will still be some illegal aliens who elude detection if ICE has no record of them because they’ve never interacted with the immigration authorities. But if police arrest anyone who’s in the Department of Homeland Security database — who was deported previously, got turned down for asylum, was picked up by the Border Patrol, overstayed a visa, or appeared before an immigration judge — ICE learns about it.
There are only so many hours in the day, so not every arrested illegal alien can be taken into custody. But if ICE wants the alien because, for instance, he has previously been deported or is a fugitive from a deportation order, it notifies the local authorities to hold him, as they would for any other state or federal law-enforcement agency, up to 48 hours after they would otherwise have released him, so that agents can collect and deport him.
With this new fingerprint-matching system in place, instead of receiving the occasional hold notice, or “detainer,” cities and counties with large numbers of immigrants started hearing from ICE constantly. In some states where large-scale immigration was a recent development, the political culture had not yet shifted to the left to such a degree that this new level of cooperation with ICE met objections. But immigration, legal and illegal, has transformed California’s population and political culture so profoundly that the pushback there was inevitable.
Of California’s 40 million people, about 15 million are in immigrant households (immigrants and their children under 18), accounting for more than 37 percent of the state’s population. Not only is that by far the highest percentage in any state, but the increase in people in immigrant households in California from 1970 to today — just the increase — is nearly twice as large as today’s total population in immigrant households in Texas, the state in second place.
Survey after survey shows that immigrants are disproportionately big-government liberals. As one overview of the data concluded, “solid and persistent majorities of Hispanic and Asian immigrants and their children share the policy preferences of the modern American Left.” As a result, as University of Maryland political scientist James Gimpel has demonstrated, in the nation’s largest counties (which are where immigrants tend to settle), “Republicans have lost 0.58 percentage points in presidential elections for every one percentage-point increase in the size of the local immigrant population.”
The results in California are plain to see. There hasn’t been a Republican in statewide or federal office since Arnold Schwarzenegger (and he was only nominally Republican). Only 13 of 40 state senators and 25 of 80 state assemblymen are Republicans. This has enabled leftist maximalism on a wide range of issues, including immigration.
Even in this environment, the effects of Secure Communities in identifying deportable aliens were blunted for a time by the Obama administration’s lax policies. Despite the anti-borders Left and its kabuki protests that Obama was the deporter in chief, his administration effectively exempted most of the resident illegal population from immigration law. Even though ICE continued to be notified of arrested illegals, administration policy was to ignore all but the worst cases. In the words of John Sandweg, who headed ICE during part of Obama’s term, “If you are a run-of-the-mill immigrant here illegally, your odds of getting deported are close to zero — it’s just highly unlikely to happen.”
Then came Donald Trump.
It wasn’t just that Trump pledged tough immigration enforcement in his raw and often coarse manner. It wasn’t just that Hillary Clinton, who said publicly that she would not deport anyone who hadn’t first been convicted of a violent felony, won California by 30 points. It was the whiplash from Obama to Trump that supercharged the sanctuary push in the state legislature. Democratic politicians, their activist allies, and illegal aliens themselves had gotten used to Obama’s arrangements and had come to think that was the way things were going to be from now on. Trump’s reversal of Obama’s laxity fell on them like a bucket of ice water.
The state took a variety of steps in response to the return of immigration enforcement. Lawmakers appropriated $45 million for a fund to help illegals fight deportation. And the state senate appointed an illegal alien to a state education commission.
But most consequential were three laws designed to limit the federal government’s ability to enforce immigration law. The best known is Senate Bill 54, the California Values Act, the most sweeping measure of its kind in the nation, making the entire state a sanctuary for illegal aliens. It prohibits state and local law enforcement from complying with ICE detainers in most cases. It prohibits notification to ICE about an alien unless in the past 15 years he’s been convicted of one of a list of the most serious crimes. It prohibits state and local authorities from allowing ICE to use space in their jails and from providing ICE any non-public information on suspects. It restricts state and local participation in any multi-agency task force that includes ICE.
The second of the three measures attempts to impose state oversight on any facility ICE uses to detain deportable aliens. And the final law seeks to shield illegal-alien workers from detection by, among other things, prohibiting private employers from voluntarily allowing ICE agents into any non-public area of their business.
The Trump administration has pushed back. The first step was to threaten to cut off certain Justice Department grants to sanctuary jurisdictions nationwide; longstanding doctrine limiting the withholding of federal funds to coerce states makes a broader cutoff unlikely. A few jurisdictions outside California have changed their sanctuary policies in response to the funding threat, but the administration’s initiative is tied up in litigation and, in any case, is unlikely to hurt sufficiently to persuade hard cases such as California to mend their ways.
That’s why in March the Justice Department filed suit against California to strike down all or parts of the three sanctuary laws, claiming that they were preempted by federal law and that they violate the supremacy clause of the Constitution. (Interestingly, the complaint cites, among other things, the Supreme Court ruling overturning parts of Arizona’s SB 1070, which was intended to assist in enforcement of federal immigration laws, on the same grounds of federal preemption.) But it will be a long time before the case reaches the Supreme Court; the defendants no doubt hope to drag things out long enough that President Maxine Waters or Dennis Kucinich can reverse the policy.
But change may come sooner than that. The legislature’s overreach has sparked a rebellion of communities seeking sanctuary from the sanctuary law. The small Orange County city of Los Alamitos got things rolling by voting to opt out of SB 54 and join the federal lawsuit. A growing list of other cities has joined the suit as well, as have Orange and San Diego counties. More cities and counties are likely to join them.
In an attempt to harness this political energy, two people whose children were killed by illegal aliens have launched a ballot initiative to repeal the sanctuary laws. Don Rosenberg, one of the parents, told the Washington Times , “This will be David versus Goliath. We’re clearly David on this side. But there are millions of Davids here.”
While the steady stream of preventable crimes by illegal immigrants protected by sanctuary policies keeps the issue before the public, the very extremism of the Left may supply the five smooth stones this army of Davids will need to slay the sanctuary Goliath. In February, for example, Oakland mayor Libby Schaaf warned illegals that an ICE raid was planned for the Bay Area. Such brazen acts delegitimize sanctuary policies in the eyes even of moderate voters.
South Carolina eventually repealed its Ordinance of Nullification. The state’s subsequent acts of resistance against legitimate federal authority also failed. It’s too early to tell whether California will succeed where South Carolina did not.
Adios, Sanctuary La Raza Welfare State of California
A fifth-generation Californian laments his state’s ongoing economic collapse.
By Steve Baldwin
American Spectator, October 19, 2017
What’s clear is that the producers are leaving the state and the takers are coming in. Many of the takers are illegal aliens, now estimated to number over 2.6 million. 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.
A fifth-generation Californian laments his state’s ongoing economic collapse.
By Steve Baldwin
American Spectator, October 19, 2017
What’s clear is that the producers are leaving the state and the takers are coming in. Many of the takers are illegal aliens, now estimated to number over 2.6 million. 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.
BLOG:
MANY DISPUTE CALIFORNIA’S EXPENDITURES FOR THE LA RAZA WELFARE STATE IN
MEXIFORNIA JUST AS THEY DISPUTE THE NUMBER OF ILLEGALS. APPROXIMATELY HALF THE
POPULATION OF CA IS NOW MEXICAN AND BREEDING ANCHOR BABIES FOR WELFARE LIKE
BUNNIES. THE $22 BILLION IS STATE EXPENDITURE ONLY. COUNTIES PAY OUT MORE WITH
LOS ANGELES COUNTY LEADING AT OVER A BILLION DOLLARS PAID OUT YEARLY TO
MEXICO’S ANCHOR BABY BREEDERS. NOW MULTIPLY THAT BY THE NUMBER OF COUNTIES IN
CA AND YOU START TO GET AN IDEA OF THE STAGGERING WELFARE STATE MEXICO AND THE
DEMOCRAT PARTY HAVE ERECTED SANS ANY LEGALS VOTES. ADD TO THIS THE FREE
ENTERPRISE HOSPITAL AND CLINIC COST FOR LA RAZA’S “FREE” MEDICAL WHICH IS
ESTIMATED TO BE ABOUT $1.5 BILLION PER YEAR.
Liberals
claim they more than make that up with taxes paid, but that’s simply not true.
It’s not even close. FAIR estimates illegal aliens in California contribute
only $1.21 billion in tax revenue, which means they cost California $20.6
billion, or at least $1,800 per household.
Nonetheless, open border advocates, such as Facebook Chairman Mark Zuckerberg, claim illegal aliens are a net benefit to California with little evidence to support such an assertion. As the Center for Immigration Studies has documented, the vast majority of illegals are poor, uneducated, and with few skills. How does accepting millions of illegal aliens and then granting them access to dozens of welfare programs benefit California’s economy? If illegal aliens were contributing to the economy in any meaningful way, California, with its 2.6 million illegal aliens, would be booming.
Furthermore, the complexion of illegal aliens has changed with far more on welfare and committing crimes than those who entered the country in the 1980s. Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute has testified before a Congressional committee that in 2004, 95% of all outstanding warrants for murder in Los Angeles were for illegal aliens; in 2000, 23% of all Los Angeles County jail inmates were illegal aliens and that in 1995, 60% of Los Angeles’s largest street gang, the 18th Street gang, were illegal aliens. Granted, those statistics are old, but if you talk to any California law enforcement officer, they will tell you it’s much worse today. The problem is that the Brown administration will not release any statewide data on illegal alien crimes. That would be insensitive. And now that California has declared itself a “sanctuary state,” there is little doubt this sends a message south of the border that will further escalate illegal immigration into the state.
Nonetheless, open border advocates, such as Facebook Chairman Mark Zuckerberg, claim illegal aliens are a net benefit to California with little evidence to support such an assertion. As the Center for Immigration Studies has documented, the vast majority of illegals are poor, uneducated, and with few skills. How does accepting millions of illegal aliens and then granting them access to dozens of welfare programs benefit California’s economy? If illegal aliens were contributing to the economy in any meaningful way, California, with its 2.6 million illegal aliens, would be booming.
Furthermore, the complexion of illegal aliens has changed with far more on welfare and committing crimes than those who entered the country in the 1980s. Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute has testified before a Congressional committee that in 2004, 95% of all outstanding warrants for murder in Los Angeles were for illegal aliens; in 2000, 23% of all Los Angeles County jail inmates were illegal aliens and that in 1995, 60% of Los Angeles’s largest street gang, the 18th Street gang, were illegal aliens. Granted, those statistics are old, but if you talk to any California law enforcement officer, they will tell you it’s much worse today. The problem is that the Brown administration will not release any statewide data on illegal alien crimes. That would be insensitive. And now that California has declared itself a “sanctuary state,” there is little doubt this sends a message south of the border that will further escalate illegal immigration into the state.
"If the racist "Sensenbrenner
Legislation" passes the US Senate, there is no doubt that a massive civil
disobedience movement will emerge. Eventually labor union power can merge with
the immigrant civil rights and "Immigrant
Sanctuary" movements to enable us to either form a new political
party or to do heavy duty reforming of the existing Democratic Party. The next
and final steps would follow and that is to elect our own governors of all the
states within Aztlan."
Indeed, California goes out of its way to attract illegal aliens. The state has even created government programs that cater exclusively to illegal aliens. For example, the State Department of Motor Vehicles has offices that only process driver licenses for illegal aliens. With over a million illegal aliens now driving in California, the state felt compelled to help them avoid the long lines the rest of us must endure at the DMV. 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.
Indeed, California goes out of its way to attract illegal aliens. The state has even created government programs that cater exclusively to illegal aliens. For example, the State Department of Motor Vehicles has offices that only process driver licenses for illegal aliens. With over a million illegal aliens now driving in California, the state felt compelled to help them avoid the long lines the rest of us must endure at the DMV. 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.
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'...: The Golden State is peddling fool's gold lately.
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.
REALITIES OF A STATE IN
MELTDOWN:
THE INVISIBLE CALIFORNIA
De facto apartheid world in the Golden State.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270265/invisible-california-bruce-thornton
In 1973, as I was going through customs in
New York, the customs agent rifling my bag looked at my passport and said, with
a Bronx sneer, “Bruce Thornton, huh. Must be one of them Hollywood names.”
Hearing that astonishing statement, I
realized for the first time that California is as much an idea as a place.
There were few regions in America more distant from Hollywood than the rural,
mostly poor, multiethnic San Joaquin Valley where my family lived and ranched.
Yet to this New Yorker, the Valley was invisible.
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