poverty

The “California Miracle” Economy Is a Fantasy

November 4, 2018 By Richard Rider 6 Comments

Democrats and their MSM allies have been touting California’s “miracle comeback” from the recession. They love to reference 2015 statistics – the SINGLE year when CA did quite well compared to the other states. But as we’ll see below, three things are apparent:

1. 2015 was an aberration.

2. Since 2105, CA has slipped back into its moribund economic performance that has become the norm in the Golden State.

3. By just about any metric, CA is doing less well than the majority of the other states. Too often a LOT less well.

California’s unemployment rate (September, 2018) has improved significantly this year. Yet we are now tied for 32nd – with a 4.1% unemployment rate. The national unemployment rate is 3.7%. The CA unemployment rate is 12.5% higher than the average of the other 49 states.

It gets worse. Using the lagging yet arguably more accurate U-6 measure of unemployment (includes involuntary part-time workers), CA is the 5th worst – 9.2% vs. the national rate of 8.1%. The national U-6 not including CA is 8.0%, making CA’s U-6 15.7% higher than other states. Remember: The federal standard used to count a worker as “employed” is working ONE hour per week. CA is indeed the “gig economy.”

Another factor to consider: This past year the number of Californians in the work force (employed and unemployed) remained stagnant – essentially a zero net increase in our Golden State pool of workers. Meanwhile the national work pool grew 0.5%. With no increase in workers, our CA unemployment improvement appears better than it really is. If our work pool had grown at the national rate, we’d have a considerably higher unemployment rate.

Yes, the number of California jobs has grown these past 12 months. But the average job growth in the other 49 states is more than TRIPLE the rate of California’s jobs growth.

But wait – California has the 5^th largest economy in the world! Aren’t we doing great compared to the other states? Short answer: no.

Longer answer: CA is a huge state with a HUGE population — over 38%% more people than the second most populous state of Texas. And CA has an uber-HIGH cost of living. Based just on GDP, CA does indeed rank as the 5^th largest economy in the world. But adjusted for population (per capita) and cost of living (using the “Missouri” COL index in the URL below), CA ranks lower than all but 13 U.S. states.

Stated differently, if one took the GDP of an aggregation of randomly selected states whose total population roughly equaled California’s 40,000,00 people, and adjusted for those states’ cost of living, then they would likely have the 5th largest economy in the world — if not higher!

Liberals love to denigrate Texas, a “backwater state” which supposedly can’t keep up with the California juggernaut. Sadly for progressives, facts prove them wrong.

In the report below, there’s a comparison of job growth by state from September 2017 to September 2018. California jobs grew 81,100. But TEXAS jobs grew 251,500. Soooo, even though CA has a population that’s 38.6% larger than Texas, the Lone Star State created over TRIPLE the number of jobs that CA produced. As a percent of population, CA ranks a dismal 37^th in the percent of job growth compared to the other states. And BTW, the population of Texas is growing over TWICE as fast as CA – and has been for years.

Another disheartening fact: Since the start of the recession (September 2007), the predominant CA job growth above pre-recession levels has been in low paying occupations. The top three dominating occupations – with the job growth in excess of 2007 levels, and the average salary:

Food Service *** 350,000 *** $22,000
Health Care *** 340,000 *** $66,300
Social Assistance *** 305,000 *** $19,100

Moreover, four occupations have failed to gain back all the jobs lost since 2007. All four are in high paying industries:

Logging and mining: $116,300
Construction: $67,700
Finance and Insurance: $123,100
Manufacturing (worst hit): $92,900

Of course, no discussion of California’s economy is complete without considering California’s sky-high cost of living – and the resulting hardship on the poor – the folks that the Democrats supposedly care so passionately about. California’s real (“supplemental”) 2017 poverty rate (the new Census Bureau standard, adjusted for the COL) is still easily the worst in the nation at 19.0%. We are 43.9% higher than the average for the other 49 states. Texas is 14.7%. The CA poverty rate is 34.6% higher than Texas.

Here’s a thought: The median Texas household income is 13.5% less than CA. But adjusted for COL, Texas’ 2015 median household income is 29.3% more than CA.

If the progressives still feel compelled to tout California, perhaps they should boast about the Golden State’s homeless rate – easily tops on the nation. Maybe they DO love the poor – and that’s why they produce so many of ’em in our “Workers’ Paradise”!

To see a more periodically updated, annotated set of facts comparing CA with the other states – using 35 criteria – check out my dreary online fact sheet.

This article was originally published by the Flash Report

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: economy, poverty

California’s Shameful Poverty Crisis

July 22, 2018 By Dan Walters 4 Comments

Seven years ago, the Census Bureau began calculating poverty by a new “supplemental” method, responding to criticism that the half-century-old official poverty rate was too simplistic and inaccurate.

The new method quickly gained wide acceptance as much more accurate because it included more forms of income and, most importantly, adjustments for widely varying costs of living.

Almost immediately, California achieved the dubious distinction of having the nation’s highest poverty rate, mostly because of its high costs of living, especially housing. Currently, it’s still No. 1 with a 20.4 percent poverty rate, more than twice that of No. 50 Vermont.

The Public Policy Institute of California and Stanford University’s Center on Poverty followed suit, using a similar methodology to calculate poverty rates for the state’s 58 counties.

Their California Poverty Measure currently tabs the state’s rate at 19.5 percent with Los Angeles County the highest at 24.9 percent and Placer County the lowest at 13.1 percent.

PPIC and Stanford also calculated an additional “near-poverty” rate of 19.2 percent, which implies that nearly 40 percent of Californians are coping with economic distress.

And now we have an even deeper dive into persistent economic despair in the nation’s richest state.

United Ways of California, a coalition of local organizations that raise money for charities, commissioned “Struggling to Stay Afloat,” which delves into poverty not only at the state and county levels, but right down to neighborhoods.

Moreover, the new study breaks down the data not only geographically, but by race or ethnicity, gender, occupation, marital status, education and other factors.

Overall, it found that “1 in 3 households in California, over 3.3 million families – including those with incomes well above the (official) federal poverty level – struggle every month to meet basic needs.”

Not surprisingly, Latinos have the highest poverty of any ethnic group, with 53 percent of households having incomes that fall below the “real cost measure.” The incomes deemed to be adequate vary widely from community to community, depending on local living costs.

All three of these statistical exercises are telling us the same thing – that California has an immense poverty problem rooted more in high living costs than in its family incomes. And housing is the most important cost driver.

The political response to California’s poverty crisis has been tepid, even though Democrats who dominate its politics often denounce economic disparity.

Raising minimum wages and welfare grants and offering a state tax credit to the working poor may have some impacts on the margin. However, the extra incomes they generate are quickly consumed by higher housing costs, plus the higher gas taxes, local sales taxes and energy bills being imposed to deal with other political priorities.

Poverty must be attacked at its roots, such as the ever-worsening shortage of housing, which drives its costs ever-upward, and the lack of education and training for good jobs that employers want to fill, but can’t.

Capitol politicians have sidestepped the politically difficult task of overcoming local opposition to housing construction, or reducing environmental red tape. The state Democratic Party just endorsed a ballot measure that would make local rent control ordinances easier to enact, thus discouraging new housing investment even more.

Nor has the dominant party been willing to buck the union-led education establishment and insist on more accountability for educating poor kids – more than half of the state’s 6 million K-12 students – so they can break their families’ poverty cycles.

Cowardice and tokenism cannot and will not erase California’s shameful status as the nation’s most poverty-ridden state.

This article was originally published by the San Jose Mercury News

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: Homeless, Homelessness, Los Angeles, poverty

Ten Questions for Jerry Brown

January 24, 2018 By Kevin Kiley 3 Comments

Tomorrow, Jerry Brown will deliver his 15th and final State of the State Address. It’s too bad California legislators can’t ask questions like our counterparts in the United Kingdom, who query their head of government during “Prime Minister’s Questions.” If we could, here are 10 questions I’d ask Governor Brown:

1.) You recently chided Congress, “It’s never good to have one party vote one way, and the other party vote 100 percent the other way. That’s dividing America at a time when we need unity.” Does this mean you’ll no longer sign legislation that is supported by only one party in the Assembly, as you did with the Gas Tax and 20 other bills last year?

2.) For children living in poverty, California is the worst place in America to get an education, ranking near the bottom for every academic performance measure. Your education plan has added almost $30 billion in yearly spending, yet our schools have if anything gotten worse at educating poor children. How do you explain this?

3.) Shortly after taking office, you called reforming the much-abused California Environmental Quality Act “the Lord’s work.” Yet no CEQA reform has happened during your tenure even as the cost of housing has soared to the point that 1 out of 3 Californians is “seriously considering” leaving the state because of it. With less than one year left in your term, when is the Lord’s work going to begin?

4.) While campaigning for Governor, you promised you would not raise taxes without voter approval. Yet last year you signed a $52 billion tax increase without giving voters a say – and now, you’re opposing an effort by voters to undo that tax hike. How should ordinary Californians respond when elected officials break their promises?

5.) In California, the cost of building a mile of road is triple what it is in other states. One reason, according to the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst, is that Caltrans is overstaffed by 3,500 positions. Yet you are proposing 400 new positions in this year’s budget. Why not learn from other states that build better and cheaper roads before making Californians pay higher taxes?

6.) Under your watch, California’s unfunded pension liability has grown by over 100 billion, with public employees generally receiving greater benefits than workers in the private sector. You clearly recognize this as a problem, having just filed a commendable opening brief in what could be a landmark state supreme court case. So why did you allow this problem, which threatens vital services and future generations, to get so much worse?

7.) You claim California is prosperous because it is the world’s “6th largest economy.” Yet adjusting for cost of living and population size, our economy actually ranks 37 out of 50 states in the country. Which statistic do you think more accurately reflects the well-being of ordinary Californians?

8.) Since you became Governor, the State Budget has grown from $129 billion to $191 billion. What evidence can you point to that this new spending has improved the quality of life for ordinary Californians? Feel free to cite, for example, health outcomes, student achievement, housing affordability, infrastructure quality, workforce participation, poverty rates, family stability, or any other metric.

9.) The projected cost of High Speed Rail now exceeds $67 billion, with new delays and cost overruns reported almost monthly. And many are doubting the bullet train will have any useful purpose. In the words of Elon Musk, “The train in question would be both slower, more expensive to operate and less safe by two orders of magnitude than flying, so why would anyone use it?” Why would anyone?

10.) You recently accused others of “ripping the country apart” through partisan actions. Yet in the last few months you’ve called your political opponents “mafia thugs,” “political terrorists,” and “evil in the extreme.” Is this rhetoric bringing the country together?

Assemblyman Kevin Kiley represents the 6th Assembly District, which includes parts of El Dorado, Placer, and Sacramento counties.

This blog post was originally published by Fox and Hounds Daily

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: CEQA, Gas tax, high speed rail, Jerry Brown, poverty

California, Poverty Capital — Why are so many people poor in the Golden State?

January 20, 2018 By Kerry Jackson 6 Comments

California — not Mississippi, New Mexico, or West Virginia — has the highest poverty rate in the United States. 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. Given robust job growth in the state and the prosperity generated by several industries, especially the supercharged tech sector, the question arises as to why California has so many poor people, especially when the state’s per-capita GDP increased roughly twice as much as the U.S. average over the five years ending in 2016 (12.5 percent, compared with 6.27 percent).

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. California state and local governments spent nearly $958 billion from 1992 through 2015 on public welfare programs, including cash-assistance payments, vendor payments, and “other public welfare,” according to the U.S. Census Bureau. 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.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, some states — principally Wisconsin, Michigan, and Virginia — initiated welfare reform, as did the federal government under President Bill Clinton and the Republican Congress. The common thread of the reformed welfare programs was strong work requirements placed on aid recipients. These overhauls were widely recognized as a big success, as welfare rolls plummeted and millions of former aid recipients entered the workforce. The state and local bureaucracies that implement California’s antipoverty programs, however, have resisted pro-work reforms. In fact, California recipients of state aid receive a disproportionately large share of it in no-strings-attached cash disbursements. It’s as if welfare reform passed California by, leaving a dependency trap in place. Immigrants are falling into it: 55 percent of immigrant families in the state get some kind of means-tested benefits, compared with just 30 percent of natives, according to City Journal contributing editor Kay S. Hymowitz.

Self-interest in the social-services community may be at work here. If California’s poverty rate should ever be substantially reduced by getting the typical welfare client back into the workforce, many bureaucrats could lose their jobs. As economist William A. Niskanen explained back in 1971, public agencies seek to maximize their budgets, through which they acquire increased power, status, comfort, and job security. In order to keep growing its budget, and hence its power, a welfare bureaucracy has an incentive to expand its “customer” base—to ensure that the welfare rolls remain full and, ideally, growing. With 883,000 full-time-equivalent state and local employees in 2014, according to Governing, California has an enormous bureaucracy—a unionized, public-sector workforce that exercises tremendous power through voting and lobbying. Many work in social services.

Further contributing to the poverty problem is California’s housing crisis. Californians spent more than one-third of their incomes on housing in 2014, the third-highest rate in the country. A shortage of housing has driven prices ever higher, far above income increases. And that shortage is a direct outgrowth of misguided policies. “Counties and local governments have imposed restrictive land-use regulations that drove up the price of land and dwellings,” explains analyst Wendell Cox. “Middle income households have been forced to accept lower standards of living while the less fortunate have been driven into poverty by the high cost of housing.” The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), passed in 1971, is one example; it can add $1 million to the cost of completing a housing development, says Todd Williams, an Oakland attorney who chairs the Wendel Rosen Black & Dean land-use group. CEQA costs have been known to shut down entire home-building projects. CEQA reform would help increase housing supply, but there’s no real movement to change the law.

Extensive environmental regulations aimed at reducing carbon-dioxide emissions make energy more expensive, also hurting the poor. On some estimates, California energy costs are as much as 50 percent higher than the national average. Jonathan A. Lesser of Continental Economics, author of a 2015 Manhattan Institute study, “Less Carbon, Higher Prices,” found that “in 2012, nearly 1 million California households faced ‘energy poverty’—defined as energy expenditures exceeding 10 percent of household income. In certain California counties, the rate of energy poverty was as high as 15 percent of all households.” A Pacific Research Institute study by Wayne Winegarden found that the rate could exceed 17 percent of median income in some areas. “The impacts on the poorest households are not only the largest,” states Winegarden. “They are clearly unaffordable.”

Looking to help poor and low-income residents, California lawmakers recently passed a measure raising the minimum wage from $10 an hour to $15 an hour by 2022—but a higher minimum wage will do nothing for the 60 percent of Californians who live in poverty and don’t have jobs, and studies suggest that it will likely cause many who do have jobs to lose them. A Harvard study found evidence that “higher minimum wages increase overall exit rates for restaurants” in the Bay Area, where more than a dozen cities and counties, including San Francisco, have changed their minimum-wage ordinances in the last five years. “Estimates suggest that a one-dollar increase in the minimum wage leads to a 14 percent increase in the likelihood of exit for a 3.5-star restaurant (which is the median rating),” the report says. These restaurants are a significant source of employment for low-skilled and entry-level workers.

Apparently content with futile poverty policies, Sacramento lawmakers can turn their attention to what historian Victor Davis Hanson aptly describes as a fixation on “remaking the world.” The political class wants to build a costly and needless high-speed rail system; talks of secession from a United States presided over by Donald Trump; hired former attorney general Eric Holder to “resist” Trump’s agenda; enacted the first state-level cap-and-trade regime; established California as a “sanctuary state” for illegal immigrants; banned plastic bags, threatening the jobs of thousands of workers involved in their manufacture; and is consumed by its dedication to “California values.” All this only reinforces the rest of America’s perception of an out-of-touch Left Coast, to the disservice of millions of Californians whose values are more traditional, including many of the state’s poor residents.

California’s de facto status as a one-party state lies at the heart of its poverty problem. With a permanent majority in the state senate and the assembly, a prolonged dominance in the executive branch, and a weak opposition, California Democrats have long been free to indulge blue-state ideology while paying little or no political price. The state’s poverty problem is unlikely to improve while policymakers remain unwilling to unleash the engines of economic prosperity that drove California to its golden years.

Kerry Jackson is the Pacific Research Institute’s fellow in California studies.

This article was originally published by City Journal Online

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: City Journal, GDP, poverty

California’s soaring poverty rates tied to its fiscal irresponsibility

September 25, 2017 By Steven Greenhut 2 Comments

The U.S. Census Bureau’s latest statistics, released this month, find that California’s poverty rate remains the highest in the nation, despite dipping ever so slightly. The reason is no surprise: It’s tied largely to the state’s unusually high cost of living.

Yet despite Democratic lawmakers’ oft-stated concern about rising income inequality, they spent the recently concluded legislative session imposing taxes, fees and new regulations that will drive up the costs of everything from transportation to housing.

In other words, they’ve been creating the poverty and inequality problem they say they’re here to solve. The burden of their failure falls most heavily on those Californians who earn the least. The new government programs they will fund with the additional tax revenue will benefit only a small number of poor people and very often at the expense of other poor people.

Under the official federal poverty measure, California’s percentage of residents living below the poverty threshold is 14.5 percent, which is nearly a percentage point above the national average. But using the bureau’s more relevant “Supplemental Poverty Measure,” which accounts for public assistance payments and the state’s sky-high housing costs, California’s poverty rate is a shocking 20.4 percent, well above the national average of 13. 9 percent.

California increasingly is becoming a state of haves and have-nots. The homeownership rates hover around 54 percent, lower than every state except New York. The cost of groceries, transportation and utilities are well above the national average, with California’s health-care costs being the only major cost-of-living area that’s around the national average.

To make matters worse, California’s troubled financial situation – mainly the unfunded debts the state has accumulated to pay for pension and medical care promises made to government employees – imposes an additional burden on taxpayers. That means higher taxes and an eroded quality of public services, as local governments struggle to balance their budgets.

The state’s distressing finances have achieved for us a kind of fame. A new study from “Truth in Accounting” ranked California near the bottom – 43^rd in the nation – for its fiscal state of affairs. The group gave California a financial grade of F because of its “staggering debt burden of $255.1 billion.” That leaves “an unbelievable $21,600 for every California taxpayer,” compared to an average debt of $9,900 per taxpayer nationwide, the group reported.

The Truth in Accounting report only looks at state liabilities. California Policy Center, for instance, found that California’s total state and local debt may be closer to $1.3 trillion, which puts the total per-taxpayer burden above $100,000.

Obviously, state officials are not about to send a $21,600 bill to every taxpayer. As Truth in Accounting explains, state officials use a variety of accounting tricks to hide the size of the debt: They inflate revenue assumptions in the pension funds (the higher the expected rate of return on investments, the lower the stated pension debt). They count borrowed money as income. They understate the true cost of government. They delay payments of bills to the next fiscal year, to mask the size of the current debt.

The “Financial State of the States” report found it even more troubling that “state government officials continue to obscure large amounts of retirement debt on their balance sheets, despite new rules to increase financial transparency.” And while California has reported much of its pension debt, “the state continues to hide most of its retiree health care debt,” with a total hidden debt of $65.9 billion.

But as unfunded liabilities mount, officials will have to find ways to pay for the growing debt. “Gov. Brown needs to come up with this money through increased taxes, or slash promised benefits to teachers, police officers, firefighters, and other public servants,” according to the group. In California, the courts have greatly limited public employee pension funds’ ability to reduce benefits, even going forward. That means Californians can expect the usual response: pressure for new taxes and fees at every level of government and cutbacks in promised services.

These debt levels aren’t inevitable. Nine states have surpluses as high as $38,200 per taxpayer, after all of their debts are paid. Several others have a relatively modest amount of debt per capita. But California and eight other states are financial sinkholes.

California is known for its progressive tax rates, meaning that the wealthiest people here pay the bulk of the state’s income taxes. Gov. Jerry Brown often warns during his budget presentations that the state’s reliance on capital gains tax receipts makes the general fund vulnerable to recession. If the economy dips, revenues fall precipitously, thus leading to large deficits. He cautions the Legislature against approving permanent spending programs that can’t be sustained if the economy goes south.

Despite such progressivism, the poorest Californians are not off the hook. The governor this year signed a large increase in the gasoline tax, averaging 12 cents a gallon. He also signed an extension of the state’s cap-and-trade system, which imposes new costs on manufacturers and refiners to force them to reduce their carbon emissions. The program’s extension is predicted to add as much as 63 cents on a gallon of gasoline by 2021, according to the well-respected Legislative Analyst’s Office.

These are “regressive” taxes that fall heavily on the poor.

California also has high sales and use taxes. The standard sales-tax rate is 7.25 percent. Many cities have local add-ons that increase those taxes to as much as 10.25 percent on most purchases, which is among the highest in the nation. These, too, are regressive taxes that boost the cost of living for everyone, but harm the poor most because they eat up a larger proportional share of their budgets.

Fiscal problems also hit poor people the hardest. Some of the state’s poorest cities (Stockton, Vallejo, Richmond and San Bernardino) have struggled under burdensome pension debts. When Stockton went bankrupt, for instance, local officials responded by increasing sales taxes as part of their “work-out plan.” High-paid public employees had their full salaries and pensions protected, while low-wage residents had to pay more in sales taxes.

But the biggest poverty problem involves housing costs. Even the state Legislature has recognized the degree to which soaring housing costs have become a statewide “crisis.” Yet the housing package that passed in the waning hours of the legislative session is likely to exacerbate the “cost of living” problem.

One measure (Senate Bill 2) increases fees on many real-estate transactions. Another will put a $3 billion housing bond on the November 2018 ballot. If voters approve, Senate Bill 3 will create new pressure on the state budget. The one measure (Senate Bill 35) that seeks to streamline the approval process for housing projects also includes a union-backed prevailing-wage requirement that could add significantly to the cost of building these projects. What one hand giveth, the other taketh away.

So, California legislators continue to drive up the cost of housing and transportation, which are the main drivers of the state’s depressingly high rates of poverty and income inequality. They ignore the bone-crushing debt levels that create constant pressure for higher taxes and that obliterate the public services upon which the poorest residents are most dependent. These actions speak far louder than their constant blather about helping the poor.

Steven Greenhut is contributing editor for the California Policy Center. He is Western region director for the R Street Institute. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org.

This article was originally published by the California Policy Center

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: Homeless, poverty

California has the nation’s highest poverty rate

March 13, 2017 By Chris Nichols 6 Comments

California’s job and economic growth has outpaced much of the nation in recent years. That growth, however, has not eliminated one of the state’s biggest challenges: poverty.

This week, State Assembly Republican Leader Chad Mayes called poverty California’s No. 1 priority during a forum of legislative leaders in Sacramento.

Mayes, who represents parts of San Bernardino and Riverside counties, claimed the state’s poverty rate is higher than any state in the nation when considering factors such as cost-of-living.

“If you look at the official poverty measure in California, we’re about average with the rest of the country,” Mayes said. “But if you use the supplemental poverty measure, we are in the lead. We have the highest poverty rate in the nation — higher than New Mexico, higher than any of the southern states, Louisiana, Alabama, higher than Idaho.”

We decided to fact-check whether the report Mayes cited really shows that California has the highest poverty rate in the nation.

Our research

From 2013 to 2015, California had America’s 17th-highest poverty rate, 15 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Official Poverty Measure. That measure uses income levels to determine poverty, but does not consider differences in cost-of-living among states. It lists the official poverty threshold for a two-adult, two-child family at $24,036 in 2015.

During the same period, California had the highest poverty rate, 20.6 percent, according to the census’ Supplemental Poverty Measure. That study does account for cost-of-living, including taxes, housing and medical costs, and is considered by researchers a more accurate reflection of poverty. For a two-adult, two-child family in California, the poverty threshold was an average of $30,000, depending on the region in the state, according to a 2014 analysis by Public Policy Institute of California.

Looking at state poverty rates, the second highest is Florida’s 19 percent, followed by New York’s and Louisiana’s shared 17.9 percent rate. The national average is 15.1 percent using the supplemental measure.

“I think Assemblymember Mayes’ comments are accurate,” said Chris Hoene, executive director of the left-leaning California Budget Policy Center, which has closely studied poverty in the state.

Hoene said the high poverty rate in the supplemental report is driven by California’s stratospheric housing costs. He added that use of the supplemental measure has gained wide acceptance among researchers.

“I think in most quarters, that’s not disputed,” he said.

Marybeth Mattingly, a researcher at the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality added by email: “Basically, yes, this statement is (sadly) accurate.”

Caroline Danielson, who studies poverty at the Public Policy Institute of California, noted that when considering the margin of error in the supplemental poverty report, California and Florida are closer than one might assume. California’s estimate has a margin of error of ± 0.8 percent while Florida’s had a margin of ± 1.1 percent.

“California’s rate is essentially the same as Florida’s,” she said. “California, we might say, is in the top two.”

Several researchers noted that California’s poverty rate has declined in recent years: “But they haven’t moved as much as you would hope,” Hoene said.

Our ruling

State Assembly Republican Leader Chad Mayes said recently that California has “the highest poverty rate in the nation” when considering the U.S. Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure.

Data from that report, and researchers who study poverty, support Mayes’ statement. The state’s 20.6 percent poverty rate is higher than any other, though Florida’s 19 percent rate is close, especially when considering the margin of error.

The supplemental report is considered by experts the best state-by-state measure of poverty, because it takes into account geographic differences in cost-of-living, not just income levels.

In his statement, Mayes cited the specific report that backs his claim, and added the context that another report, one that doesn’t account for cost-of-living, shows California’s poverty closer to the national average.

Given this clarity and context, we rate Mayes’ statement True.

This article was originally published by Politifact.com

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: Chad Mayes, poverty