Oh my my. Makes me want to leave everything and move to Alabama. Does it?
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California has the USA’s highest poverty rate, when factoring in cost-of-living
111–120 of 130 posts
Re: California has the USA’s highest poverty rate, when factoring in cost-of-living
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
The direct negative effect on the quality of life of high housing costs is astonishing. Yet there's no real public uproar. When the price of gas goes up, seemingly everyone is up in arms. But housing?! People complain, but no where near as much as they should. In areas with high housing costs, this should be the primary political issue. I guess nepotism just wins the argument...
It's a split issue. Renters want prices to go down. Owners want prices to go up. Who wins the political clash? Are there more voting owners, or voting renters? Generally there are more owners, though California has one of the lowest home ownership rates at around 53%. Cities draw this average down -- most suburbs have higher ownership rates. With this in mind it shouldn't be a surprise that owners outvote renters.
Much of the voting takes place in neighborhood meetings, not in general elections.
This system heavily favors existing home owners over the general public.
Re: California has the USA’s highest poverty rate, when factoring in cost-of-living
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Two seconds of Googling would have led you to this: http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-obama-deportations-20140... Which I'm sure you'll find credible since it's a left-leaning source.
That article does not dispute the claim that net immigration from Mexico has been negative.
Well duh, because it explains how the definition of deportation has changed to include catch and release, which wasn't the case beforehand. This is literally an article reassuring Democrats that Obama's deportation numbers are higher but don't fret about it, because it's not really the case.
Re: California has the USA’s highest poverty rate, when factoring in cost-of-living
#114Earlier 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.
So all the improvements the US us made in standards of living was completely pointless? We just need to be better than dying from diarrhea from our drinking water, then fuck it we've accomplished everything! No reason to improve anymore. Comparing the US to India is fucking stupid.
Would you please not comment like this here? If you have a substantive point, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't post.
Re: California has the USA’s highest poverty rate, when factoring in cost-of-living
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
As with everything in life, context matters.
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.
Please don't post flamewar comments to HN. "That's totally the same as having your kids die from diarrhea" is exactly the kind of argument we don't need.
Re: California has the USA’s highest poverty rate, when factoring in cost-of-living
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 anot…
What you say is mostly true in the UK and what OP said is mostly true for the USA. The USA gets better immigrants.
Re: California has the USA’s highest poverty rate, when factoring in cost-of-living
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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?
Median household income. From a couple seconds worth of Googling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income#Gallup_gross_med... > Japan: 34822 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi > MS: 40037
Does that include health insurance?
Re: California has the USA’s highest poverty rate, when factoring in cost-of-living
#118Is California a good place to live for your typical person? It has an enviable economy with Silicon Valley and whatnot. Places all over the country are trying to recreate that. But it doesn't appear to have particularly good schools, infrastructure, or public services to show for it. Does the vaunted economic engine really translate into prosperity for the middle 50% of Californians?
Re: California has the USA’s highest poverty rate, when factoring in cost-of-living
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fun fact: most immigrants from Mexico are not poor-relative-to-Mexico.
Are we talking about immigrants or "immigrants"? I seriously doubt the immigrants of the illegal -- excuse me, "undocumented" -- variety are anything but poor. That's the reason the Mexican government is so eager to keep the whole thing going -- they get to simultaneously foist their poor upon the US while said poor send back billions in remittances. It's a major industry for Mexico, believe it or not.
It takes a certain minimum amount of education and money to attempt the crossing. Poor yokels who try it get caught or die in the desert.
It also takes a minimum amount of ambition; lazy slobs can't be bothered. Fearful people don't want to risk being robbed or spending weeks out of work to end up deported and gaining nothing.
My relative's wife made the crossing because her husband was abusive and beat her and her son; he threatened to kill them both and had the connections to get away with it.
Re: California has the USA’s highest poverty rate, when factoring in cost-of-living
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a meaningless metric. Food can't be magically shipped to the regions that need it. A better measurement would be waste per capita or farm land utilization.
The other thing of course to remember is just shipping food out of the US and into the developing world is how you break local farming economies. Who wants to buy food from the local farmer when there's ample free food from relief programs. Development is hard.
>Development is hard.
It really is. That's what Lothrop Stoddard called 'The Burden Of Civilization'. Essentially, this is to say that, in as much as civilization can be a good thing, it is also very difficult to attain and sustain; some people are willing to push themselves as hard as they can to do this and some people just aren't equipped to handle civilization.