Number One in Poverty, California Isn't Our Most Progressive State -- It's Our Most Racist One
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Number One in Poverty & Inequality
Everyone thinks California is our most progressive state. And why not? It imposes the highest tax on the richest one percent. It is aggressively implementing Obamacare. And it is standing up to President Donald Trump on everything from immigration to the environment.
And yet the Golden State is also number one in poverty and inequality in America.
How can this be? Around the world, progressive economies like those of Sweden, France, and Germany, which redistribute wealth through high taxes and generous social welfare policies, boast far less poverty and inequality than other nations.
What gives? And how does California maintain its reputation as a progressive leader given the reality on the ground?
If racism is more than just saying nasty things — if it is, as scholars like James Baldwin, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Michelle Alexander and countless others have described, embedded into socioeconomic structures — then California isn't just the least progressive state. It's also the most racist.
Real World "Elysium"
In the 2013 science fiction film, "Elysium," the rich have fled to a luxury satellite orbiting Earth while the poor toil in dangerous conditions below. Life in California today differs in degree, not in kind, from that dystopian vision.
Homeless encampments of hundreds of people have cropped up around the state in the last two years. Occasionally, they are ravaged by hepatitis A, which killed 20 people last year. In Silicon Valley, 132 people died on the street in 2016 — up from 85 in 2015. In San Diego, 117 people died, up from 56.
Last year, San Diego city workers nearly killed a homeless person after accidentally throwing her and the tent she was sleeping in into the back of garbage truck. She escaped just seconds before being crushed by the trash compactor.
Meanwhile, inside comfortable homes perched atop Berkeley and Beverly Hills, affluent progressives condemn the cruelty of the Trump administration toward the poor.
MRC
Not just a movie
It's true that workers in California earn 11 percent more than their counterparts nationally. But that amount is not enough to make up for mortgage payments and rents that are 44 percent and 37 percent higher (respectively) than the national average.
Where 56 percent of Californians could afford a middle-class home in 2012, in the third quarter of 2017, just 28 percent could.
This matters. Homeownership has been the traditional route for the working class to join the middle-class, notes Chapman University demographer Joel Kotkin, who has been ringing the alarm about the crisis for years.
One fact says it all: homeowners have a net worth that is a whopping 36 to 45 times higher than that of renters.
For about 40 years from 1930 to 1970, black families were channeled into renting rooms and denied loans, whereas white families were encouraged to buy homes. After that, Richard Rothstein explains, "it was not primarily discrimination (although this still contributed) that kept African Americans out of most white suburbs… it was primarily unaffordability."
Environmentalism is used to justify de facto racial segregation in California's housing. Environmental lawsuits are a major reason for longer delays and higher costs of new housing. "The core legal structure of CEQA," notes housing attorney Jennifer Hernandez, "protects the existing characteristics of those neighborhoods and thus perpetuates land use practices founded in race and class discrimination."
California's elected officials make serious-sounding pronouncements about the problem but back them up with only symbolic actions.
Last September, Gov. Jerry Brown signed housing legislation that will raise $250 million per year to subsidize housing. But that's just enough to subsidize 1,824 units annually at a time when 100,000 to 200,000 new units are needed.
Is the problem too few progressive policies — or too many?
Consider:
- In the name of helping the poor and protecting the environment, California has placed myriad restrictions and fees on building new housing units, driving up their price;
- Progressive local governments like San Francisco and Santa Monica block even those housing projects that comply with zoning laws progressives had agreed to;
- And the state's progressive environmental law allows duplicative and anonymous lawsuits to block housing projects for often unethical and frivolous reasons.
Why haven't lawmakers changed those laws? Because the progressive residents of Elysium don't want them to.
Legislation that would have encouraged more housing density near transportation hubs was snuffed out last April, garnering support from less than one-third of legislative committee members.
"Progressive organizing," lamented Benjamin Ross in the left-wing magazine Dissent, "evolves stealthily into a defense of the residential status quo. It is a status quo that Beverly Hills is happy to preserve."
Failing Schools, Low Wages and Unfair Taxes
Progressive leaders who daily denounce Republicans as racist have blithely presided over a significant decline in the academic performance of black and Latino eighth graders relative to their counterparts in other states. Today, less than 40 percent of non-white and non-Asian students meet state educational standards.
The reason is a combination of factors, including lack of funding, lack of accountability, and a high rate of non-English speakers. When the cost of living is taken into account, California spends less on K-12 education than all but four other states.
A decade-long reform effort in Washington, D.C. showed that student performance can be improved significantly by rewarding teachers for performance and replacing underperforming teachers.
But California has rejected similar reforms. Progressives won't even allow delaying teacher tenure from two to three years to ensure high-quality teachers.
What about the state's much ballyhooed criminal justice reform?
California did indeed reduce the total number of prisoners by 12 percent between 2011 and 2015. But that's because it had to: barbaric overcrowding resulted in a federal court order that the state to take action.
Meanwhile, the amount California spends on prisons actually increased by a half billion dollars thanks to the influence of the state's deeply corrupt prison guards union.
As a consequence, California today spends more per prisoner than any other state — $65,000 annually — which happens to be the same amount it costs to send a high school graduate to Stanford University for a year.
While housing is the main factor behind the high cost of living, California's regressive and unfair taxes contribute significantly to poverty and inequality.
While the state has the highest income tax rate for the top tier earners, California also has the nation's highest sales tax, which is famously regressive.
Meanwhile, two-thirds of the tax relief from Proposition 13, the 1978 ballot initiative that restricted property taxes, goes to homeowners with incomes above $120,000 annually.
How do progressive residents of Elysium protect their wealth across the generations? By allowing homeowners to pass along their low property tax rates to their children.
California's high energy prices and regulatory burden result in the state having fewer high-paying manufacturing jobs relative to other states.
Between 2011 and 2017, California's electricity rates rose an astonishing five times more than they did nationally, undermining the ability of the state to compete for manufacturing jobs which pay $96,711 per year on average — $40,000 more than the state's average non-farm income.
Progressive and powerful public employee unions reward themselves with retirement benefits far beyond those of ordinary workers. Over 200,000 DMV workers, building permit employees, and other government workers collect retirement pensions at the age of 55 at a cost of $5.4 billion per year — an astonishing 30 times more than was paid out before 2000.
Back on Earth, one-third of the public have no retirement savings whatsoever. The median retirement savings of the rest is just $111,000. A person would need $2.6 million in savings in order to receive retirement benefits as large as those received by a California Highway Patrol officer.
The Greatest Fiction of All
The biggest difference between "Elysium" the movie and present-day California is that in the real-world version, Elysium's residents believe they are progressive.
How do they maintain that fiction, which is more detached from reality than "Elysium" the movie? By living in a fantasy world where California is leading the world in saving the environment and fighting racism.
But in saving the environment, California progressives increased electricity rates, hurt manufacturing, and allowed carbon emissions to rise even while they declined in the rest of the U.S.
And in vigorously protecting the right of their low-wage foreign servant class to remain in California while denying everybody, including them, affordable shelter, progressives aren't being generous, they're being selfish.
Nobody wants to talk about it, but the truth is that California's liberal immigration laws have been good for the progressive residents of Elysium. They benefit directly from the downward pressure that low-skill immigrants put on the wages for restaurant workers, cleaners, gardeners, and drivers.
The outcome of all of these supposedly progressive policies is the most racially unequal society in the whole of the United States. After decades of progressives congratulating themselves on their anti-racism, low-wage workers — who are disproportionately people of color — today suffer the brunt of the state's housing, tax, and regulatory policies.
What Donald Trump offers Elysium progressives is an external enemy. Trump was an opportunity for the state's politicians and Democratic Party activists to escape their responsibility to seriously address widening inequality and the extreme poverty all around them.
Trump gives progressives a way to channel whatever guilt they might have — whether from preventing homebuilding, benefitting from unfair taxes and pensions, or depriving black and Latino students the teacher quality and school funding they need — into a sanctimonious tribal rage against Republican racism.
What will it take for the progressive bubble to burst? Another recession, perhaps. California's tax revenues are deeply lopsided toward income and especially toward the richest one percent whose income is dependent on the fortunes of the stock market.
Already the state's top accountants are predicting a $55 billion shortfall over the next three years. And that amount is dwarfed by the much larger $366 billion debt taxpayers owe in pension and health care benefits to public employees.
But there will always be an external enemy upon which "progressive" residents of Elysium can displace their guilt. As such, if California is ever to live up to its ideals, change must come from within — not just from within Elysium, but from within the progressive movement itself.
And that starts with acknowledging that California's tragic poverty and widening inequality aren't the result of racist policies imposed from without but rather progressive policies embraced from within.
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