Given the media’s obsession with style, race, and gender, we would do well to understand what agenda lurks behind Harris’s atmospherics. The reality: if she wins, the tech oligarchy—titans of today’s Gilded Age—will have achieved commanding influence, not just in the information business and the media, but in the White House as well.
California
Has Become America's Cannibal State
|
For over
six years, California has had a top marginal income tax rate of 13.3 percent,
the highest in the nation. About 150,000 households in a state of 40 million
people now pay nearly half of the total annual state income tax.
The state
legislature sold that confiscatory tax rate on the idea that it was a temporary
fix and would eventually be phased out. No one believed that. California
voters, about 40 percent of whom pay no state income taxes, naturally approved
the extension of the high rate by an overwhelming margin.
California
recently raised gas taxes by 40 percent and now has the second-highest gas
taxes in the United States.
California
has the ninth-highest combined state and local sales taxes in the country, but
its state sales tax of 7.3 percent is America's highest. As of April 1,
California is now applying that high state sales tax to goods that residents
buy online from out-of-state sellers.
In late
2017, the federal government capped state and local tax deductions at $10,000.
For high earners in California, the change effectively almost doubled their
state and local taxes.
Such high
taxes, often targeting a small percentage of the population, may have brought
California a budget surplus of more than $20 million. Yet California is never
satiated with high new tax rates that bring in additional revenue. It's always
hungry for more.
Scott
Wiener, a Democratic state senator from San Francisco, has introduced a bill
that would create a new California estate tax. Wiener outlined a death tax of
40 percent on estates worth more than $3.5 million for single Californians or
more than $7 million for married couples.
Given the
soaring valuations of California properties, a new estate tax could force
children to sell homes or family farms they inherited just to pay the tax
bills.
Soon,
even more of the Californian taxpayers who chip in to pay half of the state
income taxes will flee in droves for low-tax or no-tax states.
What really
irks California taxpayers are the shoddy public services that they receive in
exchange for such burdensome taxes. California can be found near the bottom of
state rankings for schools and infrastructure.
San
Francisco ranks first among America's largest cities in property crimes per
capita. The massive concrete ruins of the state's quarter-built and now either
canceled or postponed multibillion-dollar high-speed rail system are already
collecting graffiti.
Roughly a
quarter of the nation's homeless live in California. So do about one-third of
all Americans on public assistance. Approximately one-fifth of the state's
population lives below the poverty line. About one-third of Californians are
enrolled in Medi-Cal, the state's health care program for low-income residents.
California's
social programs are magnets that draw in the indigent from all over the world,
who arrive in search of generous health, education, legal, nutritional and
housing subsidies. Some 27 percent of the state's residents were not born in
the United States.
Last
month alone, nearly 100,000 foreign nationals were stopped at the southern
border, according to officials. Huge numbers of migrants are able to make it
across without being caught, and many end up in California.
A lot of
upper-middle-class taxpayers feel that not only does California fail to
appreciate their contributions, but that the state often blames them for not
paying even more -- as if paying about half of their incomes to local, state
and federal governments somehow reveals their greed.
The
hyper-wealthy liberal denizens of Hollywood, Silicon Valley and the coastal
enclaves often seem exempt from the consequences of the high taxes they so
often advocate for others. The super-rich either have the clout to hire experts
to help them avoid such taxes, or they simply have so much money that they are
not much affected by even California's high taxes.
What is
the ideology behind such destructive state policies?
Venezuela,
which is driving out its middle class, is apparently California's model.
Venezuelan leaders believed in providing vast subsidies for the poor. The
country's super-rich are often crony capitalists who can avoid high taxes.
Similarly,
California is waging an outright war on the upper-middle class, which lacks the
numbers of the poor and the clout of the rich.
Those who
administer California's plagued department of motor vehicles and high-speed
rail authority may often be inept and dysfunctional, but the state's tax
collectors are the most obsessive bureaucrats in the nation.
What is
Sacramento's message to those who combine to pay half the state's income taxes
and have not yet left California?
"Be
gone or we will eat you!"
Watch the illegal immigrant 'conveyor belt' - in action
Want to see how the illegal immigrant
'conveyor belt' works?
Here in San Diego, a demonstration of it
in action was posted by the San Diego office of the U.S. Border Patrol on
Twitter, which was then all over the local news, and then
picked up by the Daily Mail.
Video
captured 3/14 shows an illegal crossing of Central American migrants. None of
the 52 people surrendered to the #USBP agent on the beach. All 52 people were eventually arrested after a 2 hour
foot chase with multiple agents. Once in custody, everyone claimed asylum. #CBP
Some 50-plus illegal immigrants
traveling in family units slipped through one of the openings in the junk
fences delineating the U.S.-Mexico border in San Diego, and then, in two
groups, ran in procession to the U.S. Border Patrol vehicle waiting for
them on the beach at Imperial Beach to promptly claim asylum.
KUSI has more details here:
A total of 52
people were arrested for crossing the border illegally and CBP said it did not
appear anyone got away. This includes 23 males, ages 18 to 53, 12 females,
ages 21 to 50, and 17 juveniles, ages 1 to 14.
Video captured
at the scene, where the wall was cut and people got through, credited to
“Mexican Andy.”
It was all so very orderly, actually.
Border chaos? Not in the least. There's border order all right, but it's
cartels who control the order. They already are the ones who take the fees
(or promises of free labor or drug transport) from the illegal migrants and
anyone who doesn't pay doesn't cross. Cartels not only sell access, they
provide a package deal - with the legal instruction, Mexico-based bus service
from Central America to the border, and the U.S. bus service to the U.S.
workplaces, all for a tidy profit, made even more profitable as economies of
scale kick in. As Rick Moran noted in his blog post yesterday, the conveyor
belt has enabled the cartels to 'drastically
lower their overhead costs while maximizing profit.'
Which is why the U.S. is on track to
apprehend a million illegal immigrants - a figure which doesn't count those who
get in without getting caught. Those conveyor-belt economies of scale produce
numbers.
Facts:
If border crossings continue at the same record levels they were at in
February, 916,000+ illegal aliens will flow into our country this year
This is unsustainable for any country. There is an undeniable crisis at our
border
This is a emergency!
Build. The. Wall.
And the false identification business
is being cranked to eleven. Where there is demand, there will be those who
fill the demand, and to scale:
Wow:
An illegal alien in Oregon is charged with creating and distributing over 10,000
fake IDs, voter registration cards, & Social Security cards
How many illegal aliens were able to vote and exploit our welfare state because
of his crimes?
How can Democrats support this?
The border crossing seen here, with all
of the illegal migrants lining up for their phony asylum claims, appears to be
a good representation of the dynamic described in the Washington Post's investigative
piece about these 'conveyor belts' that ran two days
ago.
It shows how the U.S. has lost control,
given that the Border Patrol is powerless to send these illegal crossers back.
Border Patrol agents are supposed to
determine who gets into the U.S., but with this video, it's
obvious they are just reduced to being handmaidens and enablers of
the cartel and its conveyor belt, handing the lined up illegals their asylum
claim papers. Cartels are the ones who school these migrants for entry into the
U.S., teaching them how to immediately launch claims for asylum whether they
merit it or not, and then board the bus waiting for them for the jobs awaiting
them with those de facto if
temporary legalization papers the asylum claim gives them. The Border
Patrol has been reduced to being their instrument.
Democrats who claim to be against
walls and borders show just how disingenuous their claims really are. Walls and
borders will always be there, but the real question is whether they
want cartels to control the access, as they are in this conveyor-belt video, or
U.S. Border Patrol agents.
I'm no big fan of the big
state but I sure as heck don't want vile money-grubbing Mexican cartels
replacing it. The conveyor belt shows that it's actually an either-or
proposition.
Exclusive–California
Refused 5.6K Requests to Turn over Criminal Illegal Aliens to Federal Officials
4:06
The sanctuary state of California refused 5,600 requests by federal
immigration officials over two years to turn over criminal illegal aliens,
state data finds.
In
an exclusive interview with SiriusXM Patriot’s Breitbart News Tonight, Immigration Reform Law
Institute (IRLI) Executive Director Dale Wilcox revealed that within a 27-month
period, the state of California had failed to honor about 5,600 Immigration and
Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainers which are the holds ICE agents file to
local jails and police to request that an illegal alien be turned over to them
for arrest and deportation.
Of
these 5,600 failed ICE detainers, more than 3,400 were lodged against an
illegal alien who had been classified “level 1” and “level 2” offenders —
meaning that these illegal aliens had been charged with crimes like homicide,
kidnapping, sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, drugs, and fraud.
“The
bottom line is, sanctuary cities are neither humane or compassionate,” Wilcox
told Breitbart News Tonight.
“They’re dangerous policies that cost Americans lives … what will it take for
these anti-borders politicians to wake up and put the safety and security of
their citizens, their legal residents before the interests of criminal aliens.”
About
250 of the ICE detainers not honored had been filed to Napa County and Sonoma
County law enforcement officials. These two California counties had sanctuary
city policies before the state’s statewide sanctuary policy.
The
5,600 failed requests by ICE to have criminal illegal aliens turned over to
them came before California enacted their statewide sanctuary policy, where all
local jails and counties are prohibited from cooperating with federal
immigration officials.
IRLI
researchers said records after the passage of California’s sanctuary state
policy are likely to show an increased number of cases where local jails and
law enforcement officials refused to turn criminal illegal aliens over to ICE.
In
a specific case, most recently, Wilcox noted that Napa County, California
deputy Riley Jarecki was nearly killed by
three-time deported illegal alien Javier Hernandez-Morales during a traffic
stop after local officials refused to turn him over to ICE agents for
deportation.
“Its
own deputy almost got killed as a result of its refusal to honor ICE detainer
requests,” Wilcox said. “And this individual had been deported three times in
the past … so they say there’s no need emergency or need for a wall, this
criminal alien is just walking back into the country.”
ICE
had requested four separate times that Hernandez-Morales be turned over to them
to be arrested and deported back to Mexico. Three of the detainers were placed
with the Napa Couty Sheriff’s Department and one was placed with the Sonoma
County Sheriff’s Department. None of the ICE detainers were honored.
Wilcox
said Americans’ lives are being put at risk in sanctuary cities and sanctuary
states like California, all so that Democrats are able to import potential voters.
“With
the Democrats, it’s about potential, future voters,” Wilcox said. “They have an
interest in bringing in new voters so that they can win elections. That’s what
that’s all about. I mean, 10 years ago, Democrats weren’t out preaching
sanctuary cities and open borders, that just wasn’t their party platform.
They’ve swallowed this belief that if you want to stay in power, if you want to
win future elections, more voters and diverse voters is the way to go.”
“Sanctuary
cities are dangerous. They’re not humane, they’re not compassionate,” Wilcox
continued. “People are dying. It’s senseless and avoidable deaths. There’s no
excuse for politicians to sell out their constituency for potential, future
voters.”
Listen
to Wilcox’s full interview here:
California's
Rendezvous With Reality
Californians brag that their state is the world's fifth-largest economy.
They talk as reverentially of Silicon Valley companies Apple, Facebook and
Google as the ancient Greeks did of their Olympian gods.
Hollywood and universities such as Caltech, Stanford and Berkeley are
cited as permanent proof of the intellectual, aesthetic and technological
dominance of West Coast culture.
Californians also see their progressive, one-party state as a
neo-socialist model for a nation moving hard to the left.
But how long will they retain such confidence?
California's 40 million residents depend on less than one-percent of the
state's taxpayers to pay nearly half of the state income tax, which for
California's highest tier of earners tops out at the nation's highest rate of
13.3 percent.
In other words, California cannot afford to lose even a few thousand of
its wealthiest individual taxpayers. But a new federal tax law now caps
deductions for state and local taxes at $10,000 -- a radical change that
promises to cost many high-earning taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars.
If even a few thousand of the state's one-percent flee to nearby no-tax
states such as Nevada or Texas, California could face a devastating shortfall
in annual income.
During the 2011-16 California drought, politicians and experts claimed
that global warming had permanently altered the climate, and that snow and rain
would become increasingly rare in California. As a result, long-planned
low-elevation reservoirs, designed to store water during exceptionally wet
years, were considered all but useless and thus were never built.
Then, in 2016 and 2017, California received record snow and rainfall --
and the windfall of millions of acre-feet of runoff was mostly let out to sea.
Nothing since has been learned.
California has again been experiencing rain and cold that could approach
seasonal records. The state has been soaked by some 18 trillion gallons of rain
in February alone. With still no effort to expand California's water-storage
capacity, millions of acre-feet of runoff are once again cascading out to sea
(and may be sorely missed next year).
The inability to build reservoirs is especially tragic given that the
state's high-speed-rail project has gobbled up more than $5 billion in funds
without a single foot of track laid. The total cost soared from an original $40
billion promise to a projected $77 billion. To his credit, newly elected Gov.
Gavin Newsom, fearing a budget catastrophe, canceled the statewide project
while allowing a few miles of the quarter-built Central Valley "track to
nowhere" to be finished.
For years, high-speed rail has drained the state budget of transportation
funds that might have easily updated nightmarish stretches of the Central
Valley's Highway 99, or ensured that the nearby ossified Amtrak line became a
modern two-track line.
California
politicians vie with each other to prove their open-borders bona fides in an
effort to appeal to the estimated 27 percent of Californians who were not born
in the United States.
But
the health, educational and legal costs associated with massive illegal
immigration are squeezing the budget. About a third of the California budget
goes to the state's Medicare program, Medi-Cal. Half the state's births are
funded by Medi-Cal, and in nearly a third of those state-funded births, the
mother is an undocumented immigrant.
California is facing a perfect storm of
homelessness. Its labyrinth of zoning and building regulations discourages
low-cost housing. Its generous welfare benefits, non-enforcement of vagrancy
and public health laws, and moderate climate draw in the homeless. Nearly
one-third of the nation's welfare recipients live in the state, and nearly one
in five live below the poverty line.
The result is that tens of thousands of
people live on the streets and sidewalks of the state's major cities, where
primeval diseases such as typhus have reappeared.
California's progressive government seems
clueless how to deal with these issues, given that solutions such as low-cost
housing and strict enforcement of health codes are seen as either too expensive
or politically incorrect.
In sum, California has no margin for error.
Spiraling entitlements, unwieldy pension costs, money wasted on high-speed
rail, inadequate water storage and delivery, and lax immigration policies were
formerly tolerable only because about 150,000 Californians paid huge but
federally deductible state income taxes.
No more. Californians may have once derided the state's one-percent as
selfish rich people. Now, they are praying that these heavily burdened
taxpayers stay put and are willing to pay far more than what they had paid
before.
That is the only way California can continue to spend money on projects
that have not led to safe roads, plentiful water, good schools and safe
streets.
A California reckoning is on the horizon, and it may not be pretty.
The
Four States of the Apocalypse
"This is the flip side (of) tax the rich, tax the
rich, tax the rich. The rich leave, and now what do you do?" said New York
Governor Andrew M. Cuomo on Feb. 4.
After the Trump tax cut went into effect one year ago, we
predicted that the Trump tax reform would supercharge the national economy but
could cause big financial problems for the five highest-tax states: California,
Connecticut, Illinois, New Jersey and New York.
The capping of the state and local tax deduction at
$10,000 raised the highest effective state tax rates by about 66 percent (for
example, in New York City and California, the rate on millionaires rose from
about 8 percent to 13.3 percent). In New Jersey, the highest rate has risen
from 7.5 percent to 12.75 percent. Now, we have Andrew Cuomo conceding that the
trend of rich people moving out of New York has caused the loss of $2.3 billion
of tax revenue in Albany's coffers. Cuomo called this tax change
"diabolical." We think it was a matter of tax fairness. No longer do
residents of low-tax states have to pay higher federal taxes to support the
blob of excessive state/local spending and pensions in the blue states.
As we predicted, the wealthy are fleeing these five
states. The new United Van Lines data were just released that are a good proxy
for where Americans are moving to and from. Guess what four states had the
highest percentage of leavers in 2018: 1) New Jersey, 2) Illinois, 3)
Connecticut and 4) New York. Even California had more Americans pack up and
leave than enter.
Ironically, liberals like Cuomo who argued for years that
businesses don't make location decisions based on taxes in their states are now
forced to admit that the cap on the state and local tax deduction (which
primarily affects the richest 1 percent) is depleting their state coffers. The
rich change their residence by moving for at least 183 days of the year to low
taxers such as Arizona, Florida, Tennessee, Texas and Utah.
We advised Cuomo and other blue state governors to
immediately cut their tax rates if they wanted to remain even semi-competitive
with low-tax states. They are doing the opposite. Connecticut, Illinois and New
Jersey have led the nation in tax increases on the rich over the last three
years, while "progressives" have cheered them on.
Last year, legislators in Trenton went on a taxing spree,
raising the income tax on those making more than $5 million a year to 10.75
percent -- now the third-highest in the country -- and then enacting a health
care individual mandate tax on workers, a corporate rate increase and an option
for localities to impose a payroll tax on businesses. And they are still short
of cash. Idiotically, these tax hikes were passed after the cap on state and
local tax deductions was enacted, thus pouring gasoline on their fiscal fires.
How has this worked out for them?
In addition to New York's fiscal woes, the deficit in
Illinois is pegged at $2.8 billion (with a $7.8 billion backlog of unpaid
bills), and Connecticut faces a two-year $4 billion shortfall despite three tax
increases in five years. New Jersey has a $500 million deficit this year (even
after the biggest tax hike in the state's history) and Moody's predicts that
gap will widen to $3 billion over the next five years. This is all happening at
a time when most states have healthy and unexpected surplus revenues due to the
Trump economic boom and the historic decline in unemployment.
A Pew study published late last year on which states are
bleeding the most red ink ranked New Jersey worst, Illinois second worst and
Connecticut seventh worst. New York was also in the bottom 10.
Let us state this loud and clear in the hopes that
lawmakers in state capitals across the country are paying attention: The three
states that have raised their taxes the most now have the worst fiscal outlook.
Worst of all, things don't look like they are going to
get better in any of these states. Last fall, Connecticut, Illinois and New
Jersey voters elected mega-rich Democratic Govs. Ned Lamont, J.B. Pritzker and
Phil Murphy, who have promised to sock it to the rich -- the ones who haven't
yet left. In Illinois, Pritzker would eliminate the state's constitutionally
protected flat tax so that he can raise the income tax on the rich by as much
as 50 percent. After raising income taxes three times in the last five years,
Connecticut's legislature now wants to raise the sales tax rate. No one in any
of these progressive states even dares utter the words tax cut. In just one
decade, New York lost 1.3 million net residents; Illinois 717,000, New Jersey
516,000 and Connecticut 176,000. California has lost 929,000.
There is also a useful warning for the soak-the-rich
crowd of progressives in Washington. If a rise in the state tax rate from 8
percent to 13 percent can have this big and immediate negative impact, think of
the economic carnage from doubling of the federal tax rate from 37 percent to
70 percent as some want to do. The wealthy would relocate their wealth and
income in low-tax havens like Hong Kong, the Cayman Islands and Ireland. That
would do wonders for the middle class living in those countries.
We are sticking with our warnings from last year. If the
four states of the Apocalypse -- Connecticut, Illinois, New Jersey and New York
-- do not reverse their taxing ways and choose to keep making things worse,
these once very rich and prosperous states will see thousands more rich
taxpayers leave. The politicians in these four states just don't seem to
understand math. A soak-the-rich tax rate of 8 percent, 10 percent or even 13
percent on income of zero yields zero income when the wealthy leave the state.
Cuomo was right: The bleak outlook for the four states of apocalypse is
"as serious as a heart attack."
city journal – california’s
poverty
FROM THE MAGAZINE
poor in the Golden State?
California
Economy,
finance, and budgets
California—not
Mississippi, New Mexico, or West Virginia—has the highest poverty rate in the
United States. According to the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty
Measure—which accounts for the cost of housing, food, utilities, and clothing,
and which includes noncash government assistance as a form of income—nearly one
out of four Californians is poor. Given robust job growth in the state and the prosperity
generated by several industries, especially the supercharged tech sector, the
question arises as to why California has so many poor people, especially when
the state’s per-capita GDP increased roughly twice as much as the U.S. average
over the five years ending in 2016 (12.5 percent, compared with 6.27 percent).
It’s not
as if California policymakers have neglected to wage war on poverty. Sacramento
and local governments have spent massive amounts in the cause, for decades now.
Myriad state and municipal benefit programs overlap with one another; in some
cases, individuals with incomes 200 percent above the poverty line receive
benefits, according to the California Policy Center. California state and local
governments spent nearly $958 billion from 1992 through 2015 on public welfare
programs, including cash-assistance payments, vendor payments, and “other
public welfare,” according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Unfortunately,
California, with 12 percent of the American population, is home today to roughly
one in three of the nation’s welfare recipients. The generous spending, then,
has not only failed to decrease poverty; it actually seems to have made it
worse.
In the
late 1980s and early 1990s, some states—principally Wisconsin, Michigan, and
Virginia—initiated welfare reform, as did the federal government under
President Bill Clinton and the Republican Congress. The common thread of the
reformed welfare programs was strong work requirements placed on aid
recipients. These overhauls were widely recognized as a big success, as welfare
rolls plummeted and millions of former aid recipients entered the workforce.
The state and local bureaucracies that implement California’s antipoverty
programs, however, have resisted pro-work reforms. In fact, California recipients
of state aid receive a disproportionately large share of it in
no-strings-attached cash disbursements. It’s as if welfare reform passed
California by, leaving a dependency trap in place. Immigrants are falling into
it: 55 percent of immigrant families in the state get some kind of means-tested
benefits, compared with just 30 percent of natives, according to City Journal contributing editor Kay S. Hymowitz.
Self-interest
in the social-services community may be at work here. If California’s poverty
rate should ever be substantially reduced by getting the typical welfare client
back into the workforce, many bureaucrats could lose their jobs. As economist
William A. Niskanen explained back in 1971, public agencies seek to maximize
their budgets, through which they acquire increased power, status, comfort, and
job security. In order to keep growing its budget, and hence its power, a
welfare bureaucracy has an incentive to expand its “customer” base—to ensure
that the welfare rolls remain full and, ideally, growing. With 883,000
full-time-equivalent state and local employees in 2014, according to Governing, California has an enormous bureaucracy—a unionized,
public-sector workforce that exercises tremendous power through voting and
lobbying. Many work in social services.
Further
contributing to the poverty problem is California’s housing crisis.
Californians spent more than one-third of their incomes on housing in 2014, the
third-highest rate in the country. A shortage of housing has driven prices ever
higher, far above income increases. And that shortage is a direct outgrowth of
misguided policies. “Counties and local governments have imposed restrictive
land-use regulations that drove up the price of land and dwellings,” explains
analyst Wendell Cox. “Middle income households have been forced to accept lower
standards of living while the less fortunate have been driven into poverty by
the high cost of housing.” The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA),
passed in 1971, is one example; it can add $1 million to the cost of completing
a housing development, says Todd Williams, an Oakland attorney who chairs the
Wendel Rosen Black & Dean land-use group. CEQA costs have been known to
shut down entire home-building projects. CEQA reform would help increase housing
supply, but there’s no real movement to change the law.
Extensive
environmental regulations aimed at reducing carbon-dioxide emissions make
energy more expensive, also hurting the poor. On some estimates, California
energy costs are as much as 50 percent higher than the national average.
Jonathan A. Lesser of Continental Economics, author of a 2015 Manhattan
Institute study, “Less Carbon, Higher Prices,” found that “in 2012, nearly 1
million California households faced ‘energy poverty’—defined as energy
expenditures exceeding 10 percent of household income. In certain California
counties, the rate of energy poverty was as high as 15 percent of all
households.” A Pacific Research Institute study by Wayne Winegarden found that
the rate could exceed 17 percent of median income in some areas. “The impacts
on the poorest households are not only the largest,” states Winegarden. “They
are clearly unaffordable.”
Looking
to help poor and low-income residents, California lawmakers recently passed a
measure raising the minimum wage from $10 an hour to $15 an hour by 2022—but a
higher minimum wage will do nothing for the 60 percent of Californians who live
in poverty and don’t have jobs, and studies suggest that it will likely cause
many who do have jobs to lose them. A Harvard study found evidence that “higher
minimum wages increase overall exit rates for restaurants” in the Bay Area,
where more than a dozen cities and counties, including San Francisco, have
changed their minimum-wage ordinances in the last five years. “Estimates
suggest that a one-dollar increase in the minimum wage leads to a 14 percent
increase in the likelihood of exit for a 3.5-star restaurant (which is the
median rating),” the report says. These restaurants are a significant source of
employment for low-skilled and entry-level workers.
Apparently
content with futile poverty policies, Sacramento lawmakers can turn their
attention to what historian Victor Davis Hanson aptly describes as a fixation
on “remaking the world.” The political class wants to build a costly and
needless high-speed rail system; talks of secession from a United States
presided over by Donald Trump; hired former attorney general Eric Holder to
“resist” Trump’s agenda; enacted the first state-level cap-and-trade regime; established
California as a “sanctuary state” for illegal immigrants; banned plastic bags,
threatening the jobs of thousands of workers involved in their manufacture; and
is consumed by its dedication to “California values.” All this only reinforces
the rest of America’s perception of an out-of-touch Left Coast, to the
disservice of millions of Californians whose values are more traditional,
including many of the state’s poor residents.
California’s
de facto status as a one-party state lies at the heart of its poverty problem.
With a permanent majority in the state senate and the assembly, a prolonged
dominance in the executive branch, and a weak opposition, California Democrats
have long been free to indulge blue-state ideology while paying little or no
political price. The state’s poverty problem is unlikely to improve while
policymakers remain unwilling to unleash the engines of economic prosperity
that drove California to its golden years.
Kerry Jackson is the Pacific Research Institute’s fellow in
California studie
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.
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.
"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.
https://spectator.org/adios-california/?utm_source=American+Spectator+Emails&utm_campaign=6e1b467cf4
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment