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Palm trees, sports cars and movie stars — that's what most of the world pictures when they think of California. But, poverty in California is a very real thing.

It's not that Californians aren't prosperous. The state's per-capita GDP has increased almost twice as fast as the national average from 2011 to 2016. The problem is that California makes it easy to be poor. The state is home to 12% of the U.S. population, and it's a magnet for welfare recipients.

The State Welfare Reform

Take a walk through the streets of downtown San Diego, “America’s Finest City.” Three hundred days of sunshine a year and vast swaths of sandy beachfront are nothing to shake a stick at, but a large community is living in the streets, subsisting on aid from government programs.

More than half of Californians who live below the poverty line don’t have jobs. The state makes it simple for the unemployed to qualify for government benefits, unlike other states that passed welfare reform in the 1990s. But it’s not only those living in poverty who are receiving the benefits, either — some families with incomes 200 percent above the poverty line still collect.

It’s not a new problem. States like Virginia, Wisconsin and New Hampshire have seen welfare roles plummet after Clinton-era laws encouraged those living in poverty to get to work. Only California, Hawaii and Vermont pay welfare to more than half of families living in poverty conditions, and California’s larger population dictates that the dollar amount it spends is much higher than any other state.

The Cost of Being Californian

One of the ways California legislators have tried to mitigate this issue is by raising the minimum wage. Living in California is expensive, so by increasing the pay rate for employees working low-wage jobs, you would think the number of persons living in poverty would decrease.

Unfortunately, that effort has backfired. Legislators might set the wage laws, but business owners just choose to hire fewer people when the cost of running their business goes up. That means more people are on the streets, and the cost of living has remained the same. Government programs, then, must work harder to pick up the slack.

However, it's not the price of milk making it tough for Californians to get by — that’s mostly the same no matter where you go. It's housing — there's not enough of it.

To make matters worse, new developments for low-income residents aren’t being built, even though they need to be. As the number of available spaces dwindles, the prices go up. Living without a home makes it difficult to get organized and find a job.

Pouring salt in the wound is the high cost of energy in California. It’s the result of state measures aimed at making the state’s air and water cleaner — however, for families that are just getting by, it makes keeping the lights on a challenge.

Shifting the Tide

It’s worth noting that using older methods of quantifying poverty, ones that don’t take into account the cost of living, California stacks up more evenly to other states. However, the cost of living in California is drastically different from other states, so it's foolish to use this metric as a get-out-of-jail-free card.

One in every five Californians lives below the poverty line. The state has made strides to bring that number down in the last two to three years, but they have been small. This failure to act has earned California the title of “sanctuary state” from welfare reform proponents.

As long as the welfare state remains where it’s at, more of America’s poor population will gravitate toward places like San Diego. And who can blame them? Try sleeping on the streets in Chicago during the middle of winter — it’s not comfortable. A city where it’s 70 degrees for most of the year and rarely rains? That’s a little more bearable.

It’s admirable that Californians are sympathetic toward their fellow human beings, but this is not a sustainable policy. In a state that constitutes the world’s sixth-largest economy, it’s highly difficult to believe that we can’t find more ways to integrate of the impoverished community into the workforce.

That doesn't mean pulling the rug out from under people, but we have to incentivize the unemployed to become job seekers. America is not a socialist country — if it were, we could sustain this much load on the system. But it's not.

Continuing to pay people who aren't working might help in the short term, but it will bankrupt the state eventually. And a broke California won't just have an impact on locals — the entire United States will feel it. The only way to avoid this is by getting people off the streets and into the workforce.

*(Image credit: Franco Folini/ flickr)