Over the last 40 years the state's population has doubled. Triple what it was 60 years ago. In fact, California's population has now surpassed the entire population of Canada. Despite the state having 832,849 millionaire households—that’s nearly 60 percent more than second-place Texas—one out of five Californians is living in poverty. Since 2014 the number of homeless children in California has jumped 20 percent. (source here)
California does have a higher than average poverty rate but it is lower than 15 other states mostly Republican. And its poverty rate is only 1.6% higher than the national average.
In terms of absolute poverty, that's probably true, but in terms of relative poverty (relative to the cost of living) it's worse in California.
But thats less of a problem that can be solved. Big cities are just naturally more expensive and nobody is going to be able to fix that.
That's what happens when your 'compassion' is so grotesquely warped that it's focused upon the residents of the richest and safest nation on earth - instead of those who are actually helpless. You know, starving children in war zones, etc.
Yes and California is making it so much better by flooding the state with less-than-high-school educated, non-english speaking people with no money and 12 kids.
We used to do that with our whole country in the early 1900s flooding our nation with poor immigrants from Italy, Ireland, and Russia. We turned out the better for it.
OP This doesn't sound much like 'the American dream' to me. Maybe it's what this 'Let's all hate Russia and its President' is all about . . . to bury bad news??
Except those people had skills and didn't get put on section 8 housing and welfare. They also didn't set up heroin rings on their way in.
For any of you who don't know your history, there were basically two separate waves of immigration at that time. The first came around 1870-1890 from Northern Europe and the British Isles and settled on the Plains and cities in the Midwest. These were less populated areas at the time that the U.S. wanted to settle. The second wave came mainly around 1890-1925 from countries in Southern and Eastern Europe. Their pattern of settlement tended to be different, and there were a lot of issues with urban poverty at that time. Some of you might be familiar with the history of organized crime, the Italian mafia, the Chicago gangsters (although there was actually more organized crime going on in the Eastern coastal cities than Chicago), which lasted for decades, all the way up until the late 1980s. The total amount of immigration spiked in 1914 and remained especially high in the 5 years thereafter. About 80% more people came in the two decades after 1900 than the two decades before.
A fifteen dollar an hour minimum wage and unemployment compensation for being unemployed in an at-will employment State!
A tale of two countries... From the NY Times: More than one-quarter of the total homeless population nationwide lives in California, roughly 114,000. The vast majority are "unsheltered" — a more bureaucratic term to describe the thousands living on the streets, under freeways and tucked into grassy fields and parks in cities all around the state. It's certainly a bigger increase than we would have expected," said Ben Metcalf, the director of the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development. "There's a tale of different countries here: We’re seeing a real significant increase and much of the rest of the country is not. We’re all doing the same things, but here the rent is too damn high. We’ve seen an incredible increase in the cost of housing." There is grim evidence at county morgues, too — because of a significant hepatitis A outbreak and because the homeless population is aging, several cities have seen a dramatic rise in the number of people who die homeless. In Santa Clara County, the number of homeless deaths have more than doubled since 2011, with 132 people dying on the street last year. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/21/...less-population-drives-national-increase.html Mother Jones reports: The number of homeless people in America increased for the first time in 7 years. Fueling this year’s rise in homelessness is California, which had 134,278 homeless people in 2017, more than any other state and 25 percent of the nation’s total. California saw the largest absolute increase in homelessness of any state between 2016 and 2017. https://www.motherjones.com/politic...rica-increased-for-the-first-time-in-7-years/ The Chicago Tribune, Dec 5, 2017 reports: "The nation's homeless population increased this year for the first time since 2010, driven by the surge in the number of people living on the streets in Los Angeles and other West Coast cities." So here's a summary: The Recession came in 2007, a year or two later there was a huge spike in homelessness, but after 2010 it didn't increase any more, but then in 2017, seven years later, it started increasing again so much on the West coast (mostly in California) that it brought up the entire average for the whole country. This is many years after the Recession. What's going on here?
The first wave of immigrants that came, the government hoped to settle in the Midwest, which was mostly unsettled at that time. Chicago in 1870 was only a tiny city. But as the second wave of immigration came, most of these new ones from Southern and Eastern Europe, it became too much, and probably was one of the causes leading up to the Depression.
