“California — not Mississippi, New Mexico, or West Virginia — has the highest poverty rate in the United States,” the Los Angeles Times notes in a Jan. 14 piece by Kerry Jackson.

“According to the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure –which accounts for the cost of housing, food, utilities, and clothing, and which includes noncash government assistance as a form of income — nearly one out of four Californians is poor.”

So, why are Californians so poor? After all, job and GDP growth is good, although most of that is based around the tech sector. Part of it, Jackson argues, is that “state and local bureaucracies that implement California’s antipoverty programs … resisted pro-work reforms” that began in the 1990s to get people off of welfare.

“It’s not as if California policymakers have neglected to wage war on poverty, Sacramento and local governments have spent massive amounts in the cause, for decades now. Myriad state and municipal benefit programs overlap with one another; in some cases, individuals with incomes 200 percent above the poverty line receive benefits, according to the California Policy Center,” Jackson writes.

“Unfortunately, California, with 12 percent of the American population, is home today to roughly one in three of the nation’s welfare recipients. The generous spending, then, has not only failed to decrease poverty; it actually seems to have made it worse,” Jackson continued. – READ MORE

Democrats fear the Trump administration’s re-reinstatement of citizenship questions on the 2020 U.S. Census will cost California a Congressional seat and billions in funding.

The number of U.S. House of Representative seats was fixed by law in 1911 at 435. The “enumeration” requires at that each state have at least one Representative, and the other Representatives are allocated according to population as determined by the U.S. Census every ten years. Based on the 2010 Census data, California received the most, at 53.

But Politico reports that could change with the Department of Justice sending a letter on December 12 to the Census Bureau asking that the citizenship question eliminated in 2010 during the Obama administration be reinstated for the 2020 Census.

According to the Justice Department’s General Counsel, Arthur E. Gary, “This data is critical to the Department’s enforcement of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and its important protections against racial discrimination in voting.” He added, “To fully enforce those requirements, the Department needs a reliable calculation of the citizen voting-age population in localities where voting rights violations are alleged or suspected.”

The Obama administration discontinued the 1970-2000 “long form” questionnaire that asked citizenship questions. Democrats claim that it was appropriately replaced by the American Community Survey (ACS). But the Justice Department stresses that ACS is a “samples survey that is sent to only around one in every thirty-eight households each year.” – READ MORE

A “New California” movement says it wants to split the coastal state in half, letting “right-wingers” create their own economy and governmental structure separate from the leftists who rule in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Robert Paul Preston and Tom Reed say they’re leading a movement to break off rural and southern California territories, occupied mostly by people who aren’t thrilled with the rules and regulations — and especially the taxes — levied by politicians closer to the coasts.

According to Fox News, the movement declares that, “after years of over taxation, regulation, and mono party politics the State of California and many of its 58 Counties have become ungovernable,” and that those same counties are now “under a tyrannical form of government that does not follow” basic “Constitutional requirements.”

“There’s something wrong when you have a rural county such as this one, and you go down to Orange County which is mostly urban, and it has the same set of problems, and it happens because of how the state is being governed and taxed,” the movement’s leaders told CBS News. – READ MORE