Wage inequality is
surging in California — and not just on the coast. Here’s why
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-10-10/wage-inequality-is-surging-in-california-and-not-just-on-the-coast-heres-why
Wage inequality has risen more in
California cities than in the metropolitan areas of any other state, with seven
of the nation’s 15 most unequal cities located in the Golden State.
Gavin Newsom Brags About His Record Fighting Homelessness in California
3:04
California Governor Gavin Newsom boasted Thursday about his state’s effort to fight the crisis of homelessness in the state, as President Donald Trump criticized California politicians for the second day in a row for neglecting the problem.
Last week, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) released statistics showing that in the year ending in January 2019, homelessness in the U.S. had rise 2.7% — driven “entirely” by California’s rise of 16.4%. Though homelessness had actually declined in most other states, California had seen a dramatic increase.
Newsom, speaking to Breitbart News in the spin room after the Democrat debate in Los Angeles, admitted that the state was facing a severe problem: “It is an embarrassment, it is unacceptable. And we’ve got to own it, we’ve got to own up and solve it.” But he also told reporters that the Trump administration was to blame because it would not provide more funds for housing, — though many experts say that the problem is caused by mental illness, drug addiction, and other factors that the availability of free or affordable housing, by itself, would not actually resolve.
On Christmas Day, in a belated response to Newsom’s criticism the week before, President Trump tweeted that Newsom had “done a really bad job on taking care of the homeless population in California” and threatened — as he has done before — to “get involved,” presumably using his emergency powers to take over state and local policy.
Trump reiterated his point on Dec. 26, arguing that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) — his main opponent during the ongoing impeachment battle — was neglecting the problem in her home town of San Francisco:
Another line they cut into: Illegals get free public housing as
impoverished Americans wait
Want some perspective on why so many blue sanctuary cities have so
many homeless encampments hovering around?
Try the reality that illegal immigrants are routinely given free
public housing by the U.S., based on the fact that they are uneducated,
unskilled, and largely unemployable. Those
are the criteria, and now importing poverty has never been easier. Shockingly,
this comes as millions of poor Americans are out in the cold awaiting that
housing that the original law was intended to help.
Thus, the tent cities, and by coincidence, the worst of these
emerging shantytowns are in blue sanctuary cities loaded with illegal
immigrants - Orange County, San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle, New York...Is
there a connection? At a minimum, it's worth looking at.
The Trump administration's Department of Housing and Urban
Development is finally trying to put a stop to it as 1.5 million illegals
prepare to enter the U.S. this year, and one can only wonder why they didn't do
it yesterday.
The plan would scrap Clinton-era regulations that allowed illegal
immigrants to sign up for assistance without having to disclose their status.
Under the new Trump rules, not only would the leaseholder using public housing
have to be an eligible U.S. person, but the government would verify all
applicants through the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE)
database, a federal system that’s used to weed illegal immigrants out of other
welfare programs.
Those already getting HUD assistance would have to go through a new verification,
though it would be over a period of time and wouldn’t all come at once.
“We’ve got our own people to house and need to take care of our
citizens,” an administration official told The Washington Times. “Because of
past loopholes in HUD guidance, illegal aliens were able to live in free public
housing desperately needed by so many of our own citizens. As illegal aliens
attempt to swarm our borders, we’re sending the message that you can’t live off
of American welfare on the taxpayers’ dime.”
The Times notes that the rules are confusingly contradictary, and
some illegal immigrant families are getting full rides based on just one member
being born in the U.S. The pregnant caravaner who calculatingly slipped
across the U.S. in San Diego late last year, only to have her baby the next
day, now, along with her entire family, gets that free ride on
government housing. Plus lots
of cheesy news coverage about how
heartwarming it all is. That's a lot cheaper than any housing she's going to
find back in Tegucigalpa.
Migrants would be almost fools not to take the offering.
The problem of course is that Americans who paid into these
programs, and the subset who find themselves in dire circumstances, are in fact
being shut out.
The fill-the-pews Catholic archbishops may love to tout the
virtues of illegal immigrants and wave signs about getting 'justice"
for them, but the hard fact here is that these foreign nationals are
stealing from others as they take this housing benefit under legal
technicalities. That's not a good thing under anyone's theological law.
But hypocrisy is comfortable ground for the entire open borders lobby as
they shamelessly celebrate lawbreaking at the border, leaving the
impoverished of the U.S. out cold.
The Trump administration is trying to have this outrage fixed
by summer. But don't imagine it won't be without the open-borders lawsuits, the
media sob stories, the leftist judges, and the scolding clerics.
Los Angeles County Pays
Over a Billion in Welfare to Illegal Aliens Over Two Years
In 2015 and 2016, Los Angeles County paid
nearly $1.3 billion in welfare funds to illegal aliens and their families. That
figure amounts to 25 percent of the total spent on the county’s entire needy
population, according to Fox News.
The state of California is home to more illegal aliens than any other state
in the country. Approximately one in five illegal aliens lives in California,
Pew reported.
Approximately a quarter of California’s 4 million illegal immigrants
reside in Los Angeles County. The county allows illegal immigrant parents with
children born in the United States to seek welfare and food stamp benefits.
The welfare benefits data acquired by Fox News comes from the Los
Angeles County Department of Public Social Services and shows welfare and food
stamp costs for the county’s entire population were $3.1 billion in 2015, $2.9
billion in 2016.
The data also shows that during the first five months of 2017, more than
60,000 families received a total of $181 million.
Over 58,000 families received a total of $602 million in benefits in
2015 and more than 64,000 families received a total of $675 million in 2016.
Robert Rector, a Heritage Foundation senior
fellow who studies poverty and illegal immigration, told Fox the costs represent “the tip of
the iceberg.”
“They get $3 in benefits for every $1 they spend,” Rector said. It can
cost the government a total of $24,000 per year per family to pay for things
like education, police, fire, medical, and subsidized housing.
In February of 2019, the Los Angeles city council signed a resolution
making it a sanctuary city. The resolution did not provide any new legal
protections to their immigrants, but instead solidified existing policies.
In October 2017, former California governor
Jerry Brown signed SB 54 into law. This bill made
California, in Brown’s own words, a “sanctuary state.” The Justice
Department filed a lawsuit against the State of California over the law. A
federal judge dismissed that suit in July. SB 54 took effect on Jan.
1, 2018.
According to Center for
Immigration Studies, “The new law
does many things: It forbids all localities from cooperating with ICE detainer
notices, it bars any law enforcement officer from participating in the
popular 287(g) program, and it prevents state and local police
from inquiring about individuals’ immigration status.”
Some counties in California have protested its implementation and joined
the Trump administration’s lawsuit against the state.
California’s campaign to provide public services to illegal immigrants
did not end with the exit of Jerry Brown. His successor, Gavin Newsom, is
just as focused as Brown in funding programs for illegal residents at the
expense of California taxpayers.
California’s budget earmarks millions of dollars annually to the One
California program, which provides free legal assistance to all aliens,
including those facing deportation, and makes California’s public universities
easier for illegal-alien students to attend.
According to the Fiscal Burden of Illegal
Immigration on United States Taxpayers 2017 report, for the estimated 12.5 million illegal
immigrants living in the country, the resulting cost is a $116
billion burden on the national economy and taxpayers each year, after
deducting the $19 billion in taxes paid by some of those illegal immigrants.
BLOG: MOST FIGURES PUT THE NUMBER OF
ILLEGALS IN THE U.S. AT ABOUT 40 MILLION. WHEN THESE PEOPLE ARE HANDED AMNESTY,
THEY ARE LEGALLY ENTITLED TO BRING UP THE REST OF THEIR FAMILY EFFECTIVELY
LEAVING MEXICO DESERTED.
New data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that more than 22 million
non-citizens now live in the United States.
"The good news: some Californians are waking up. A recent PPIC poll found that increasing proportions of
Californians believe that the state is headed in the wrong direction—a figure
that exceeds 55 percent in the inland areas."
On its current course, California increasingly resembles a model
of what the late Taichi Sakaiya called “high-tech feudalism,” with a small
population of wealthy residents and a growing mass of modern-day serfs.
California Preening
The Golden State is on a path
to high-tech feudalism, but there’s still time to change course.
December
20, 2019
California
Economy, finance, and
budgets
“We
are the modern equivalent of the ancient city-states of Athens and Sparta.
California has the ideas of Athens and the power of Sparta,” declared then-governor
Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2007. “Not only can we lead California into the future
. . . we can show the nation and the world how to get there.” When a movie star
who once played Hercules says so who’s to disagree? The idea of California as a
model, of course, precedes the former governor’s tenure. Now the state’s
anti-Trump resistance—in its zeal on matters concerning climate, technology,
gender, or race—believes that it knows how to create a just, affluent, and
enlightened society. “The future depends on us,” Governor Gavin Newsom said at his
inauguration. “And we will seize this moment.”
In
truth, the Golden State is becoming a semi-
gap between
middle and upper incomes—72
percent, compared with the U.S. average of 57
percent—and its highest poverty rate. Roughly
half of America’s homeless live in Los Angeles
property crime rate among major cities. California
hasn’t yet become a full-scale dystopia, of
course, but it’s heading in a troubling direction.
This didn’t have to happen. No place on earth has more going for
it than the Golden State. Unlike the East Coast and Midwest, California
benefited from comparatively late industrialization, with an economy based less
on auto manufacturing and steel than on science-based fields like aerospace,
software, and semiconductors. In the mid-twentieth century, the state also
gained from the best aspects of progressive rule, culminating in an elite
public university system, a massive water system reminiscent of the Roman Empire,
and a vast infrastructure network of highways, ports, and bridges. The state
was fortunate, too, in drawing people from around the U.S. and the world. The
eighteenth-century French traveler J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur described the American as “this new man,” and
California—innovative, independent, and less bound by tradition or old
prejudice—reflected that insight. Though remnants of this California still
exist, its population is aging, less mobile, and more pessimistic, and its
roads, schools, and universities are in decline.
In the second half of the twentieth
century, California’s remarkably diverse economy spread prosperity from the coast
into the state’s inland regions. Though pockets of severe poverty existed—urban
barrios, south Los Angeles, the rural Central Valley—they were limited in
scope. In fact, growth often favored suburban and
exurban communities, where middle-class families, including minorities, settled
after World War II.
In the last two decades, the state has adopted policies that
undermine the basis for middle-class growth. State energy policies, for
example, have made California’s gas and electricity prices among the steepest
in the country. Since 2011, electricity prices have risen five times faster than the
national average. Meantime, strict land-use controls have raised housing costs
to the nation’s highest, while taxes—once average, considering
California’s urban scale—now exceed those of virtually every state. At the same time, California’s economy has shed industrial
diversity in favor of dependence on one industry: Big Tech. Just a decade
before, the state’s largest firms included those in the aerospace, finance,
energy, and service industries. Today’s 11 largest companies hail from the tech
sector, while energy firms—excluding Chevron, which has moved much of its
operations to Houston—have disappeared. Not a single top
aerospace firm—the iconic industry of twentieth-century California—retains its
headquarters here.
Though lionized in the press, this tech-oriented economy hasn’t
resulted in that many middle- and high-paying job opportunities for
Californians, particularly outside the Bay Area. Since 2008, notes Chapman
University’s Marshall Toplansky, the state has created five times the number of
low-paying, as opposed to high-wage, jobs. A remarkable 86 percent of new jobs
paid below the median income, while almost half paid under $40,000. Moreover,
California, including Silicon Valley, created fewer high-paying positions than
the national average, and far less than prime competitors like Salt Lake City,
Seattle, or Austin. Los Angeles County features the lowest pay of any of the
nation’s 50 largest counties.
No state advertises its multicultural
bona fides more than California, now a majority-minority state. This is evident
at the University of California, where professors are required to prove their service to “people
of color,” to the state’s high school curricula, with its new ethnic studies component. Much of California’s
anti-Trump resistance has a racial context.
State
Attorney General Xavier Becerra has
sued
the administration numerous times over
immigration
policy while he helps ensure
California’s
distinction as a sanctuary for illegal
residents have
received driver’s licenses, and
San Francisco now permits illegal immigrants
Such
radical policies may make progressives feel better about themselves, though
they seem less concerned about how these actions affect everyday people.
California’s Latinos and African-Americans have seen good blue-collar jobs in
manufacturing and energy vanish. According to one United Way study, over half of
Latino households can barely pay their bills. “For Latinos,” notes long-time
political consultant Mike Madrid, “the
California Dream is becoming an unattainable fantasy.”
In the past, poorer Californians could count on education to
help them move up. But today’s educators appear more
interested in political indoctrination than results. Among
the
income students. In wealthy San
Francisco, test scores for black students are the worst of any California county. Many
minority residents, especially African-Americans, are fleeing the state. In a
recent UC Berkeley poll, 58 percent of black expressed interest in leaving
California, a higher percentage than for any racial group, though approximately
45 percent of Asians and Latinos also considered moving out.
Perhaps the biggest demographic disaster is generational. For
decades, California incubated youth culture, creating trends like beatniks, hippies,
surfers, and Latino and Asian art, music, and cuisine. The state is a
fountainhead of youthful wokeness and rebellion, but that may
prove short-lived as millennials leave. From 2014 to 2018, notes demographer
Wendell Cox, net domestic out-migration grew from 46,000 to 156,000. The exiles
are increasingly in their family-formation years. In the 2010s, California
suffered higher net declines in virtually every age category under 54, with the
biggest rate of loss coming among the 35-to-44 cohort.
As families with children leave, and international migration slows
to one-third of Texas’s level, the remaining population is rapidly aging. Since
2010, California’s fertility rate has dropped 60 percent, more than the
national average; the state is now aging 50 percent more rapidly than the rest
of the country. A growing number of tech firms and millennials have headed to
the Intermountain West. Low rates of
homeownership among younger people play a big role in this trend, with
California millennials forced to rent, with little
chance of buying their own home, while many of the state’s biggest metros lead the nation in long-term owners. California is increasingly a greying refuge for those who bought
property when housing was affordable.
After Governor Schwarzenegger morphed
into a progressive environmentalist, climate concerns began driving state
policy. His successors have embraced California “leadership” on climate issues.
Jerry Brown recently told a crowd in China that the
rest of the world should follow California’s example. The state’s top
Democrats, like state senate president pro tem Kevin DeLeon, Los Angeles mayor
Eric Garcetti, and billionaire Democratic presidential candidate Tom Steyer,
now compete for the green mantle.
Their policies have worsened conditions for many
middle- and working-class Californians. Oblivious to these concerns, Greens
ignore practical ideas—nuclear power, natural gas cars, job creation in
affordable areas, home-based work—that could help reduce emissions without
disrupting people’s lives. Ultra-green policies also work against the
state’s proclaimed goal of building
more than 3.5 million new housing units by 2025. In accordance with its efforts
to reduce car use, the state mandates that most growth occurs in
already-crowded coastal areas, where land prices are highest. But in cities
like San Francisco, the cost of building one unit for a homeless
person surpasses $700,000. California’s inland regions, though experiencing
population gains, keep losing state funding for decrepit highways in favor of
urban-centric, mass transit projects—yet transit use has stagnated, especially
in greater Los Angeles.
The state, nevertheless, continues its pursuit of policies that
would eliminate all fossil fuels and nuclear power—outpacing national or even
Paris Accord levels and guaranteeing ever-rising energy prices. Mandating
everything from electric cars to electric homes will only
drive more working-class Californians into “energy poverty.” High energy prices
also directly affect the manufacturing and logistics firms that employ
blue-collar workers at decent wages. Business relocation expert Joe Vranich notes that industrial firms
account for many of the 2,000 employers that left the state this decade.
California’s industrial growth has fallen to the bottom tier of states; last year, it
ranked 44th, with a rate of growth one-third to one-quarter that of prime
competitors like Texas, Virginia, Arizona, Nevada, and Florida.
Similarly, the high energy prices tend to hit the interior
counties that, besides being poorer, have far less temperate climates. Cities
like Bakersfield, capital of the state’s
once-vibrant oil industry, are particularly hard-hit. High energy prices will
cost the region, northeast of the Los Angeles Basin, 14,000 generally high-paid
jobs, even as the state continues to import oil from Saudi Arabia.
California’s leaders apply climate change to excuse virtually
every failure of state policy. During the California drought, Brown and his minions blamed the
“climate” for the dry period, refusing to take responsibility for insufficient water storage that would have
helped farmers. When the rains returned and reservoirs filled, this argument
was forgotten, and little effort has been made to conserve water for next time.
Likewise, Newsom and his supporters in the media have blamed recent fires on
changes in the global climate, but the disaster had as much to do with green
mandates against controlled burns and brush clearance than anything
occurring on a planetary scale. Brown joined greens and others in blocking such sensible
policies.
Few climate advocates ever seem to ask if their policies actually
help the planet. Indeed, California’s green policy, as one paper demonstrates, may be
increasing total greenhouse-gas emissions by pushing people and industries to
states with less mild climates. In the past decade, the state ranked 40th in
per-capita reductions, and its global carbon footprint is minimal. Renewable
energy may be expensive and unreliable, but state policy nevertheless enriches the green-energy investments
of tech leaders, even when their efforts—like
the Google-backed Ivanpah solar farm—fail to deliver
affordable, reliable energy.
It’s not so surprising, given these enthusiasms,
leads a city with paralyzing traffic congestion,
proliferating homeless camps—would rather talk
about becoming chair of the C40 Cities Climate
Leadership Group.
Reality is asserting itself, though. Tech firms already show signs
of restlessness with the current regulatory regime and appear to be
shifting employment to other states, notably Texas, Tennessee, Nevada, Colorado, and Arizona. Economic-modeling firm Emsi estimates that several states—Idaho,
Tennessee, Washington, and Utah—are growing their tech employment faster than
California. The state is losing momentum in professional and technical
services—the largest high-wage sector—and now stands roughly in the middle of
the pack behind other western states such as Texas, Tennessee, and Florida. And
Assembly Bill 5, the state law regulating certain forms of contract labor, reclassifies part-time workers.
Aimed initially at ride-sharing giants Uber and Lyft, the legislation also extends to
independent contractors in industries from media to trucking.
At some point, as even Brown noted, the ultra-high capital
gains returns will fall and, combined with the costs of an expanding welfare
state, could leave the state in fiscal chaos. Big Tech could stumble, a possibility
made more real by the recent $100 billion drop in the value of
privately held “unicorn” companies, including WeWork. If the tech economy
slows, a rift could develop between two of the state’s biggest forces—unions
and the green establishment—over future levels of taxation. More than two-thirds of California cities don’t
have any funds set aside for retiree health care and other retirement expenses.
The state also confronts $1 trillion in pension debt, according to former
Democratic state senator Joe Nation. U.S. News & Report ranks
California, despite the tech boom, 42nd in fiscal health among the states.
The good news: some Californians are waking up. A recent PPIC poll found that
increasing proportions of Californians believe that the state is headed in the
wrong direction—a figure that exceeds 55 percent in the inland areas. And voters dislike the state legislature even more than they dislike Donald Trump. Newsom’s approval rating stands at 43
percent, placing him toward the bottom among the nation’s
governors. A conservative-led campaign to recall him is unlikely to succeed, but surveys reveal
growing opposition to the new tax hikes proposed by the legislature. There’s a growing
concern about the state’s expanding homeless population.
And a rebellion against the state’s energy policies is already
under way. Recently, 110 cities, with total population exceeding 8
million, have demanded changes in California’s drive to prevent new natural gas
hookups. The state’s Chamber of Commerce and the three most prominent
ethnic chambers—African-American, Latino, and Asian-Pacific—have joined this
effort.
Californians need less bombast and progressive pretense from their
leaders and more attention to policies that could counteract the economic and
demographic tides threatening the state. On its current course,
California increasingly resembles a model of what the late Taichi Sakaiya
called “high-tech feudalism,” with a small population of wealthy residents and
a growing mass of modern-day serfs. Delusion and preening ultimately
have limits, as more Californians are beginning to recognize. As the 2020s
beckon, the time for the state to change course is now.
Joel Kotkin is the presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University
and executive director of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His latest book
is The Human City: Urbanism for
the Rest of Us. His book on the return to
feudalism will be released next year.
Report:
California ‘Entirely’ Responsible for Nation’s Rise in Homelessness
20 Dec 20192,076
2:41
The
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development reported Friday that the
nation’s homeless population rose 2.7% as of January 2019, an increase it said
was “entirely” driven by a rise of 16.4% in the state of California.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development is reporting its
third consecutive increase in its homelessness projection, based on a summary
of its annual report obtained by the Associated Press.
President Trump has been highly critical of the homeless problem
in California, and HUD said the increase seen in its January snapshot was
caused “entirely” by a 16.4% increase in the state’s homeless population.
“As we look across our nation, we see great progress, but we’re
also seeing a continued increase in street homelessness along our West Coast
where the cost of housing is extremely high,” HUD Secretary Ben Carson said.
“In fact, homelessness in California is at a crisis level and needs to be
addressed by local and state leaders with crisis-like urgency.”
…
In the January 2018 count, almost 553,000 people were counted as
homeless. That number rose to about 568,000 this year.
The number of homeless veterans, and the number of homeless
families with children, dropped.
It is not clear whether the rise in California is wholly
California’s fault. Homeless people from other states often relocate to
California, partly because the winter weather is more tolerable (though also
because of generous welfare benefits).
President Donald Trump has proposed federal intervention in
California to help solve the problem. HUD Secretary Ben Carson recently visited
the state to assess the problem.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom told Breitbart News on Thursday
evening that the homeless crisis is “an embarrassment, it is unacceptable. And
we’ve got to own it, we’ve got to own up and solve it.”
Volume 90%
However, he has pushed back against federal intervention, saying
more federal money is needed, but not federal control.
Joel B.
Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social
Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a
J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak
Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How
Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from
Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
Illegal Immigration Is the Reason California Is
Burning
By Wayne Allyn Root
Newsmax.com, October 31, 2019
. . .
https://www.newsmax.com/wayneallynroot/california-fires-power-outage-immigration/2019/10/31/id/939607/
Illegal Immigration Is the Reason
California Is Burning
A
firefighting helicopter makes a water drop over the Easy Fire on October 30,
2019, near Simi Valley, California. (David McNew/Getty Images)
·
·
·
·
California is collapsing in front of our eyes. Everyone with the
money and common sense is running for their lives. The question is why is this
happening to such a rich and beautiful state?
Let's start with a comparison of the taxes in California with my
state of Nevada (right next door to California). While California was burying
its citizens with among the nation’s highest personal income taxes, highest
corporate income taxes, highest sales taxes, and highest gas taxes, Nevada’s
citizens have enjoyed among the lowest taxes in the country.
That could be why millions of people have left California in the
past decade — almost all for the low tax states like Nevada, Texas, Florida,
Utah, Colorado, Washington, and Arizona. Those states lead the nation in
population growth, while California and other high tax, blue states lead the
nation in population loss.
Keep in mind this was all before the
nonstop blackouts and $6 per gallon gas in California.
Who can live in a place where the electric utility company shuts
off the power to homes and businesses for days on end, multiple times per year?
Because the wind is blowing hard? California has truly become a Third World
Nation.
Keep in mind, this is what you got for all those high taxes.
So why is this happening? I lived in California for 15 wonderful
years. The winds howled back then too. We had 80 MPH Santa Ana winds. And
plenty of fires, floods, mudslides, and earthquakes. I lived through all of
them. My home almost burned three times. My car was almost carried away by a
massive mudslide.
Yet in my 15 years in California, no one shut off electricity
because the wind was blowing. No one shut off electricity because there was the
threat of a fire.
I’m not a California hater. I loved my time in California. It is
the most beautiful state in America, with the greatest weather. But something
has dramatically changed since I left. Today I wouldn’t live there if you gave
me a $5 million oceanfront mansion for free.
What’s changed is disastrous liberal policy.
Lots of liberal ideas ruined California: high taxes, stifling
regulations, climate change policy, permissive policies towards homeless
encampments, the highest welfare benefits in the nation, a $15 minimum wage.
It’s impossible to run a business in California. Restaurants are closing by the
hundreds.
And did I mention poop, pee, and drug needles in the streets? And
homeless camps everywhere.
Now add in blackouts that make life
miserable and bankrupt businesses.
California has become an unlivable third-
world hellhole.
But despite all those liberal policies that have contributed to
the rot of California, one issue is at the root of California’s current
problems. One issue stands heads and tails above all the rest.
First and foremost, illegal immigration is the problem. Since I
left two decades ago, California has collectively spent hundreds of billions of
dollars on illegal aliens and their bills — public schools, free meals at
school, special bi-lingual teachers, healthcare, housing allowances, low income
energy assistance, aid to families with dependent children, prisons, cops,
courts, public defenders, welfare, food stamps, and a hundred other government
handouts. And don’t forget special lower college tuition for illegal
immigrants.
Can you imagine if all those billions of dollars were instead
spent on new infrastructure, moving power poles underground, upgraded
electrical equipment, modernized electrical systems, homeless vets, more cops,
and better schools for children born in California. Can you imagine what a
better place California would be for its own citizens?
Think about it in personal terms. What if a husband and father has
a drug problem. He's addicted to cocaine or heroin. He spends $20,000 a year on
his drug addiction for 20 years. That's $400,000. But his life remains in control.
Until one day he finds out his child has cancer. The bill is $100,000 (after
insurance pays). But he doesn't have the $100,000. His child is dying. If only
he had the $400,000 back that he wasted on drugs.
That's California and illegal immigration. The state has
squandered hundreds of billions on illegal immigration in the 20 years since
I've been gone. They could use that money today. They desperately need it back
to pay for the hundred billion dollar job of upgrading and modernizing their
electric grid.
But they don't have the money. It's all
been wasted on illegal aliens. And it's
gone forever.
I guarantee you one thing Californians: if you had all that money
back, you wouldn’t be sitting in the dark.
In my next column, I’ll get to Part II of the disastrous mistakes
of liberalism that have destroyed California. Think idiotic environmental
policies and climate change fraud.
That's another few hundred billion dollars wasted — and gone
forever. Think about that, as you sit in the dark, shivering or sizzling, with
your food spoiling.
Think about that as you fill up your gas tank with $5 our $6 per
gallon gas, driving on crumbling highways, in massive traffic jams.
All the money to fix your misery was spent
on illegal aliens, not you. How does that
make you feel?
Trust me, if you impeach President Trump and elect Democrats to
run the country, Democrats will turn the whole America into one big crappy,
miserable, unlivable California.
Except you won't even get the sunshine and perfect 75 degree days.
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Wage inequality is
surging in California — and not just on the coast. Here’s why
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-10-10/wage-inequality-is-surging-in-california-and-not-just-on-the-coast-heres-why
OCT. 10, 2019
Wage inequality has risen more in
California cities than in the metropolitan areas of any other state, with seven
of the nation’s 15 most unequal cities located in the Golden State.
San Jose, with its concentration of
Silicon Valley technology jobs, had the largest gap of any California metro
area between those at the top of the pay scale and those at the bottom. It
ranked second in the nation after the suburb of Fairfield, Conn., home to
wealthy New York financiers, according to a new analysis of 2015 U.S. Census
data by Federal Reserve economists. San Francisco and Los Angeles also ranked
high on the list.
More surprising, perhaps, is the inclusion
of Bakersfield, where high-wage engineering jobs are juxtaposed with
poverty-wage farm work.
The heavy concentration of California
metro areas is a striking turnabout from 1980, when just three figured in the
top 15.
As inequality has soared across the United
States, most sharply since the 1980s, it has been the focus of widespread
debate and become a hot political issue. But less attention has focused on
dramatic geographical differences in inequality.
“Wage inequality … has risen quite sharply
in some parts of the country, while it has been much more subdued in other
places,” wrote Jaison Abel and Richard Deitz, economists at the Federal Reserve
Bank of New York, who titled their report, “Why Are Some Places So Much More Unequal than Others?”
“Rising inequality in the United States
has largely been an urban phenomenon,” they added.
Large cities with dynamic economies tend
to have higher wage disparities, while midsized cities with “sluggish
economies” are less unequal because they attract fewer high-wage workers, the
authors found.
Nationally, outsized executive pay has
become a major issue. Under President Obama, the federal Securities and
Exchange Commission ordered corporations to publicly report the ratio between
what top executives are paid and what their median workers earn, drawing
attention to big compensation packages. But the new tax law backed by President Trump and
congressional Republicans cut income taxes for top
earners.
The new Federal Reserve study only
addresses wages and does not examine growing disparities in assets such as real
estate and stocks, the focus of recent calls by progressive politicians to impose a wealth
tax on
the rich.
U.S. wages have grown “much more rapidly
for highly skilled workers at the top of the wage distribution than for those
in the middle or at the bottom,” the authors wrote. “A worker in the 95th
percentile of the wage distribution earns more than three times what the median
worker earns and more than seven times the earnings of a worker at the 10th
percentile, well above what these ratios were just a few decades ago.”
Comparing wage data from 1980 to 2015 in
200 metropolitan areas, Abel and Deitz documented a disproportionate rise in
inequality in the most populous cities, like Los Angeles, New York and Houston.
By contrast, the pay gap has remained largely flat in midsized Midwestern and
Southern cities, such as Wasau, Wisc., Fort Wayne, Ind., and Ocala, Fla.
The report focused on what the authors
call the 90/10 ratio: the difference between the earnings of workers in the
90th percentile of wage distribution and those in the 10th percentile. But the
disparities were reflected throughout pay levels.
“In 1980, there was virtually no
relationship between city size and the level of wage inequality,” according to
the report. “None of the 10 largest metropolitan areas ranked among the
nation’s most unequal places.… By 2015, five of the 10 largest areas ranked
among the most unequal in the country.”
A scene on the streets of San
Francisco.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles
Times)
In San Francisco, inflation-adjusted wages
grew by 18% between 1980 and 2015 for the bottom 10% of the workforce. For
those paid at the median — with half of wage earners making less and half
making more — pay rose by 53%. And for those at the top, earning in the 95th
percentile, pay rose a whopping 122%, according to the paper.
In Los Angeles, over the same 35 years,
inflation-adjusted pay rose by just 3% for those in the bottom 10%, and by 18%
for those at the median wage. For workers at the top, earning in the 95th
percentile, pay rose by 69%.
Ranking 200 metro areas by pay disparities
over time, Abel and Dietz found that San Francisco skyrocketed from 128th most
unequal in 1980 to eighth in 2015. Over the same period, San Jose jumped from
70th to second and Los Angeles rose from 26th to 12th most unequal.
If the explosive inequality in the Bay
Area is easily attributable to a massive expansion of high-paid tech jobs, the
fact that Bakersfield ranked in the top tier for unequal pay in both 1980
(12th) and in 2015 (fourth) may be less obvious.
Cal State Bakersfield economist Richard
Gearhart said inequality is pronounced in the city of 380,000 people because it
has “a highly segmented labor market — either really well paying or really
poorly paying. We don’t have a flourishing ‘middle-class’ economy for IT,
managers, and finance.”
With robust oil and agriculture
industries, the city has six-figure engineering and science jobs. But it also
has some 40,000 local farmworkers, many of whom are paid on a piece rate,
earning below the legal minimum wage, Gearhart added.
As for Los Angeles, Christopher Thornberg,
a partner at the consultancy Beacon Economics, said the city has “high-income
folks in entertainment and some in tech. But it also has an enormous
low-skilled population working in restaurants, hotels, janitorial services and
back offices.”
The fact that Los Angeles rose in the
inequality ranking over 35 years can be partly attributed to “a huge influx of
low-skilled Latin Americans into L.A. County since 1980,” he said. Moreover, he
added, “L.A. was once an enormous manufacturing center. But since 1990,
manufacturing jobs have dropped from about 850,000 to 350,000.”
According to the Federal Reserve study,
growing inequality in large cities is driven by the contrast between rapidly
rising wages of the best-paid workers, and far more modest increases for
medium- and low-wage workers.
Several factors explain the trend, the
report indicates:
·
Big cities have more need for skilled
workers. Think programmers in San Jose and San Francisco, and finance
executives in New York. On the other hand, as automation and globalization have
cut the demand for middle- and low-skilled workers, cities such as Detroit and
Youngstown, Ohio, where thousands of auto and steel industry jobs disappeared,
experienced wage stagnation.
·
What economists call “urban agglomeration
economies” — the way that companies in related businesses cluster together in
dense metropolitan areas — spurs higher productivity and higher wages. This
clustering tends to favor higher-skilled workers, research shows. Think
Hollywood.
·
The weakening of labor unions led to less
worker bargaining power to create middle-class jobs. And the erosion in the inflation-adjusted
value of the federal minimum wage over decades has kept pay low for those in
the bottom tier, although many states are now raising pay floors.
·
Migration within the U.S. is changing the
employment mix, with better-skilled professionals moving to cities to earn
more. “Since the early 1980s, those with college and graduate degrees have
flocked to large cities, while lesser-skilled workers have increasingly been
priced out of such places, in large part because of high and rising housing costs,”
the authors write.
In California, the migration trend has been pronounced.
The state attracts a steady stream of college graduates, especially from the
East Coast, even as many less-educated residents move to neighboring states —
and to Texas — in search of a lower cost of living.
In 2017, according to the
latest U.S. Census migration data, the Golden State lost a net 86,890 residents
without bachelor’s degrees, and just 4,443 with four-year degrees. It gained
11,653 people with graduate degrees.
OPEN BORDERS: IT’S ALL ABOUT KEEPING WAGES
DEPRESSED!
"In the decade following the
financial crisis of 2007-2008, the capitalist class has delivered powerful
blows to the social position of the working class. As a result, the working
class in the US, the world’s “richest country,” faces levels of economic
hardship not seen since the 1930s."
"Inequality has reached unprecedented
levels: the wealth of America’s three richest people now equals the net
worth of the poorest half of the US population."
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