The Scrapbook visited Los Angeles for the first time around 20 years ago, and it was a delightful experience in most every way. One oddity stood out, though: the sheer number of homeless people. We don’t mention this to denigrate the needy, but the experience of being approached on nearly every corner by people asking for money—some of them, truth be told, not appearing all that hard-up—is not easily forgotten.
We observed the same phenomenon on subsequent visits to San Francisco and San Diego and concluded that the state’s perfect-year-round climate is probably not unrelated to the phenomenon. Speaking only for ourselves, if we were suddenly without shelter some January, we’d rather be in San Bernardino than Buffalo.
But the weather surely can’t account for the fact that, as we learned from a recent report by the Census Bureau, California has the highest poverty rate in the nation: A full 20 percent of Californians live below the federal poverty line.
Readers may wish to quarrel with the definition of “poverty” in this ranking, and the state’s high number of undocumented workers suggests that illegal immigration is likely a contributing factor. Still, it strikes us as remarkable that the nation’s most progressive, left-leaning state also has more people in poverty, per capita, than any other state. California’s taxes are among the nation’s highest—the state consistently ranks among the least friendly to business—and it spends over a third of its total budget on welfare-related programs, ranking fifth in the country as of 2013 (the Census Bureau’s latest data).
If we didn’t know any better, we’d start to think that maybe, just maybe, the progressive welfare state doesn’t actually work.
