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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

#41

Post by YokoZar »

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.

Fixing Housing supply is relatively easy: we just need to legalize construction. And maybe density too, such as the missing middle: http://missingmiddlehousing.com/

There's a reason the poor have been migrating out into the sub-suburbs: that's where houses can actually get built.

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

#42

Post by laurencerowe »

xienze wrote: post #14
patio11 wrote: post #9

Earlier 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.

Net illegal immigration from Mexico has been negative since 2009. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/03/02/what-we-know...

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

#43

Post by TuringNYC »

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…

Assuming heat is a poor assumption.

I grew up without heat on many days. It was the 80s. Inflation ate into parents' earnings to the point where you had to cut something -- housing, food, heat. They cut heat. We used multiple blankets. Showers were usually with warmish to cool water.

I agree, we now have access to healthcare. Back then, we'd go to the ER for everything, you'd have to gauge whether the illness was worth 6 or 7 hours in the hospital. Those times might come back depending on where legislation heads.

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

#44

Post by hkmurakami »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #40
hkmurakami wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possibly the middle class Mexican citizens who have the resources to make the journey across the border in the first place.

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.

Happy and reassuring to have my conjecture rejected.

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

#46

Post by seanmcdirmid »

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…

Ya, the bottom in the developed world, and especially in California, is much higher. In china you can find a moldy room in an apartment building basement (no window!), or even sleep in the restaurant you are working in (many people live in their shops in Beijing, and I don't mean above them in something like an apartment!). For food, there are plenty of places that cut corners to keep costs down, you'll live but you might get cancer later.

Pre-Katrina New Orleans was popular because survival was similarly cheap, not for the same quality of survival, but the bottom possible was lower.

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

#47

Post by NTDF9 »

bagacrap wrote: post #39

Not a surprise to me given that LA has the least affordable rent in the country (a measure of average percent of income spent on rent --- not absolute rent). But in both cases, my intuition is that this just means California is a very desirable place to live. If Dallas has lots of jobs and relatively affordable housing but you choose to live in California despite the financial burden, it must be because you think it…

>> affordable housing but you choose to live in California despite the financial burden, it must be because you think it has greater intrinsic value (weather, culture, community, etc).

Agreed. In addition, migration and re-establishing a new life in a new place is stressful and not cheap.

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

#48

Post by vanjoe »

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…

Always comparing,never evaluating against an outside standard. We'll never break the n log(n) barrier

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

#49

Post by dragonwriter »

bagacrap wrote: post #39

Not a surprise to me given that LA has the least affordable rent in the country (a measure of average percent of income spent on rent --- not absolute rent). But in both cases, my intuition is that this just means California is a very desirable place to live. If Dallas has lots of jobs and relatively affordable housing but you choose to live in California despite the financial burden, it must be because you think it…

> If Dallas has lots of jobs and relatively affordable housing but you choose to live in California despite the financial burden, it must be because you think it has greater intrinsic value

Or because you were born here and can't afford to leave; the share of California's population that is native born Californian has been growing for the last decade or so.

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

#50

Post by emojiofficer »

YokoZar wrote: post #41
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.

Fixing Housing supply is relatively easy: we just need to legalize construction. And maybe density too, such as the missing middle: http://missingmiddlehousing.com/ There's a reason the poor have been migrating out into the sub-suburbs: that's where houses can actually get built.

They're called exurbs
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