California's wealth/poverty ratio: I haven't run across the article with the claim. But see this one: https://townhall.com/columnists/jonahgo … 5?amp=true
According to the standard poverty measure, Mississippi ranks first in the nation with a rate of 20.8 percent. California ranks 16th. The Census Bureau's "Supplemental Poverty Measure" places California first in the nation with a poverty rate of 20.4, and Mississippi falls to fifth.
To be clear, California spends an enormous amount of money fighting poverty. The problem, as Kerry Jackson explains in the winter issue of City Journal, is that California remains stuck in the past. While the rest of the country embraced welfare reforms that emphasized work, California's bloated and heavily unionized welfare bureaucracies -- with nearly 900,000 state and municipal employees -- clung to the old model of relying on policies that encourage dependency, not self-sufficiency.
A cynical interpretation holds that this is a feature, not a bug. Just as California's prison guard unions have fought reforms that might reduce the prison population -- fewer prisoners, fewer prison guard jobs -- California's poverty bureaucrats have a similar incentive. "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," Jackson writes.
In my experience, a cynic is an optimist by nature and a realist by sad experience. I'm told that this is a cynical definition. I think it a realistic one.
Cui bono? The word 'underserved' from the mouths of bureaucrats is a flamimg red flag.
