But
not everything is great for all Californians, with Breitbart News reporting
that Silicon Valley has the highest
income inequality in the nation and the U.S. News & World Report naming California
as the worst state for “quality of life,” due to the high cost of living.
The
Federation for American Immigration Reform estimates that California spends $22
billion on government services for illegal aliens, including welfare,
education, Medicaid, and criminal justice system costs.
And just recently, the
state-funded University of California system announced it will spend $27
million on financial aid for illegal aliens. They’ve
even taken out radio spots on stations all along the border, just to make sure
other potential illegal border crossers hear about this program. I
can’t afford college education for all my four sons, but my taxes will pay for
illegals to get a college education.
California became a Democratic stronghold not because Californians became socialists, but because millions of socialists moved there. Immigration turned California blue, and immigration is ultimately to blame for California's high poverty level.
AMERICA: ONE PAYCHECK AND TWELVE
ILLEGALS AWAY FROM HOMELESSNESS!
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/12/rick-moran-los-angeles-mexicos-second.html
A dashcam video of downtown Los Angeles on
Christmas day reveals a stunning sight: hundreds of tents and lean-tos on the
sidewalks that serve as shelter for the homeless. The scene is reminiscent of a
third-world country. RICK MORAN / AMERICANTHINKER
com
HOMELESS CRISIS IN LOS ANGELES,
MEXICO’S SECOND LARGEST
CITY, WORSENS BY THE DAY…. Approximates the great depression
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/11/homeless-crisis-in-mexicos-second.html
HOMELESS AMERICA’S HOUSING CRISIS as 40
million illegals have climbed U.S. open borders.
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/12/homeless-in-america-hundreds-of.html
EVERY AMERICAN (Legal) only one paycheck and two illegals away from living in their cars.
https://www.city-journal.org/html/california-economy-16076.html?utm_source=City+Journal+Update&utm_campaign=65ed8ae8c2-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_07_27_01_46&utm_medium=email&utm_term=
“Protecting citizens from industrial capitalism’s
giant corporations? Where were the Securities and Exchange Commission, the
Federal Reserve, the Office of Thrift Supervision, and the Office of Federal
Housing Enterprise Oversight as the mortgage bubble blew up in 2008, nearly
taking the whole financial system with it and producing the worst economic bust
since the Great Depression, which even today has sunk the labor-force
participation rate and hiked the suicide rate among working-class men and women
to record levels?”
“By contrast, many voters give Barack Obama no such
credit for his analogous response to the Great Recession.”
“Mexican criminals really have infiltrated the
country and really have killed Americans, inevitably, under the
administration’s anything-goes immigration stance.”
WHY ARE
VOTERS SO FUCKING MAD?
CITY JOURNAL
MYRON MAGNET
Haunting
this year’s presidential contest is the sense that the U.S. government no
longer belongs to the people and no longer represents them. And this uneasy
feeling is not misplaced. It reflects the real state of affairs.
We have lost
the government we learned about in civics class, with its democratic election
of representatives to do the voters’ will in framing laws, which the president
vows to execute faithfully, unless the Supreme Court rules them
unconstitutional. That small government of limited powers that the Founders
designed, hedged with checks and balances, hasn’t operated for a century. All
its parts still have their old names and appear to be carrying out their old
functions. But in fact, a new kind of
government has grown up inside the old structure, like those parasites hatched
in another organism that grow by eating up their host from within, until the
adult creature bursts out of the host’s carcass. This transformation is not an
evolution but a usurpation.
What has now
largely displaced the Founders’ government is what’s called the Administrative
State—a transformation premeditated by its main architect, Woodrow Wilson. The
thin-skinned, self-righteous college-professor president, who thought himself
enlightened far beyond the citizenry, dismissed the Declaration of
Independence’s inalienable rights as so much outmoded “nonsense,” and he
rejected the Founders’ clunky constitutional machinery as obsolete. (See “It’s
Not Your Founding Fathers’ Republic Any More,” Summer 2014.) What a
modern country needed, he said, was a “living constitution” that would keep
pace with the fast-changing times by continual, Darwinian adaptation, as he
called it, effected by federal courts acting as a permanent constitutional
convention.
Modernity, Wilson thought, demanded efficient
government by independent, nonpartisan, benevolent, hyper-educated experts,
applying the latest scientific, economic, and sociological knowledge to
industrial capitalism’s unprecedented problems, too complex for self-governing
free citizens to solve. Accordingly, he got Congress to create executive-branch
administrative agencies, such as the Federal Trade Commission, to do the job.
During the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt proliferated such
agencies, from the National Labor Relations Board and the Federal Housing
Administration to the Federal Communications Commission and the Securities and
Exchange Commission, to put the New Deal into effect. Before they could do so,
though, FDR had to scare the Supreme Court into stretching the Constitution’s
Commerce Clause beyond recognition, putting the federal government in charge of
all economic activity, not just interstate transactions. He also had to
pressure the justices to allow Congress to delegate legislative power—which is,
in effect, what the lawmakers did by setting up agencies with the power to make
binding rules. The Constitution, of course, vests all legislative power in Congress, empowering it to make laws,
not to make legislators.
But the
Administrative State’s constitutional transgressions cut deeper still. If
Congress can’t delegate its legislative powers, it certainly can’t delegate judicial
powers, which the Constitution gives exclusively to the judiciary.
Nevertheless, after these administrative agencies make rules like a
legislature, they then exercise judicial authority like a court by prosecuting
violations of their edicts and inflicting real criminal penalties, such as
fines and cease-and-desist orders. As they perform all these functions, they
also violate the principle of the separation of powers, which lies at the heart
of our constitutional theory (senselessly curbing efficiency, Wilson thought),
as well as the due process of law, for they trample the citizen’s Fifth
Amendment right not to lose his property unless indicted by a grand jury and
tried by a jury of his peers, and they search a citizen or a company’s private
papers or premises, without bothering to get judge-issued subpoenas or search
warrants based on probable cause, flouting the Fourth Amendment. They can issue
waivers to their rules, so that the law is not the same for all citizens and
companies but is instead an instrument of arbitrary power. FDR himself ruefully
remarked that he had expanded a fourth branch of government that lacked
constitutional legitimacy. Not only does it reincarnate the arbitrary power of
the Stuarts’ tyrannical Star Chamber, but also it doesn’t even meet the minimal
conditions of liberty that Magna Carta set forth 801 years ago.
Adding insult
to injury, Wilson, his allies, and their current followers call themselves
“progressives,” a fatuous boast implying that they are the embodiments and chosen
instruments of the spirit of an ever-improving, irresistible future. In tune
with the German idealist philosophy that Wilson and his circle studied, they
claim to be marching toward an as-yet-unrealized goal of human perfection. But
that perfection, the German philosophers believed, would look something like
Prussia’s enlightened despotism. For Americans to think that it is progress to
move from the Founders’ revolutionary achievement—a nation of free citizens,
endowed with natural rights, living under laws that they themselves have made,
pursuing their own vision of happiness in their own way and free to develop as
fully as they can whatever talent or genius lies within them—to a regime in
which individuals derive such rights as they have from a government superior to
them is contemptible. How is a return to subjection an advance on freedom? No
lover of liberty should ever call such left-wing statism “progressive.” In
historical terms, this elevation of state power over individual freedom is not
even “liberal” but quite the reverse.
As these agencies have metastasized, they have
borne out not a single premise that justified their creation, and their
increasingly glaring failure has drawn citizens’ angry attention to them.
Expert? As a New Deal congressman immediately recognized with shock, many of
those who staffed the Administrative State were kids just out of law school,
with zero real-world experience or technical knowledge. Efficient? Can-do
America, which built the Empire State Building in 11 months and ramped up
airplane production during World War II from 2,000 in 1939 to nearly 100,000 in
1944, now takes years of bureaucratic EPA busywork to repair a bridge or lay a
pipeline, and who knows how many businesses never expand or even start because
the maze of government regulation is too daunting and costly to navigate? Only
last year, EPA “experts” fecklessly stood by as workers under their supervision
accidentally dumped 3 million gallons of toxic wastewater into the Colorado
River, and the agency vouchsafed not a word of warning to downstream Colorado
and New Mexico officials for an entire day before the poisonous,
fluorescent-orange flood hit them. Over at Veterans Affairs, those who’ve
fought for their country die in droves while waiting for medical care. But
what’s the problem? asks agency head Robert MacDonald blithely. After all,
at ever-popular Disneyland, “do they measure the number of hours you wait in
line?”
Non-political?
Ask Lois Lerner at the Internal Revenue Service. Oh wait: she pleaded the Fifth
Amendment—and her boss, John Koskinen, simply ignores Congress’s orders, even
as more than 2,000 of his enforcement agents have acquired military-grade
weaponry, among 200,000 of such administrative-agency officers now similarly
equipped with lethal arms, presumably for coercion of the citizens they
supposedly serve. Or there’s the Federal Elections Commission and the Federal
Communications Commission, lackeys of President Obama and his ultra-partisan
agenda.
Protecting citizens from industrial capitalism’s
giant corporations? Where were the Securities and Exchange Commission, the
Federal Reserve, the Office of Thrift Supervision, and the Office of Federal
Housing Enterprise Oversight as the mortgage bubble blew up in 2008, nearly
taking the whole financial system with it and producing the worst economic bust
since the Great Depression, which even today has sunk the labor-force
participation rate and hiked the suicide rate among working-class men and women
to record levels? Moreover, from the establishment of the first administrative
agency—the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887, essentially designed to
create shared railroad cartels—these agencies have been key instruments of
crony capitalism, which today often takes the form of senators and congressmen
pressuring agencies for rule changes or waivers to benefit their contributors,
usually at the expense of their competitors as well as the public, as the
author of the recent Confessions of Congressman X complains of his fellow legislative
“puppets.” Little wonder that today’s Americans think that such people don’t
represent them. Pollsters report that trust in government is at its lowest
level ever, with only 19 percent expecting government to do the right thing,
according to last year’s Gallup and Pew polls.
Ensuring the
citizens’ health and safety? Where is the Food and Drug Administration as
counterfeit medicines and medical supplies from China infiltrate our hospitals?
As for the infamously dysfunctional Transportation Security Administration, its
Keystone Kops’ regularly reported inability to spot journalists carrying banned
weapons onto airplanes, while they are too busy fondling travelers’ private
parts or undressing grannies, is a standing national joke—on us. We lost our
constitutional safeguards for this?
FDR spewed out his agencies in a “try anything”
spirit to cure a Depression that his predecessor’s misguided palliatives had
worsened, and debate still surges over whether the New Deal agencies did harm
or good, putting aside their doubtful legitimacy. But the majority of Americans
at the time gave the president credit for good intentions. By contrast, many voters give Barack Obama no such credit for
his analogous response to the Great Recession. They see it as a
cynically calculated ploy to extend government’s power over the people,
especially given the White House chief of staff’s crack that a president should
“never let a good crisis go to waste.” So on the pretext of addressing the
financial crisis, the administration partially socialized American medicine
with legislation that only Democrats voted for, without bothering to read it,
and that citizens who opposed the measure—still a solid majority of those
polled—saw as a kind of coup d’état, framed with utter irresponsibility and
ignoring the scary financial mess. As happened during the New Deal, a timid
Supreme Court found the act constitutional only by the politically driven
legerdemain frequent in that institution’s checkered history. It struck many as
flimflam, not government by consent.
The result was
a spectacular expansion of the Administrative State, with some 150 new agencies
and commissions created; no one knows the exact number. And these agencies
purposely removed the Administrative State even further from government by the
people. One agency, the Independent Payment Advisory Board—the so-called death
panel—is so democratically unaccountable that Congress can only abolish it by a
three-fifths vote in both houses within a seven-month period next year. After
that, the law bars Congress from altering any of the board’s edicts, a
provision as far from democratic self-government as you can get.
When the
administration finally confronted the financial crisis, lengthened by
Obamacare’s disincentives to hiring, its reflex response was to expand the
Administrative State still further with the Dodd-Frank Act, named for its two
legislative sponsors, both of whom had been in bed with the mortgage racket,
one figuratively and one literally. Whether it solved the problem is dubious.
What is certain is that it is as undemocratic as Obamacare, with its Consumer
Financial Protection Bureau, whose budget Congress can’t control, its Financial
Stability Oversight Council, whose rulings no court may review, and its army of
regulators occupying the big banks and squeezing multimillion-dollar penalties
out of CEOs clinging to their supersize compensation, regardless of what
happens to the stockholders. Meanwhile, the opaque Federal Housing Finance
Agency, formed during the crisis to salvage the misbegotten mortgage giants
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, seems bent on nationalizing permanently this
sizable chunk of the economy, putting the government in charge of citizens’
housing as well as their health care.
As for the
“stimulus” that was supposed to give a Keynesian boost to the economy: since
you can’t prove a negative, no one can show that if all that money had stayed
in the private economy, it would have created more jobs and economic growth
than the economically anemic Obama era has done. What unemployed or
underemployed workers saw, though, is that a good portion of stimulus money
went to protect the jobs of public employees, whose welfare evidently trumps
that of the citizens whom they supposedly serve. Coal miners saw that, even as
the administration aimed to kill their jobs, its stimulus shoveled out hundreds
of millions of dollars to now-defunct Solyndra and other nonviable,
crony-capitalist “green” energy companies, supposed solutions to a
global-warming crisis that many think a hoax, though some two dozen public
officials seem keen to suppress, Inquisition-style, the very utterance of that
thought. And voters noticed that America’s three highest-income counties are in
the Washington suburbs that house the federal government’s recession-proof
functionaries. (See “Hail Columbia!,”
Winter 2013.)
Unease over illegal immigration also has stoked today’s fear
that the government no longer belongs to the people, and it’s important to
understand the separate but mutually reinforcing ways that it has done so. Once
again, President Obama has made a bad situation worse—this time, by his
contemptuous refusal to execute the laws faithfully. His catch-and-release
policy for illegal border-crossers, as well as his ban on deporting young
aliens brought here by their illegal-immigrant parents, are imperial,
antidemocratic edicts that might have sparked impeachment proceedings, had not
Congress’s silly move to impeach Bill Clinton for lying about his sex games
with an intern tainted that weapon for years to come. The result of Obama’s
diktat, as contrary to the spirit of the Founders’ Constitution as is the
Administrative State, is that law-abiding taxpayers must pay for the kids’
welfare support, health care, and schooling—as they already do for “anchor
babies” born to mothers who have sneaked over the U.S. border for the purpose
of having a child eligible for “child-only” welfare benefits, scarcely less
than ordinary welfare payments and vastly more than the income of Central
American peasant families. No American voted to incur these costs, which, if
current trends continue, are likely to persist for several generations of such
families, so they amount to taxation without representation as naked as George
III’s.
As for the illegals who work, often for long
hours at low pay, off the books: because immigrants, 13 percent of the
population, hold 17 percent of the jobs—and no one knows the percentage of
workers who are here illegally—jobless working-class citizens have
understandably concluded that a lawless government, by countenancing such cheap
labor, is taking the bread out of their mouths. Should they eat cake instead?
America’s
highest-income counties are in the suburbs that house Washington’s
recession-proof functionaries.
What citizens
want to know is that, of all the world’s people who seek to live in America,
our government will admit those who come legally, whose families will not harm
us, and who will add to the wealth of the nation, not reap where they have not
sown. After all, public safety—not clean energy or national health care—is
government’s purpose. Nevertheless, Mexican criminals really
have infiltrated the country and really have killed Americans, inevitably,
under the administration’s anything-goes immigration stance. Further, it’s no comfort
to any American who has suffered loss from an Islamist terror attack within our
borders—from Ground Zero and Fort Hood to San Bernardino and Orlando—that such
incidents pose no threat to our existence as a nation, as the president has
said by way of reassurance, while refusing to call such outrages by their right
name. How many citizens would have to die in a dirty-bomb attack in Grand
Central Terminal for such events to strike him as a threat to the nation’s
existence?
The question
of providing a path to citizenship for the 12 million illegal aliens already
here is also germane to the debate about whom the U.S. government serves and to
whom it belongs. Talk radio’s Rush Limbaugh jokes that “illegal aliens” is a
politically incorrect term; we must say “undocumented Democrats” instead. But it’s a joke with a barb, for no one can doubt that these
12 million, if they could vote, would vote for the Democratic program of an
ever-larger, richly paid government extracting ever-larger transfer payments
from productive workers to the dependent poor—James Madison’s definition of the
tyranny of the majority in Federalist 10. With black poverty
and exclusion steadily ameliorating, thanks to decades of striving by
well-intentioned Americans of all races—even though Obama’s ex–attorney general
Eric Holder devoted his tenure to denying this plain
truth—the Democratic Party needs a new class of victims to justify its
“helping” agenda and its immense cadre of well-paid government “helpers.” Central
American peasants fill the bill.
Formerly, our
open economy drew the enterprising and energetic to these shores, and our lack
of a public safety net, with only private ethnic and religious charities to
help the unfortunate, meant that those who couldn’t contribute to the U.S.
economy went home. But today, when we have a
vast welfare state that didn’t exist during earlier waves of immigration, the
mothers of anchor babies come for handouts, and even the children of
hardworking legal Hispanic immigrants end up on the welfare rolls at
troublesomely high rates. In addition, our showering of self-proclaimed refugees with
welfare benefits, which attracts the shiftless rather than the enterprising,
only compounds the government-sustained dependency problem—dependency upon
taxpayers who didn’t choose this particular philanthropy.
The phalanx of privately supported settlement
houses and other institutions that met the great immigration wave around the
turn of the twentieth century, along with the public school system, aimed to
“Americanize” the new arrivals—teaching them our language, manners, and
customs, and especially our republican civic ethic. Culture, after all, is as
important an element of national identity as political institutions. To become
an American in those days meant little more than learning English and
subscribing to a broadly shared creed of self-reliance, self-government,
self-improvement, and allegiance to a tolerant nation that most people agreed
was unique in the freedom and opportunity it afforded—as well as in its
readiness to confer citizenship on newcomers who almost universally desired it.
But today’s legal Hispanic immigrants often don’t
apply for American citizenship, or retain dual nationalities: Americanization
often is not high on their agendas.
Moreover, our
new doctrine of multiculturalism gives today’s immigrants nothing to assimilate
to, since current intellectual fashion—set by the universities, Hollywood, and
the mainstream media—celebrates everything that makes us different rather than
the creed that once made one nation out of many individuals. And
multiculturalism’s accompanying creed of victimology encourages dependency
rather than self-reliance. Who are the victimizers of illegal Hispanic aliens?
According to today’s politically correct “progressivism,” it is the neocolonial
United States that has exploited the Third World’s natural resources, shored up
its ruling oligarchies, and subverted its incipient democratic governments. And
then it further victimizes them with racism when they try to escape to this
country.
Deference to
the greater wisdom of government, which Wilsonian progressivism deems a better
judge of what the era needs and what the people “really” want than the people
themselves, has been silently eroding our unique culture of enterprise,
self-reliance, enlightenment, and love of liberty for decades. But if we cease
to enshrine American exceptionalism at the heart of our culture—if we set equal
value on such Third World cultural tendencies as passive resignation, fatalism,
superstition, devaluation of learning, resentment of imaginary plots by the
powerful, and a belief that gratification deferred is gratification forgone—the
exceptionalism of our institutions becomes all the more precarious.
Supercharging
American anger over illegal immigration and its consequences is the politically
correct ban on openly discussing it, with even the most reasoned reservation
dismissed as racism and yahooism. And political correctness generates its own
quantum of anger among citizens, who think of freedom of speech and debate as
central to American exceptionalism. But elite culture stigmatizes plain
speaking, so that now a rapist or a murderer is a “person who committed a
crime” or an “individual who was incarcerated,” says the Obama Department of
Justice, or, according to the latest humbug from the Department of Education, a
“justice-involved individual.” Implicit in these euphemisms is the theory that
“society,” not the criminal, is to blame for crime, a long-exploded idea aimed at
blurring the distinction between right and wrong.
That’s what
makes it so disheartening to learn that the University of California has just
deemed it a politically incorrect offense to declare America a land of
opportunity, so as not to stigmatize those who’ve failed to seize it. It’s
disheartening not only because such a retreat from our traditional culture will
hold back immigrants, but also because our long cultural unraveling already has
damagingly demoralized the native-born working class in the face of economic
change. They dimly know that, and part of what makes them so angry is what they
have allowed themselves to become.
The Hollowing-Out of the California Dream
For minorities in the Golden State, opportunity and upward mobility are hard to come by.July 26, 2018
California
Economy, finance, and budgets
Progressives praise
California as the harbinger of the political future, the home of a new,
enlightened, multicultural America. Missouri Senator Claire McCaskillhas identified California
Senator Kamala Harris as the party leader on issues of immigration and race.
Harris wants a moratorium on construction of new immigration-detention facilities in
favor of the old “catch and release” policy for illegal aliens, and has
urged a shutdown of the government rather than compromise on mass amnesty.
Its
political leaders and a credulous national media present California as the
“woke” state, creating an economically just, post-racial reality. Yet in terms
of opportunity, California is evolving into something more like apartheid South
Africa or the pre-civil rights South. California simply does not measure up in
delivering educational attainment, income growth, homeownership, and social mobility
for traditionally disadvantaged minorities. All this bodes ill for a state
already three-fifths non-white and trending further in that direction in the
years ahead. In the past decade, the state has added 1.8 million Latinos, who
will account by 2060 for almost half the state’s population. The black
population has plateaued, while the number of white Californians is down some
700,000 over the past decade.
Minorities
and immigrants have brought much entrepreneurial energy and a powerful work
ethic to California. Yet, to a remarkable extent, their efforts have reaped
only meager returns during California’s recent boom. California, suggests
gubernatorial candidate and environmental activist Michael Shellenberger, is not “the most
progressive state” but “the most racist” one. Chapman University reports that 28 percent of
California’s blacks are impoverished, compared with 22 percent nationally.
Fully one-third of California Latinos—now the state’s largest ethnic group—live
in poverty, compared with 21 percent outside the state. Half of Latino households
earn under $50,000 annually, which, in a high-cost state, means that they
barely make enough to make ends meet. Over two-thirds of non-citizen Latinos,
the group most loudly defended by the state’s progressive leadership, live at
or below the poverty line, according to a recent United Way study.
This
stagnation reflects the reality of the most recent California “miracle.”
Historically, economic growth extended throughout the state, and produced many
high-paying blue-collar jobs. In contrast, the post-2010 boom has been
inordinately dependent on the high valuations of a handful of tech firms and
coastal real estate speculation. Relatively few blacks or Latinos participate
at the upper reaches of the tech economy—and a recent study suggests that their percentages in
that sector are declining—and generally lack the family resources to compete in
the real estate market. Instead, many are stuck with rents they can’t afford.
Even
as incomes soared in the Silicon Valley and San Francisco after 2010, wages for
African-Americans and Latinos in the Bay Area declined. The shift of employment
from industrial to software industries, as well as the
extraordinary presence—as much as 40 percent—of noncitizens in the tech
industry, has meant fewer opportunities for assemblers and other blue-collar
workers. Many nonwhite Americans labor in the service sector as security guards or janitors, making about $25,000
annually, working for contractors who offer no job security and only limited
benefits. In high-priced Silicon Valley, these are essentially poverty wages.
Some workers live in their cars, converted garages, or even on the streets,
largely ignored by California’s famously enlightened oligarchs.
CityLab has described the Bay Area as “a region of
segregated innovation.” TheGiving Code, which reports on charitable trends among
the ultra-rich, found that between 2006 and 2013, 93 percent of all private
foundation-giving in Silicon Valley went to causes outside of Silicon Valley.
Better to be a whale, or a distressed child in Africa or Central America, than
a worker living in his car outside Google headquarters.
For
generations, California’s racial minorities, like their Caucasian counterparts,
embraced the notion of an American Dream that included owning a house. Unlike
kids from wealthy families—primarily white—who can afford elite
educations and can sometimes purchase houses with parental help, Latinos
and blacks, usually without much in the way of family resources, are
increasingly priced out of the market. In California, Hispanics and blacks face
housing prices that are approximately twice the national average, relative to
income. Unsurprisingly, African-American and Hispanic homeownership rates have
dropped considerably more than those of Asians and whites—four times the rate
in the rest of the country. California’s white homeownership rate remains above
62 percent, but just 42 percent of all Latino households, and only 33 percent
of all black households, own their own homes.
In
contrast, African-Americans do far better, in terms of income and
homeownership, in places like Dallas-Fort Worth or greater Houston than in
socially enlightened locales such as Los Angeles or San Francisco. Houston and
Dallas boast black homeownership rates of 40 to 50 percent; in deep blue but
much costlier Los Angeles and New York, the rate is about 10 percentage points
lower.
Rather
than achieving upward class mobility, many minorities in California have fallen
down the class ladder. This can be seen in California’s overcrowding rate, the nation’s second-worst. Of
the 331 zip codes making up the top 1 percent of overcrowded zip codes in the
U.S., 134 are found in Southern California, primarily in greater Los Angeles
and San Diego, mostly concentrated around heavily Latino areas such as
Pico-Union, East Los Angeles, and Santa Ana, in Orange County.
The
lack of affordable housing and the disappearance of upward mobility could
create a toxic racial environment for California. By the 2030s, large swaths of
the state, particularly along the coast, could evolve into a geriatric belt,
with an affluent, older boomer population served by a largely minority
service-worker class. As white and Asian boomers age, California increasingly
will have to depend on children from mainly poorer families
with fewer educational resources, living in crowded and even unsanitary
conditions, often far from their place of employment, to work for low
wages.
Historically,
education has been the lever that gives minorities and the poor access to
opportunity. But in California, a state that often identifies itself as
“smart,” the educational system is deeply flawed, especially for minority
populations. Once a model of educational success, California now ranks 36th in
the country in educational performance, according to a 2018 Education Weekreport. The state does
have a strong sector of “gold and silver” public schools, mostly located in
wealthy suburban locations such as Orange County, the interior East Bay, and
across the San Francisco Peninsula. But the performance of schools in heavily
minority, working-class areas is scandalously poor. The state’s powerful
teachers’ union and the Democratic legislature have added $31.2 billion since
2013 in new school funding, but California’s poor students ranked 49th on National
Assessment of Education Progress tests. In Silicon Valley, half of local public
school students, and barely one in five blacks or Latinos, are proficient in basic
math.
Clearly,
California’s progressive ideology and spending priorities are not serving
minority students well. High-poverty schools are so poorly run that disruptions
from students and administrative interruptions, according to a UCLA study,
account for 30 minutes a day of class time. Teachers in these schools often
promote “progressive values,” spending much of their time, according to one writer, “discussing community problems and societal
inequities.” Other priorities include transgender and other gender-relatededucation, from which parents, in some
school districts, cannot opt out. This ideological instruction is doing little
for minority youngsters. San Francisco, which the nonprofit journalism site Calmatters refers to as “a
progressive enclave and beacon for technological innovation,” also had “the
lowest black student achievement of any county in California,” as well as the
highest gap between black and white scores.
Ultimately,
any reversal of this pattern must come from minorities demanding a restoration
of opportunity. Some now see the linkage between state policy and impoverishment,
which has led some 200 civil rights leaders to sue the state Air Resources Board, the group that
enforces the Greenhouse Gas edicts of the state bureaucracy. But perhaps the
ultimate wakeup call will come from a slowing economy. After an extraordinary
period of growth post-recession, California’s economy is clearly weakening, as
companies and people move elsewhere. Texas and other states are now
experiencing faster GDP growth than the Golden State. Perhaps
more telling, the latest BEA numbers suggest that California—which created barely 800 jobs last month—is now experiencing far lower income growth than the national average,
and scarcely half that of Texas, Colorado, Michigan, Arizona, Missouri, or
Florida. Out-migration of skilled and younger workers,
reacting to long commutes and high prices, seems to be accelerating, both in Southern California and the Bay
Area.
One
has to wonder what will happen when the California economy, burdened by
regulations, high costs, and taxes, slows even more. Generous welfare benefits,
made possible by taxing the rich, could be threatened; conversely, the Left
might get traction by pushing to raise taxes even higher. The pain will be
relatively minor in Palo Alto, Malibu, or Marin County, the habitations of the
ruling gentry rich—but for those Californians who have already been left
behind, and for a diminishing middle class, it might be just beginning.