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California has the USA’s highest poverty rate, when factoring in cost-of-living

politifact.com

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Re: California has the USA’s highest poverty rate, when factoring in cost-of-living

#61

Post by imjustsaying »

HillaryBriss wrote: post #24

When I look around at approaches for reducing poverty in CA, almost everything I see is proposals for additional government subsidy programs. What I don't see is proposals for increasing the supply of the things that make COL so high in the first place. How do you make things like housing, health care, and education more abundant, cheaper, more competitive in CA? No one seems to know.

>No one seems to know.

Everyone knows. Get the cancer known as the state out of the business of picking winners and losers.

Re: California has the USA’s highest poverty rate, when factoring in cost-of-living

#62

Post by vacri »

eitally wrote: post #19
danjoc wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Context, yes. They can tell me about how they are struggling to make ends meet because of their two car payments and interest only mortgage. That's totally the same as having your kids die from diarrhea, because they get their drinking water straight out of a dirty river and you don't have access to simple medications.

The problem is that in countries where you can survive on $2/day, you can also largely squat where you want and scrounge crude shelter whilst begging for food. You can't do any of that in California, in any reliable way... and in many parts of the state, $30k/yr just isn't enough to rent an apartment and cover the basics (food, transport, medical care). So yes, the poor in the US are both better and worse off than po…

You've got a pretty stereotypical view of the developing world.

Nevertheless, SF actually has pretty good services for the homeless. That's why there's a lot of homeless people there.

Given also that the median black household income in California is $35k, it sounds like you can actually survive of $30k in Cali without your kids dying of dysentery. Alternatively, if you want to 'scrounge crude shelter', there's 11 million square miles of public land in California.

In short, my eyes just about goggled out of my head when the response to "kids die from drinking dirty water" is "yeah, but they can live wherever they want".

Re: California has the USA’s highest poverty rate, when factoring in cost-of-living

#63

Post by adventured »

dikdik wrote: post #34
rpmcmurphy wrote: post #28

The problem with the way poverty is measured in the US is it measures relative income. Being poor relative to other people sucks, but consider the following. You can be poor in the US, and have: - Clean running water - Electricity - Heat - Phone, now plus internet access - Paved roads - Access to basic health care (for now, thanks Obama!) Disclosure: I went through bankruptcy and foreclosure, so I know exactly how mu…

Everything you state is true, but are we really supposed to use third world countries as our baseline? If Michael Phelps used Terry Schiavo as his competition, I doubt he would be as good as he is. In the US we should be comparing ourselves to the best countries with the least amount of poverty, the highest socioeconomic mobility, and the healthiest populions. We can't and won't improve if we always look for the lowe…

Should we be comparing the US of 330 million people versus tiny nations that have artificial advantages due to their small size and homogeneous culture? Which pushes further into how you compare such dramatically different examples in the first place.

Consider Finland. Five million people, 82% white, extremely anti-immigration, and they don't have to defend themselves for the most part. The US military shield has mostly taken care of that for them (thus their 1.3% of GDP military spending despite having a frequently hostile Russia on their doorstep). So you want to compare their outcome, to the US?

Comparing a wildly diverse nation of 330 million against Sweden, Norway or Finland type nations, is absurd. Those are the absolute elite outcomes of the world and Europe in particular.

Compare Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Minnesota, Virginia, New Jersey, Vermont, Washington, etc. to those nations. They all have median incomes equal to or higher than Switzerland (and that's before adjusting for the better cost of living in those states vs a Switzerland type nation) and are much closer on a population basis. Those are the elite outcomes of the US collection of states.

Or would you rather compare various of the bottom 25 US states to the relatively impoverished half of Europe nobody ever wants to talk about? Bulgaria, Belarus, Russia, Moldova, Hungary, Ukraine, Greece, Portugal, Spain, Latvia, Lithuania, Serbia, Croatia, Macedonia, etc.

The fact is, most developed nations struggle to match the median incomes of the poorest US states. Japan as one example has a median income 20% below Mississippi and Louisiana (and it's likely to continue losing ground to those states). Germany is about on par with Kentucky.

Re: California has the USA’s highest poverty rate, when factoring in cost-of-living

#64

Post by johnloeber »

adventured wrote: post #59
WillPostForFood wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Middle class Mexican citizens can live good lives in Mexico, so they don't need to risk dangerous border crossing to end up a poor illegal immigrant in the US.

That's incorrect. As domestic wages rise in a poor nation, emigration rises because the burgeoning middle class is better able to leave. That's why the US saw such a dramatic increase in immigration from Latin America since 1980, as wages have soared (relatively) there. The US now sees more immigration from Latin America every ten years, than it did in a century from 1880-1980. The desperately poor aren't the primary…

Thanks for this perspective. I didn't know about this.

Re: California has the USA’s highest poverty rate, when factoring in cost-of-living

#65

Post by temp »

adventured wrote: post #63
dikdik wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything you state is true, but are we really supposed to use third world countries as our baseline? If Michael Phelps used Terry Schiavo as his competition, I doubt he would be as good as he is. In the US we should be comparing ourselves to the best countries with the least amount of poverty, the highest socioeconomic mobility, and the healthiest populions. We can't and won't improve if we always look for the lowe…

Should we be comparing the US of 330 million people versus tiny nations that have artificial advantages due to their small size and homogeneous culture? Which pushes further into how you compare such dramatically different examples in the first place. Consider Finland. Five million people, 82% white, extremely anti-immigration, and they don't have to defend themselves for the most part. The US military shield has mos…

>Japan as one example has a median income 20% below Mississippi and Louisiana

Can you provide sources for that? What are you comparing? Median disposable income? Median household income?

Re: California has the USA’s highest poverty rate, when factoring in cost-of-living

#66

Post by ptaipale »

adventured wrote: post #59
WillPostForFood wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Middle class Mexican citizens can live good lives in Mexico, so they don't need to risk dangerous border crossing to end up a poor illegal immigrant in the US.

That's incorrect. As domestic wages rise in a poor nation, emigration rises because the burgeoning middle class is better able to leave. That's why the US saw such a dramatic increase in immigration from Latin America since 1980, as wages have soared (relatively) there. The US now sees more immigration from Latin America every ten years, than it did in a century from 1880-1980. The desperately poor aren't the primary…

Right. When millions were starving in Ethiopia in mid-1980's there was no movement of migration towards Europe. People couldn't afford it, they didn't even know of the theoretical possibility.

Increased wealth and better access to information and information technology in African and Asian countries is what's pushed the recent migration towards Europe (via Turkey, Libya or Morocco) on the move.

Re: California has the USA’s highest poverty rate, when factoring in cost-of-living

#67

Post by ezequiel-garzon »

adventured wrote: post #63
dikdik wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything you state is true, but are we really supposed to use third world countries as our baseline? If Michael Phelps used Terry Schiavo as his competition, I doubt he would be as good as he is. In the US we should be comparing ourselves to the best countries with the least amount of poverty, the highest socioeconomic mobility, and the healthiest populions. We can't and won't improve if we always look for the lowe…

Should we be comparing the US of 330 million people versus tiny nations that have artificial advantages due to their small size and homogeneous culture? Which pushes further into how you compare such dramatically different examples in the first place. Consider Finland. Five million people, 82% white, extremely anti-immigration, and they don't have to defend themselves for the most part. The US military shield has mos…

I'm sorry, but it doesn't boil down to per-capita GDP alone. The possibility that a tragedy could quickly exceed your health insurance limit and deplete your savings is something most Americans fear, while it's not an issue in Europe. Whether you would choose (if given that luxury) one system over the other is not obvious.

Re: California has the USA’s highest poverty rate, when factoring in cost-of-living

#68

Post by polskibus »

adventured wrote: post #59
WillPostForFood wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Middle class Mexican citizens can live good lives in Mexico, so they don't need to risk dangerous border crossing to end up a poor illegal immigrant in the US.

That's incorrect. As domestic wages rise in a poor nation, emigration rises because the burgeoning middle class is better able to leave. That's why the US saw such a dramatic increase in immigration from Latin America since 1980, as wages have soared (relatively) there. The US now sees more immigration from Latin America every ten years, than it did in a century from 1880-1980. The desperately poor aren't the primary…

I disagree with regard to Eastern European part. Most of the emigration was unskilled labor. They were not below poverty line, they could organize move to UK, but they were never middle class in Poland, etc, and they usually aren't middle class in the UK. The second batch of emigrants is graduates entering the job market sometimes with degrees irrelevant in current market. So they decide to start their career in another country, because they don't have much to lose. In another country they focus on climbing up, often in a career not related to their education or previous aspiration.

The doctors, etc are a minority. A visible minority, because their move harms their country of origin more than a loss of a builder from a social perspective but still a minority.

Re: California has the USA’s highest poverty rate, when factoring in cost-of-living

#69

Post by 1_2__3 »

rpmcmurphy wrote: post #28

The problem with the way poverty is measured in the US is it measures relative income. Being poor relative to other people sucks, but consider the following. You can be poor in the US, and have: - Clean running water - Electricity - Heat - Phone, now plus internet access - Paved roads - Access to basic health care (for now, thanks Obama!) Disclosure: I went through bankruptcy and foreclosure, so I know exactly how mu…

There are enormous swaths of the US where few or none of those things are available. You are fooling yourself if you think those are guaranteed in most heavily impoverished areas and contributing to the overall problem by doing so. In fact your comment is such right-wing dog whistling (greatest country in the world no matter what lalalala".

Re: California has the USA’s highest poverty rate, when factoring in cost-of-living

#70

Post by ptaipale »

HarryHirsch wrote: post #23
yummyfajitas wrote: post #5

There is something very important missing - the SPM poverty measure is relative poverty, not absolute. All this means is that CA has many rich people.

And all the the pretty money you earn as a software engineer in SF is sufficient only for a kommunalka : http://venturebeat.com/2017/03/10/tech-workers-live-40-to-a-... We had one in town when I was a student. The thing had a name. It was called Schweinebunker .

That could be true, but the poverty rate doesn't really tell anything about it.

A purchasing power metric (that includes cost of housing) would indicate that.

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