When Biden took office, one of his first acts was the elimination of our border security. Like a power-hungry dictator, Biden simply decided to ignore our immigration laws. His catastrophic border policy resulted in untold millions of unidentified foreign citizens from around the world pouring into our country. Its impact is now being felt in cities across the country. The worst is yet to come. PETER LEMISKA - AND WE'RE ALREADY THERE!!!
Saturday, December 21, 2019
STAGGERING ECONOMIC INEQUALITY, HOMELESSNESS AND ILLEGALS IN NANCY PELOSI AND DIANNE FEINSTEIN'S STATE OF CALIFORNIA "In the last two decades, the state has adopted policies that undermine the basis for middle-class growth"
CALIFORNIA HANDS ILLEGALS TENS OF BILLIONS IN WELFARE AND SOCIAL SERVICES TO KEEP THEM COMING AND VOTING DEMOCRAT FOR MORE! "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.
“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- feudal kingdom, with the nation’s widest
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 or San Francisco, which now has the highest 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 immigrants. So far, more than 1 million illegal
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 50 states, California ranked 49th in the performance of low- 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, that progressive politicians like Garcetti—who leads a city with paralyzing traffic congestion, rampant inequality, a huge rat infestation, and 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 Kotkinis 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.
MULTI-CULTURALISM and the creation of a
one-party globalist country to serve the rich in America’s open borders.
“Open border advocates, such as Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg,
claim illegal aliens are a net benefit to California with little evidence to
support such an assertion. As the CIS has documented, the vast majority of
illegals are poor, uneducated, and with few skills. How does accepting millions
of illegal aliens and then granting them access to dozens of welfare programs
benefit California’s economy? If illegals were contributing to the economy in
any meaningful way, CA, with its 2.6 million illegals, would be booming.” STEVE
BALDWIN – AMERICAN SPECTATOR
Josh Hawley: GOP Must Defend Middle
Class Americans Against ‘Concentrated Corporate Power,’ Tech Billionaires
The
Republican Party must defend America’s working and middle class against
“concentrated corporate power” and the monopolization of entire sectors of the
United States’ economy, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) says.
In an interview on The Realignment podcast,
Hawley said that “long gone are the days where” American workers can depend on
big business to look out for their needs and the needs of their communities.
Instead, Hawley explained that increasing “concentrated
corporate power” of whole sectors of the American economy — specifically among
Silicon Valley’s giant tech conglomerates — is at the expense of working and
middle class Americans.
“One of the things Republicans need to recover today is a
defense of an open, free-market, of a fair healthy competing market and the
length between that and Democratic citizenship,” Hawley said, and continued:
At the end of the day, we are trying to support and sustain here
a great democracy. We’re not trying to make a select group of people rich.
They’ve already done that. The tech billionaires are already billionaires, they
don’t need any more help from government. I’m not interested in trying to help
them further. I’m interested in trying to help sustain the great middle of this
country that makes our democracy run and that’s the most important challenge of
this day.
“You have these businesses who for years now have said ‘Well,
we’re based in the United States, but we’re not actually an American company,
we’re a global company,'” Hawley said. “And you know, what has driven profits
for some of our biggest multinational corporations? It’s been … moving jobs
overseas where it’s cheaper … moving your profits out of this country so you
don’t have to pay any taxes.”
“I think that we have here at the same time that our economy has
become more concentrated, we have bigger and bigger corporations that control
more and more of our key sectors, those same corporations see themselves as
less and less American and frankly they are less committed to American workers
and American communities,” Hawley continued. “That’s turned out to be a problem
which is one of the reasons we need to restore good, healthy, robust
competition in this country that’s going to push up wages, that’s going to
bring jobs back to the middle parts of this country, and most importantly, to
the middle and working class of this country.”
While multinational corporations monopolize industries, Hawley
said the GOP must defend working and middle class Americans and that big
business interests should not come before the needs of American communities:
A free market is one where you can enter it, where there are new
ideas, and also by the way, where people can start a small family business, you
shouldn’t have to be gigantic in order to succeed in this country. Most people
don’t want to start a tech company. [Americans] maybe want to work in
their family’s business, which may be some corner shop in a small town …
they want to be able to make a living and then give that to their kids or give
their kids an option to do that. [Emphasis added]
The problem with corporate concentration is that it tends to
kill all of that. The worst thing about corporate concentration is that it
inevitably believes to a partnership with big government. Big business and
big government always get together, always. And that is exactly what has
happened now with the tech sector, for instance, and arguably many other
sectors where you have this alliance between big government and big business …
whatever you call it, it’s a problem and it’s something we need to address.
[Emphasis added]
Hawley blasted the free trade-at-all-costs doctrine that has
dominated the Republican and Democrat Party establishments for decades,
crediting the globalist economic model with hollowing “out entire industries,
entire supply chains” and sending them to China, among other countries.
“The thing is in this country is that not only do we not make
very much stuff anymore, we don’t even make the machines that make the stuff,”
Hawley said. “The entire supply chain up and down has gone overseas, and a lot
of it to China, and this is a result of policies over some decades now.”
As Breitbart News reported, Hawley detailed in the interview
how Republicans like former President George H.W. Bush’s ‘New World Order’
agenda and Democrats have helped to create a corporatist economy that
disproportionately benefits the nation’s richest executives and donor class.
The billionaire class, the top 0.01 percent of earners, has
enjoyed more than 15 times as
much wage growth as the bottom 90 percent since 1979. That economy has been
reinforced with federal rules that largely benefits the wealthiest of
wealthiest earners. A study released last month
revealed that the richest Americans are, in fact, paying a lower tax rate than
all other Americans.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on
Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
Economists: America’s Elite Pay Lower Tax Rate Than All Other
Americans
The wealthiest
Americans are paying a lower tax rate than all other Americans, groundbreaking
analysis from a pair of economists reveals.
For the
first time on record, the wealthiest 400 Americans in 2018 paid a lower tax
rate than all of the income groups in the United States, research highlighted by the New York Times from
University of California, Berkeley, economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel
Zucman finds.
The
analysis concludes that the country’s top economic elite are paying lower
federal, state, and local tax rates than the nation’s working and middle class.
Overall, these top 400 wealthy Americans paid just a 23 percent tax rate, which
the Times‘ op-ed columnist David Leonhardt notes is a
combined tax payment of “less than one-quarter of their total income.”
This 23
percent tax rate for the rich means their rate has been slashed by 47
percentage points since 1950 when their tax rate was 70 percent.
(Screenshot
via the New York Times)
The
analysis finds that the 23 percent tax rate for the wealthiest Americans is
less than every other income group in the U.S. — including those earning
working and middle-class incomes, as a Times graphic shows.
Leonhardt
writes:
For
middle-class and poor families, the picture is different. Federal
income taxes have also declined modestly for these families, but they haven’t
benefited much if at all from the decline in the corporate tax or estate tax. And
they now pay more in payroll taxes (which finance Medicare and Social
Security) than in the past. Over all, their taxes have remained fairly flat.
[Emphasis added]
The report
comes as Americans increasingly see a growing divide between the rich and
working class, as the Pew Research Center has found.
Sen. Josh
Hawley (R-MO), the leading economic nationalist in the Senate, has warned
against the Left-Right coalition’s consensus on open trade, open markets, and
open borders, a plan that he has called an economy that works solely for the
elite.
“The same
consensus says that we need to pursue and embrace economic globalization and
economic integration at all costs — open markets, open borders, open trade,
open everything no matter whether it’s actually good for American national
security or for American workers or for American families or for American
principles … this is the elite consensus that has governed our politics
for too long and what it has produced is a politics of elite ambition,”
Hawley said in an August speech in the
Senate.
That
increasing worry of rapid income inequality is only further justified by
economic research showing a rise in servant-class jobs,
strong economic recovery for elite zip codes but not for working-class
regions, and skyrocketing wage growth for the billionaire class at 15 times
the rate of other Americans.
John
Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
Census Says U.S.
Income Inequality Grew ‘Significantly’ in 2018
(Bloomberg) -- Income
inequality in America widened “significantly” last year, according to a U.S.
Census Bureau report published Thursday.
A measure of inequality
known as the Gini index rose to 0.485 from 0.482 in 2017, according to the
bureau’s survey of household finances. The measure compares incomes at the top
and bottom of the distribution, and a score of 0 is perfect equality.
The 2018 reading is the
first to incorporate
the impact of President Donald Trump’s end-
2017 tax bill, which was reckoned by many
economists to be skewed in favor of the
wealthy.
But the distribution of
income and wealth in the U.S. has been worsening for decades, making America
the most unequal country in the developed world. The trend, which has persisted
through recessions and recoveries, and under administrations of both parties,
has put inequality at the center of U.S. politics.
Leading candidates for
the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, including senators Elizabeth
Warren and Bernie Sanders, are promising to rectify the tilt toward the rich
with measures such as taxes on wealth or financial transactions.
Just five states --
California, Connecticut, Florida, Louisiana and New York, plus the District of
Columbia and Puerto Rico -- had Gini indexes higher than the national level,
while the reading was lower in 36 states.
Federal homelessness chief has harsh words for California: ‘You can’t tell me it’s working’
Robert Marbut is brand-new to his job as executive director of the agency that coordinates the federal government’s response to homelessness. But he is already criticizing the work being done to get people off the streets in California.
“If [it] was working, California should have the lowest numbers in the country, and it should be reducing,” he told The Times. “And instead for the last five years, it has gone the other direction. So you can’t tell me it’s working. ... To me, it’s that simple.”
For a state that is home to nearly a quarter of the country’s homeless population, these could be ominous words from a man who, as head of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, has sway over federal policy on homelessness and housing.
Since the summer, President Trump has been railing against Los Angeles and San Francisco for failing to get a handle on a growing number of homeless encampments. He has threatened to bring in the federal government, and rumors continue to swirl that the administration is drafting an executive order to crack down on homelessness, though it has yet to come to fruition and federal officials have offered few details of what it would entail.
“Homelessness has become a crisis that cannot be ignored,” White House spokesman Judd Deere said in a statement. “Earlier this year, President Trump directed his team to study the issue, including visiting areas where the crisis has become most extreme, and develop a range of common sense policy options for consideration to solve the problem. While some governors and mayors have helped create this situation only to ignore it, President Trump is not going to sit idly by.”
The appointment of Marbut has particularly concerned homeless advocates. As a Texas-based consultant, he spent years working for cities struggling with homelessness, and has long encouraged elected officials to stop coddling people on the streets, including by blocking charities from handing out food.
His philosophy is broadly in line with many of the Trump administration’s views.
In his interview with The Times, Marbut declined to say how he was vetted or selected for his new role. He declined to say whether he had spoken to the president. And he declined to say anything about future plans the administration has to address homelessness.
“We’re focused on where the humanitarian crises are now, and right now that is disproportionately the West Coast — and it’s pronounced in California,” he said. “And that’s just the fact of the numbers.”
Marbut pointed out that roughly 1,000 homeless people died in Los Angeles County in 2018 — nearly double the number from six years ago. Another 1,000 are likely to die by the end of this year. If the city, county or state’s plan for stemming the rising tide of people sleeping on the streets was effective, Marbut said, that wouldn’t be the case.
“I hate to make it this simplistic, but it really is this simplistic: If what was working was working, the numbers in California would be dramatically dropping and they’re not,” he said. “So that’s why the president is so focused and so concerned.”
California has faced a complex confluence of skyrocketing housing prices, a shortage of affordable housing, and insufficient services to help the swelling numbers of people who have lost their homes or are on the verge of it. At the same time, Los Angeles has created a large outreach system and invested in the construction of thousands of units of supportive housing that are expected to be built in the coming years.
L.A. officials are quick to trumpet the tens of thousands of people they have gotten off the streets, but it’s become like bailing water out of a sinking ship. Every day in 2018, about 130 homeless people moved into housing, but another 150 people became homeless, according to county officials.
In a recent report, the White House Council of Economic Advisors blamed “decades of misguided and faulty policies” for putting too many restrictions on development and causing home prices to rise to unaffordable levels. It also posited that “more tolerable conditions for sleeping on the streets” increased the homeless population.
That squares with advice Marbut has given as a consultant. Some of his recommendations, such as having a single case management system for homeless people, fall squarely into mainstream best practices. But others don’t.
For example, he has repeatedly told cities that panhandling, as well as feeding the homeless, must be stopped because both enable homeless people to stay on the streets. This has led him to push cities to crack down on loitering and sleeping in public places.
But in the interview with The Times, he said his advice wasn’t that cut and dried.
“It was not don’t feed. It was don’t feed in Place X,” he said. “Move the feeding to the other services providers, so you have a more holistic use of services.”
Still, this view has been roundly criticized by homeless advocates, who say it’s ineffective and relies on the faulty assumption that homeless people stay on the street because handouts of food and money make it more hospitable.
Marbut recently met with about 30 housing and homeless advocates in Washington shortly after assuming the job at the Interagency Council. Many were critical of his past approaches.
Separately, 75 House Democrats also sent a letter to Trump calling for him not to appoint Marbut to the post. It didn’t work.
“What he recommends can be very appealing to people who believe homelessness is an individual failing and believe that the reason people have mental illness or addiction is because they refuse to take care of themselves,” said Barbara Poppe, a former executive director of the Interagency Council. “It blames them for the situation they’re in, as opposed to looking at what are the solutions that actually are successful at helping them address their health issues and their housing issues.”
The agency that Marbut now runs sits at the center of more than a dozen federal agencies that all have a hand in working on homelessness, including the departments of Housing and Urban Development, Veterans Affairs, and Health and Human Services. The Interagency Council doesn’t make direct funding decisions for programs, but it can create strategic plans to tackle homelessness, as it did under Poppe, and then roll those plans out to local communities and nonprofits.
Poppe says that her fear is that Marbut — at the behest of his like-minded colleagues in the Trump administration — will encourage ideas that focus too much on criminalizing homelessness and reduce a focus on getting people into long term housing.
She has personal experience. She was paid by Fresno Housing Authority to help address homelessness after the Central Valley city opted not to take Marbut’s advice.
The local business community had banded together to hire Marbut in 2013 to do a top-to-bottom assessment of the city’s homeless resources. It included Marbut going undercover and living on the streets for a time.
Marbut told one Fresno official that he would avoid bathing for a few days and then a pour a beer on himself so that he would fit in. Marbut didn’t dispute this in his interview with The Times and said that he found that “becoming homeless” — as he called it in his report — offers insight that can’t be gleaned any other way.
He recommended that Fresno build a shelter similar to the one he had helped create in San Antonio. Hundreds of homeless people slept in an outdoor courtyard at the facility with the hope that it would act as an incentive to enter Haven for Hope, which had rules including sobriety.
Preston Prince, executive director of the Fresno Housing Authority, visited San Antonio and met with Marbut. He said he was worried that Marbut’s recommendations for Fresno would be a departure from the “housing first” model, the widely accepted strategy that prioritizes getting people indoors and then helping them.
Prince also said they struggled to find data showing that the Texas shelter got people into permanent housing.
Fresno officials ended up not using his recommendations. Then they brought in Poppe, who said Marbut’s plan lacked any way for people to exit homelessness into permanent housing.
With Marbut as executive director of the Interagency Council on Homelessness, she said, “the concern is he’s going to promote a model that hasn’t been shown to have any efficacy in actually reducing homelessness. And I think there’s a lot of belief that it’s not a trauma informed model, so it’s actually hurting people rather than helping them.”
"When we hear stories about the homelessness in California and elsewhere, why don't we hear how illegal aliens contribute to the problem? They take jobs and affordable housing, yet instead of discouraging illegal aliens from breaking the law, politicians encourage them to come by lavishing free stuff on them with confiscated dollars from this and future generations." JACK HELLNER
America's homeless and housing crisis? They can't open their corrupt mouths without howling AMNESTY! AMNESTY! AMNESTY.... Give our illegals amnesty so they can bring up the rest of their families and vote Democrat for more!...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 California.
“The figures show that the majority of California's growth will be in the Latino population, said Dowell Myers, a professor of urban planning and demography at USC, adding that "68% of the growth this decade will be Latino, 75% next and 80% after that.”
Report: California ‘Entirely’ Responsible for Nation’s Rise in Homelessness
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.”
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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.”
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.
Fact Check: Mayor Pete Claims U.S. Economy ‘Not Working for Most’ Americans
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South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg claimed on Thursday the economy was “not working for most” Americans at the Democrat presidential primary debate in Los Angeles, California.
Buttigieg made the claim when asked by the debate’s moderator to explain his argument for winning over voters who “may not like everything President Donald Trump has done,” but like the economy.
“Where I live folks aren’t measuring the economy by how the Dow Jones is doing, they’re measuring the economy by how they’re doing,” the mayor said in response. “When you’re doing the bills at the end of the month at your kitchen table and you find that even if your wages have gone up it’s not nearly going as fast as the cost of health[care] and housing.”
“This economy is not working for most of us, for the middle class and, I know you’re only ever supposed to say ‘middle class’ and not poor in politics, but we’ve got to talk about poverty in this country,” he added, before arguing for increasing the minimum wage and stronger labor protections.
Buttigieg’s claim that the economy is not working for most Americans, especially those in the middle and working class, is strongly rebutted by most fiscal indicators.
Since President Donald Trump’s tax cuts went into effect, wages have gone up, while unemployment has hit record lows. The impact has been most felt by blue-collar and low-skill workers, who have seen their wages grow by more than three percent in the last year alone.
Meanwhile, the number of out of work Americans, contrary to Buttigieg’s suggestion, is at the lowest point since the great recession in 2007. Likewise, the unemployment rate reached 3.5 percent in November—the lowest in 50 years.
Further undercutting Buttigieg’s claim is that Trump’s policies have boosted communities that have generally missed out on prior periods of economic growth. As such, the unemployment rates among African Americans and Hispanics have reached record lows, while median household income has soared.
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