America

[vta]

Not everybody who gets off a bus from Parts Unknown can become a Hollywood movie star?

Sadly no...but we have great weather !

 

[Mick]

We are not to broke to "look after our own". What gave you that idea??? Do you have any idea how much the USA gives to other countries?

Shit...the GDP of my state is twice that your whole country !

And yet...my state is the poverty capitol of the USA.

Since when does money solve problems? Especially when you put government in charge of said money ?? This isn't rocket science.



California, Poverty Capital — Why are so many people poor in the Golden State?


California — not Mississippi, New Mexico, or West Virginia — has the highest poverty rate in the United States. According to the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure — which accounts for the cost of housing, food, utilities, and clothing, and which includes noncash government assistance as a form of income — nearly one out of four Californians is poor. Given robust job growth in the state and the prosperity generated by several industries, especially the supercharged tech sector, the question arises as to why California has so many poor people, especially when the state’s per-capita GDP increased roughly twice as much as the U.S. average over the five years ending in 2016 (12.5 percent, compared with 6.27 percent).

It’s not as if California policymakers have neglected to wage war on poverty. Sacramento and local governments have spent massive amounts in the cause, for decades now. Myriad state and municipal benefit programs overlap with one another; in some cases, individuals with incomes 200 percent above the poverty line receive benefits, according to the California Policy Center. California state and local governments spent nearly $958 billion from 1992 through 2015 on public welfare programs, including cash-assistance payments, vendor payments, and “other public welfare,” according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Unfortunately, California, with 12 percent of the American population, is home today to roughly one in three of the nation’s welfare recipients. The generous spending, then, has not only failed to decrease poverty; it actually seems to have made it worse.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, some states — principally Wisconsin, Michigan, and Virginia — initiated welfare reform, as did the federal government under President Bill Clinton and the Republican Congress. The common thread of the reformed welfare programs was strong work requirements placed on aid recipients. These overhauls were widely recognized as a big success, as welfare rolls plummeted and millions of former aid recipients entered the workforce. The state and local bureaucracies that implement California’s antipoverty programs, however, have resisted pro-work reforms. In fact, California recipients of state aid receive a disproportionately large share of it in no-strings-attached cash disbursements. It’s as if welfare reform passed California by, leaving a dependency trap in place. Immigrants are falling into it: 55 percent of immigrant families in the state get some kind of means-tested benefits, compared with just 30 percent of natives, according to City Journal contributing editor Kay S. Hymowitz.

Self-interest in the social-services community may be at work here. If California’s poverty rate should ever be substantially reduced by getting the typical welfare client back into the workforce, many bureaucrats could lose their jobs. As economist William A. Niskanen explained back in 1971, public agencies seek to maximize their budgets, through which they acquire increased power, status, comfort, and job security. In order to keep growing its budget, and hence its power, a welfare bureaucracy has an incentive to expand its “customer” base—to ensure that the welfare rolls remain full and, ideally, growing. With 883,000 full-time-equivalent state and local employees in 2014, according to Governing, California has an enormous bureaucracy—a unionized, public-sector workforce that exercises tremendous power through voting and lobbying. Many work in social services.

Further contributing to the poverty problem is California’s housing crisis. Californians spent more than one-third of their incomes on housing in 2014, the third-highest rate in the country. A shortage of housing has driven prices ever higher, far above income increases. And that shortage is a direct outgrowth of misguided policies. “Counties and local governments have imposed restrictive land-use regulations that drove up the price of land and dwellings,” explains analyst Wendell Cox. “Middle income households have been forced to accept lower standards of living while the less fortunate have been driven into poverty by the high cost of housing.” The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), passed in 1971, is one example; it can add $1 million to the cost of completing a housing development, says Todd Williams, an Oakland attorney who chairs the Wendel Rosen Black & Dean land-use group. CEQA costs have been known to shut down entire home-building projects. CEQA reform would help increase housing supply, but there’s no real movement to change the law.

Extensive environmental regulations aimed at reducing carbon-dioxide emissions make energy more expensive, also hurting the poor. On some estimates, California energy costs are as much as 50 percent higher than the national average. Jonathan A. Lesser of Continental Economics, author of a 2015 Manhattan Institute study, “Less Carbon, Higher Prices,” found that “in 2012, nearly 1 million California households faced ‘energy poverty’—defined as energy expenditures exceeding 10 percent of household income. In certain California counties, the rate of energy poverty was as high as 15 percent of all households.” A Pacific Research Institute study by Wayne Winegarden found that the rate could exceed 17 percent of median income in some areas. “The impacts on the poorest households are not only the largest,” states Winegarden. “They are clearly unaffordable.”

Looking to help poor and low-income residents, California lawmakers recently passed a measure raising the minimum wage from $10 an hour to $15 an hour by 2022—but a higher minimum wage will do nothing for the 60 percent of Californians who live in poverty and don’t have jobs, and studies suggest that it will likely cause many who do have jobs to lose them. A Harvard study found evidence that “higher minimum wages increase overall exit rates for restaurants” in the Bay Area, where more than a dozen cities and counties, including San Francisco, have changed their minimum-wage ordinances in the last five years. “Estimates suggest that a one-dollar increase in the minimum wage leads to a 14 percent increase in the likelihood of exit for a 3.5-star restaurant (which is the median rating),” the report says. These restaurants are a significant source of employment for low-skilled and entry-level workers.

Apparently content with futile poverty policies, Sacramento lawmakers can turn their attention to what historian Victor Davis Hanson aptly describes as a fixation on “remaking the world.” The political class wants to build a costly and needless high-speed rail system; talks of secession from a United States presided over by Donald Trump; hired former attorney general Eric Holder to “resist” Trump’s agenda; enacted the first state-level cap-and-trade regime; established California as a “sanctuary state” for illegal immigrants; banned plastic bags, threatening the jobs of thousands of workers involved in their manufacture; and is consumed by its dedication to “California values.” All this only reinforces the rest of America’s perception of an out-of-touch Left Coast, to the disservice of millions of Californians whose values are more traditional, including many of the state’s poor residents.

California’s de facto status as a one-party state lies at the heart of its poverty problem. With a permanent majority in the state senate and the assembly, a prolonged dominance in the executive branch, and a weak opposition, California Democrats have long been free to indulge blue-state ideology while paying little or no political price. The state’s poverty problem is unlikely to improve while policymakers remain unwilling to unleash the engines of economic prosperity that drove California to its golden years.

Kerry Jackson is the Pacific Research Institute’s fellow in California studies.

This article was originally published by City Journal Online

Yeah, giving welfare doesn’t get rid of poverty, but it does help people to feed their kids, or themselves. What's the alternative? Do some research on social democratic countries, they have way better health, education, housing for the poor outcomes, blah, blah, than the USA.

 

[vta]

Do some research on social democratic countries, they have way better health, education, housing for the poor outcomes, blah, blah, than the USA.

Dude...I'm from the USA. Whatever device you are using to access these forums was thought of and designed here. We truly are the greatest nation on earth. Health care, really? We are responsible for most of modern medicine.

I get it...you hate America. You keep on talking trash while having no real experience. Tell me...give me some more of the thoughts you have on America.

 

[vta]

Yeah, giving welfare doesn’t get rid of poverty, but it does help people to feed their kids, or themselves.

So does working for a living.

 

[NBE One !]

mick,an eighth of all Americans LIVE in California. (So I heard recently)

At Heart were all the same,y'know... Believe

 

[armedoldhippy]

Name me one great president since the tyrannical civil war.

Dwight David Eisenhower. led the armies that freed Europe/Asia from Hitler et al with Allied help as a warm-up to his entry into politics. also warned us about the military-industrial complex we are currently more or less enslaved by now. he tried, but we did not listen...

 

[CaptainDankness]

We're talking about why "Murica is too broke to look after its own, not whether you can stomp the British into moonshine, whatever the fuck that means.

We ain't broke we just have bums. Most of them don't want to be responsible. Most of them flock down to Florida and California where it's warm ain't so they can live on the streets pay no taxes work no jobs just standing on the street corner with their hands out begging for money to get a fix.

They ain't just some down on their luck people, they're crack heads, junkies or alcoholics. Can't help someone who doesn't want help.

 

[CaptainDankness]

Dwight David Eisenhower. led the armies that freed Europe/Asia from Hitler et al with Allied help as a warm-up to his entry into politics. also warned us about the military-industrial complex we are currently more or less enslaved by now. he tried, but we did not listen...

Russia put in much more work defeating the Nazis. We could have stayed home and Hitler still would have lost. We beat the Russians to Berlin so we can take their scientists. Also why we nuked Japan Stalin was going to help with Japan but we didn't want Stalin controlling even a part of Japan.

Also Japan only attacked us because we refused to trade with them, we provoked them into war. Sure he warned about the military industrial complex but resigned didn't even attempt to stop it.

JFK was alright though but he was killed because of it.

 

[igrowone]

... We beat the Russians to Berlin so we can take their scientists. ...

reread your history, we did not beat the Russians to Berlin
we let the Russians have it, the scientists were scattered over the country
most much preferred the usa to the soviet union

 

[mean mr.mustard]

 

[Easy7]

It's all a product of poverty and the war ln drugs. Most of us are not even educated what to do with money to make money. Then drugs advertise and escape, or a lifestyle with possible income. The rich do drugs and stay rich. The poor do drugs and 90% don't know shit about them cause D.A.R.E. is stupid.

 

[Guest]

Yeah, you're right, I've never been to the US but I do have the internet and tv. I'm sure there's lots of awesome Americans there, but the vibe looks really sour, like my mother in law. Don't be put off by the poverty in those pics you posted, as some of the most beautiful people I've met are living in abject poverty. Educate yourself and have a bit of a read about what goes on there.The human spirit is a beautiful thing. I'll link a short article. Here's a taste ''' Often illiterate parents are making an investment in the future. And local entrepreneurs are developing schools that far surpass the quality of local public education. ''''''''
It is what it is.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/randall-kempner/dharavi-the-most-entrepre_b_834300.html

Using huff and puff as a source costs you any claim to any point.

 

[coldcanna]

View Image

Imagine the quote about every nation that isn't armed? Well, little Timmy was really really nice to everybody so the bullies decided not to pick on him.... hahahaha that will be the day. I personally live for Hillary's anti-gun speeches that have 20-30 armed secret service guys in the background. Or the Greenwich, CT anti gunners that live in gated communities with home security companies on call 24/7. Tell me when in the history of humanity did being unarmed help someone?

 

['Boogieman']

If people would rather hold their hand out and beg for money instead of work they don't deserve help they need to get off their lazy ass and take care of themselves. True poverty is like you see in socialist countries or places like North Korea. Im from the midwest and when I visited Southern California i was shocked how many people choose to be homeless many of them actually love the life.

 

[St. Phatty]

I suggest reading the comments in the news section at RT.com, Russia Today.

Most of the people posting type real good English. Either they're Western or the Internet world speaks fluent colloquial (street) English, even in Russia.

I wonder how much of that English learning is from watching movies ?

Anyway, the US is not popular world-wide because of its military actions.

But in the Western corporate world, it's all flag-waving and people embracing politically correct themes.

It makes for a strange contrast.

 

[igrowone]

... Tell me when in the history of humanity did being unarmed help someone?

let's see
suppose you want to go to this year's super bowl - armed or unarmed?
you're not getting in armed
being a legislator in congress? generally an unarmed job
most better work situations are unarmed operations, not all of course
being unarmed is a trend, civilization is going in that direction
unarmed nations may be a ways off, but seems to be the trend

 

[mean mr.mustard]

I guess anytime you don't want people to be killed would be a good time to not have a gun.

Allow me to ask what great cause is accomplished by neglecting citizens.

 

[Bud Green]

I would absolutely hate to see someone get shot while near my house


I own a couple long guns and a couple handguns. total of 4..
They are mostly for personal protection...
Occasionally used for varmints, as I live way back in the woods.

Not a single person has died, or even been shot towards because of my guns...
but I have them in case you decide to come here with bad intent...

that said, there have been 2 occasions in my long life, where I know that merely walking out my door with a loaded shotgun in my hands has prevented something bad from happening..

 

[vta]

How about...Keep a job and don't attack or burglarize people. Chances are you will not be homeless and wont get shot either. Win win !

 

[Gry]

VTA, if Lewis Powell could read your posting, he would be one happy corpse