Friday, February 15, 2019

GAVIN NEWSOM, NANCY PELOSI, DIANNE FEINSTEIN AND NANCY PELOSI'S DUMPSTER CITY OF SAN FRANCISCO.... Truly, where do you think the rest of Mexifornia is headed???

FROM THE MAGAZINE

California, Poverty Capital

Why are so many people poor in the Golden State?
Winter 2018
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.
DEMOCRAT CONTROLED AMERICAN CITIES IN CRISIS

LOS ANGELES, MEXICO’S SECOND LARGEST CITY and MEXICAN MURDER CAPITAL OF AMERICA



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"It was instead, downtown Los Angeles, Calif., although the scene was recreated in numerous other cities around the country with substantial Mexican populations. Hordes of Mexican expatriates, many here illegally, were protesting the very U.S. immigration laws they were violating with impunity. They found it offensive and a violation of their rights that the U.S. dared to have immigration laws to begin with."
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Jose Pescador Osuna, Mexican Consul General We are practicing "La Reconquista" in California."
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Aztlan's goal, known as La reconquista, is to cede and take over the entirety of the southern and western states by any means necessary and impose a Communist militant dictatorship. President Bush's blanket amnesty program goes a long way to helping the extremists achieve their aim.

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ICE ‘Raging Bull’ Operation Leads to Arrest of 267 MS-13 Gang Members in Los Angeles

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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.
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JUDICIAL WATCH

Illegal Immigration Costs U.S. Taxpayers a Stunning $134.9 Billion a Year

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In 1960, according to a USC demographic study, fewer than 10% of the people in the Los Angeles County area were Latino. By 2008, according to federal census estimates, almost half were Latino. Roughly the same was true in the city of Los Angeles.
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"It extends to each issue the Democrats embrace. Every city that has come under Democrat control is proof positive that instead of raising the standard of living for the occupants, the city falls to crime, gangs, and drugs.  In fact, "America is awash with troubled, dysfunctional cities that have been electing Democrat Party mayors for decades." EILEEN F TOPLANSKY




EYE ON THE NEWS

Harm Production in San Francisco

The City by the Bay has embraced a new religion: drug normalization.
February 14, 2019
California
Cities

Drugs are destroying San Francisco’s most densely populated and desirable neighborhoods, as more and more addicts, many of them homeless, fill the streets. Politicians and activists are pushing “harm reduction,” which, in a clinical sense, means a “set of practical strategies and ideas aimed at reducing negative consequences associated with drug use,” such as overdose or the transmission of disease. But in a contemporary context, it also means “a movement for social justice built on a belief in, and respect for, the rights of people who use drugs.” 
Harm reduction, originally a controversial public-health measure, has become a religion among advocates, even as fears that the practice would normalize drug use have been borne out. Organizations like the San Francisco Drug Users Union demand “a safe environment where people can use & enjoy drugs” and a “positive image of drug users to engender respect within our community and from outside our community.” True believers dominate City Hall as well as a network of affiliated, politicized nonprofits that operate in the city with little oversight or accountability. In this environment, questioning harm reduction or its effects borders on heresy. But are the programs actually helping impoverished addicts? And what is the impact on the community?
The Department of Public Health distributes 4.45 million needles each year to the city’s 22,000 intravenous drug users. Heroin and prescription opioids are the most injected substances, though use of methamphetamines and Fentanyl is on the rise. It’s true that sterile needles reduce the transmission of blood-borne infections, and injecting narcotics under supervision can lower the risk of overdose and death. But harm reduction goes far beyond promoting these kinds of needle-safety measures. For example, At the Crossroads, a nonprofit, assembled “safe snorting kits” for at-risk and homeless youth. Baggies were filled with straws, chopping mats, plastic razor blades, and instruction sheets. Other groups offer crack-cocaine “safe-smoking” kits. A proposal to open “safe injection” sites, opposed by Jerry Brown, is favored by Governor Gavin Newsom, and is likely to succeed.
Harm-reduction efforts are sometimes sold as ways to connect with addicts, offer them other services, and help them get off drugs. But those laudable goals are not really what motivate advocates, who want mostly to remove the stigma surrounding drug use. Addicts may eventually pursue treatment or stop using on their own, but a central principle of harm-reduction theory is accepting and respecting drug use. As a result, an astonishing number of addicts on San Francisco streets hover on the edge of death, despite a continuous supply of clean needles.
Visit city neighborhoods ranging from the iconic Union Square and the Financial District to historically troubled areas such as the Tenderloin, Civic Center, and South of Market, and the unintended consequences of harm reduction become hard to ignore. The advocates have certainly succeeded in reducing stigma—it’s easy to find people openly injecting into their arms, legs, toes, and necks. Their exposed flesh shows infected sores; they stumble, fall, and pass out. There seem to be more of them, and in worse condition, every day. Addicts congregate on sidewalks, in parks, subway stations, and outside businesses. They die in school doorways
As for the needles, addicts are encouraged to take as many as they want. The city program does not involve needle exchange, so it offers no incentive properly to dispose of used needles. San Francisco’s streets and transportation system are littered with discarded syringes. After massive public outcry (and streams of embarrassing media reports) about the proliferation of hazardous medical waste on the streets and sidewalks, the city contracted with the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, at approximately $1 million per year, to hire a cleanup crew. Roughly 60 percent of the needles now get collected.
Meantime, quality of life in the city continues to erode. Tourism is threatenedretailers close, and families leave. Yet harm-reduction zealots remain adamant in their views. During public discussions about safe-injection sites, they dismiss legitimate concerns about increased drug-dealing, burglaries, violence, and vagrancy. In community meetings, Department of Public Health representatives disregard residents’ misgivings. Typical complaints—“Why are you doing this? Bloody needles are everywhere, people are injecting in front of my kid’s preschool, I’m afraid to take my dog for a walk”—are met with responses that usually begin, “This is harm reduction.” In San Francisco’s brave new world, there is no room for the skeptic.

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