California Is Doing Fine, Thank You Very Much

Whenever I see an op-ed insisting that California is a total, um, shithole of a state, I always check the credit line at the bottom. Four times out of five it comes from City Journal, often by professional California scold Kerry Jackson. Sure enough, that’s where today’s piece in the LA Times is from:

Guess which state has the highest poverty rate in the country? Not Mississippi, New Mexico, or West Virginia, but California, where nearly one out of five residents is poor. That’s according to the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure, which factors in the cost of housing, food, utilities and clothing, and which includes noncash government assistance as a form of income.

Ah. The SPM. There’s an obvious reason that California performs poorly on the SPM, but Jackson instead blames it on his usual tired litany of bugaboos: generous welfare policies, lack of pro-work welfare reform, self-interested bureaucracies that want to keep the welfare rolls high,¹ restrictive land-use regulations, out-of-control environmental rules, high minimum wage, and high-speed rail.

I’m not sure why the LA Times bothers printing this dreck, but let’s take a look at some basic measures of how California is doing. Jackson is careful not to use the standard poverty rate, and it’s pretty obvious why that is:

California ranks 21st. Nothing out of the ordinary there. But what about our lack of welfare reform? Does that mean we have lots of people idling away on the public dime? Not really. We do have an unemployment rate a smidge worse than it should be, but our labor force participation rate is dead average:

California ranks 20th. West Virginia, Mississippi, and New Mexico are way behind us. How about our massive state bureacracy?

California is the fifth lowest. So if absolute poverty is average; labor force participation is average; and the state bureaucracy is under control; then whatever could put California at the top of the SPM poverty ranking?

Oh, right: housing. California has the fourth-highest housing prices in the nation, and the SPM incorporates housing prices in its estimates. Are California’s high housing prices due to restrictive land-use regulation? Sure, that’s some of it. But I don’t know of any evidence that California is wildly out of the ordinary on this measure, and at this point I’m too tired to look for it. If you want to argue that California should have looser land-use regulations, go for it.² I won’t argue.

There’s a whole cottage industry on the right dedicated to the proposition that California is a hellhole. Why? Because California is the most liberal state in the nation, and the existence of a high-tax, high-service state that nonetheless has a great economy is an affront to their principles. And yet, California’s economy is doing fine:

We rank 8th in GDP per capita—and that’s without an oil boom but with a high level of illegal immigration. What’s more, California’s GDP per capita has grown faster than national GDP over the past two decades:

In 1997, California’s GDP per capita was only 3 percent higher than the country as a whole. Today, it’s 13 percent higher. This is not the sign of a sputtering economy that’s choked by bureaucracy and environmental regulations.

God knows California has its problems, and obviously our location and weather allow us to attract high-value workers despite those problems. Nonetheless, the plain fact is that California has high taxes, good services, vigorous environmental regulations, and still has a strong economy. All the cherry picking in the world won’t change that.

But yes, we also have very high housing prices, and that hurts the poor. I don’t think anyone disputes that.

¹I’m not making this up. Here’s what Jackson says: “With 883,000 full-time-equivalent state and local employees in 2014, California has an enormous bureaucracy. Many work in social services, and many would lose their jobs if the typical welfare client were to move off the welfare rolls.”

²Just don’t embarrass yourself looking for egregious state regulations. Most of the relevant land-use rules are at the city and county level.

WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

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This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

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And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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