Which state has 12 percent of America’s population, but one-third of its welfare recipients? You got it.
Disparate Welfare Impact
29 Responses to Disparate Welfare Impact
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Mitchell Young says:
Demographic change.
I live in California. I ride the bus. I see the young ‘Latina’ — read Mexican, women towing three babies/toddlers. No matter how hard working their husbands are (remember immigrant women, especially illegal immigrant women, are actually *less* likely to be working than natives), mowing lawns or washing cars or busing tables isn’t going to pay for those kids food and shelter, let alone education.
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Bruce Ross says:
Oft repeated but not necessarily true. The state’s welfare caseloads are high (though benefits aren’t particularly generous), but according to this source, at least, it’s about 20 percent, not one-third: http://www.statemaster.com/graph/eco_wel_cas_tot_rec-economy-welfare-caseloads-total-recipients.
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JT says:
And yet, I’d bet it remains near the bottom on federal monies received as against taxes sent to the federal govt. There must be better numbers out there, but the easiest to find was 2005:http://www.taxfoundation.org/research/show/266.html#fedspend_per_taxesbystate-20071009.
Just goes to show…well, I don’t know what it shows. That CA needs better federal representation, I guess.
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EddieInCA says:
Hmmm….
California pays in more in Federal taxes then it gets back in Federal dollars.
http://visualeconomics.creditloan.com/united-states-federal-tax-dollars/
Federal Spending Received per Dollar of Taxes Paid
10 Biggest Receivers
1. New Mexico $2.03
2. Mississippi $2.02
3. Alaska $1.84
4. Louisiana $1.78
5. West Virginia $1.76
6. North Dakota $1.68
7. Alabama $1.66
8. South Dakota $1.53
9. Kentucky $1.51
10. Virginia $1.5110 Biggest Donators
1. New Jersey $0.61
2. Nevada $0.65
3. Connecticut $0.69
4. New Hampshire $0.71
5. Minnesota $0.72
6. Illinois $0.75
7. Delaware $0.77
8. California $0.78
9. New York $0.79
10. Colorado $0.81How is that possible, given the premise stated in this piece?
Something is missing from Mr. Robinson’s analysis…
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Robert says:
California, despite it’s reputation to the contrary, is the most Capitalistic state in the nation: fabulous wealth built on plentiful and powerless workers and compliant government that socializes much of the cost of labor.
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Thank you, EddieinCA. This indicates a long-standing fact: on a dollar-for-dollar basis (which is a better comparison than aggregate total), the red states whose politicians are always griping about government interference and how awful welfare is and so on are net recipients of the very government largess they deplore; whereas the horrible, awful Librul blue states are net donors.
In short, the stronghold of those who bloviate about the eviles of redistrubutionism and monetary tranfers are themselves recipients of money redistributed to them from the blue states they decry. Interesting, huh?
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Peter says:
I do like how people talk down to California and then take Californian tax dollars to subsidise their failed states.
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Fran Macadam says:
Let’s not forget that a very significant amount of federal monies are associated with military spending.
New Mexico, at the top of the list, is the most heavily militarized of any state.
Don’t forget too, the story that Boeing is receiving billions in government subsidies as per the recent WTO finding.
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Brian says:
“on a dollar-for-dollar basis (which is a better comparison than aggregate total)”
OK, I’ll bite: why? The federal government revenue is mostly (but not exactly) based on income, while spending certainly is not (just the opposite in many ways, of course). So why should the two be coupled at all (as opposed to the ratios posted above being anti-correlated with per-capita income)? Connecticut and New Jersey, compared to New Mexico and Mississippi, have lots of wealthy individuals and successful businesses and fewer poor. So of course “they” “pay more” in taxes and “get less back” but so what? It seems like you’re thinking of each state as one individual entity when that’s not the case at all and is not the proper way to look at the situation.“the stronghold [sic] of those who bloviate about the eviles [sic] of redistrubutionism [sic] and monetary tranfers [sic] are themselves recipients of money redistributed to them [sic] from the blue states they decry.”
OK, I’ll bite again–why is this impossible to believe? Is it not possible that the residents of the red states think that many government programs are in fact bloated, wasteful, inefficient, even counterproductive, and should be scaled back or even abolished? Is it really your position that naked economic self-interest should be all anyone cares about? -
Mary Russell says:
My family left L.A. when I was 12 and moved to New York. I attended public schools in both states. My very first semester in NY schools, I failed both math and science. California schools were so very poor academically that I had never had a science class until we moved. I am so happy that my parents made the decision to leave when they did, in the mid-80s, and move to a place with more hope and a better future.
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Rob says:
In addition to Brian’s helpful clarification, I say to the critics: so what? You’re missing the operative distinction. The problem isn’t that California is receiving lots of federal money (though less, proportionally, than some other states) but what California is using that money for; namely, welfare programs, a culture of dependency and cyclical poverty. Note also that some of these programs (e.g., Medicaid) are state programs, so the charts about federal dollars, etc., are more than irrelevant.
Read this sentence to yourself out loud again. I dare you to defend it: California contains 33% of all welfare recipients in the whole country.
Something went wrong somewhere, guys.
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Mary: Your experience resonates with mine. As a homeschooler growing up in Virginia, our local school district required us to take a standardized test to ensure that we were meeting certain minimum benchmarks. At the time, Virginia didn’t have its own, so we either used a test from Iowa or, usually, one from California. The California tests were so hilariously easy that we usually finished way ahead of time, scoring in the 99th percentile way above our own grade levels in all subjects. I say this not to brag–it was hardly a measure of intelligence, much less a challenge–but to lament the apparently piss-poor quality of California public education, even 20+ years ago. Either the standards are really low there, or the tests were merely perfunctory and everyone aced them.
Sadly, I suspect the former, and I’m probably not going out on a limb when I posit that low educational expectations are correlated with high welfare dependency.
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That ‘Tax Foundation’ data is 7 years old (at least) –both ‘sources’ quoted in this discussion are in fact the same source. Surely the bailouts of the big banks boosted New York, New Jersey, etc as recipient states (unless, of course, some sort of subterfuge is used, as I imagine is likely). Further, the ‘Tax Foundation’ data doesn’t break out common good spending (like defense) from transfers, or ‘entitlement’ transfers — which, after all, retired people paid into — versus just plain old transfers like SNAP/EBT.
California, with Hollywood and Silicon Valley, does produce for the US, although in both cases it is living on its laurels. The state has had net domestic outmigration for 20 years. It isn’t that people just ‘talk down’ the place, they actually leave it, despite its tremendous natural advantages.
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Read this sentence to yourself out loud again. I dare you to defend it: California contains 33% of all welfare recipients in the whole country.
It’s a sentence from a blog post about a WSJ editorial piece produced by two members of the Hoover Institution that doesn’t show it’s work. It’s impossible to defend or attack it. There’s not enough there there.
I mean, watch this: “Despite containing 12% of the country, California has only 1% of the nation’s welfare recipients.” Sounds pretty good doesn’t it? You’re not actually going to ask me to show my work are you?
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OK, let me correct myself. The latest HHS data says California indeed has one-third of the nation’s TANF cases.
http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/ofa/data-reports/caseload/2011/2011_family_tan.htm
Just when I try not to think the worst of California …
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Aha! For whatever it’s worth, a critical reason is that California is one of the few states that does not impose time limits on welfare payments, at least for children. While payments for adults run out after a lifetime cap of 60 months (recently reduced to 48, if I’m not mistaken), the Legislature has long held to the philosophy that it should not punish the children more than circumstance already has for the parents’ inability to make themselves productive members of society. Obviously, of course, the money still ends up filtering through those parents.
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Sean says:
California is also at or near the top in cost of living, which has a great deal to do with whether a person needs assistance or not. It follows that CA would have more welfare recipients than other states, although I doubt that cost of living accounts for it all.
“California, with Hollywood and Silicon Valley, does produce for the US, although in both cases it is living on its laurels.”
You’re forgetting the San Joaquin Valley, which produces somewhere around 10% of the nation’s agriculture.
In 2009 California’s GDP was the 8th largest in the world, bigger than Brazil’s or Spain’s. Yes, California used to be 7th largest so we’ve slipped a bit, but this state is still a HUGE producer by any measure.
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Brian: As you can see here, “stronghold” is correctly spelled, as is “them”. “Redistributionism”, “evils”, and “transfers” are indeed misspelled. Alas, there are occasions when I type too fast and don’t have time to edit. Such is the frailty of human nature. Generally when I reply to a post I look at the ideas expressed rather than feeling the supercilious and snarky need to put “sic’s” all over the place. This is because I realize that others, like I myself, may type too fast at times or have insufficient time to edit, and that misspelling does not necessarily indicate lack of intelligence or a failure to grasp the subject matter.
Anyway, I have no problem with the taxes derived from the “wealthy individuals and successful businesses” that are presumably commoner in the blue states going to help the greater number of poor in red states. However, the GOP is always deriding “redistribution of wealth”, insisting that taxes on the wealthy be lowered, and putting forth an ideology of supposed self-reliance in arguing for cuts in benefit programs. This clash might be viewed as inconsistent, or to use a harsher term, hypocritical.
On the other issue, if red state residents do “think that many government programs are in fact bloated, wasteful, inefficient, even counterproductive, and should be scaled back or even abolished,” they’e free to refuse to accept the money, right? That they do not do so might, just might, also be interpreted as hypocrisy.
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Interestingly, most recent commenters apparently see no problem with California’s welfare rolls. Instead, they’ve deployed a variety of tactics designed to shift the focus to other unrelated issues (I’m not denying that said issues are problematic, but here they are little more than tu quoque jabs). Some, like Turmarion, raise the old canard about red state hypocrisy, which, while a fair point, still misses the real problem, and still avoids the fact that these numbers include state-level programs like Medicaid. Some, like JT, seek to undermine the source, even though other (more credible? and easily accessible) sources corroborate the statistics. Some, like Sean, insist that California is still a great place, in spite of what is unanimously derided as its dysfunctional government and its growing trend of net emigration.
So is there really no problem with California? No one is concerned that a huge proportion of its population is on welfare, and that it tops the list by a huge margin on the national welfare rolls? Really? So everything is still sunny in Cali, even though it’s literally going bankrupt (not to speak of the federal government itself…).
I mean, I’m not averse to discussing these other problems–media bias, red-state poverty, etc.–but in this case their being broached seems to have more to do with evading the real point, namely, the self-destruction of the statist welfare model.
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MH - secular misanthropist says:
Turmarion, Ayn Rand was against Social Security but took the money anyway. I guess eople generally don’t like to make statements that cost them money and orthodox Cosimanianism is popular.
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“mowing lawns or washing cars or busing tables isn’t going to pay for those kids food and shelter, let alone education.”
“fabulous wealth built on plentiful and powerless workers and compliant government that socializes much of the cost of labor.”
“California is also at or near the top in cost of living, which has a great deal to do with whether a person needs assistance or not. ”
ANYONE SEE A PATTERN HERE? If wages, particularly the minimum wage, were substantially increased, hard working men could actually support their families on their labor. Welfare, and other taxpayer-financed subsidies of deadbeat employers could be phasedout.
“The state has had net domestic outmigration for 20 years.”
Well, its about time. The California climate has never provided sufficient water to support so many millions, not without raiding the other side of the Sierra Nevada, destroying lakes, turning the Gulf of California into a metallic sludge… send half the population back to Nebraska, or up north to Oregon to gather the hops, or even to New York. This is not the promised land, it is just endless sprawl.
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Siarlys,
The key word in my sentence was ‘domestic’. California’s population is still exploding due to international migration and the high fertility rates of those immigrants. So it’s not like the environment is being saved, or more Colorado River water makes its way to Mexico.
“ANYONE SEE A PATTERN HERE? If wages, particularly the minimum wage, were substantially increased, hard working men could actually support their families on their labor. ”
If immigration was restricted and the laws enforced, the market would take care of that situation. As it is now we are in a suboptimal equilibrium point. Householders will hire illegal help, because, hey, it’s cheap, and even if they mow their own lawn, they *don’t* get to exempt themselves from X amount of taxes going to support the help and the helps families.
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“… and still avoids the fact that these numbers include state-level programs like Medicaid.”
Rob, that is not the case. This is a running debate we have in California, and it is specifically about welfare/”Temporary” Assistance to Needy Families aka CalWORKS, where the state has kept relatively generous enrollment criteria for children, dodging some of the welfare reforms of the 1990s.
As for Medicaid, California has 12 percent of the population about about 14 percent of the Medicaid enrollment. Higher, but nothing remotely disproportionate like the welfare caseload.
http://www.statehealthfacts.org/comparetable.jsp?ind=774&cat=4&sub=52&yr=1&typ=1
Meanwhile, the state had, in December 2011, 11.9 percent of food-stamp enrollment, just barely less than its population would otherwise suggest — and that’s actually surprising given the awful unemployment rate.
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JonF says:
Re: Some, like JT, seek to undermine the source, even though other (more credible? and easily accessible) sources corroborate the statistics
It’s not credible that 1/3 of American welfare recipients live in California. I suspect that this has been garbled from a more believable stat, that 1/3 of Californians receive some form of public payment, which if you include Unemployment, Social Security and Medicare in the mix would not be outrageously high.
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JonF: A set of statistics from just prior to the current recession listed California as having about 1,000,000 of the country’s 4,000,000 recipients of federal public assistance. Is it so unbelievable that that situation has changed a tad in the past five years? After all, California’s economy especially has been decimated in some sectors (home-building, etc.).
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Turmarion: The use of [sic] can refer to grammatical mistakes, not just spelling mistakes, dude. Yes, [sic] in general is snarky and juvenile, and I try to avoid it, but your post was so vitriolic, hostile, and full of bile and hate that I saw no reason not to poke you about your ubiquitous spelling/grammar errors.
Your point about “refusing” gov’t money for programs you disapprove of is nonsensical. Social Security and Medicare are disasters and should be radically changed, but given that the government has forced me to pay into them, how would it possibly make sense for me to refuse the “benefits,” such as they are? If the programs still exist in 30 years in recognizable form, which of course they won’t…
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JonF, see the link to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services I posted above. It’s quite true.
As it happens, Gov. Jerry Brown is proposing — under budget duress — welfare changes that would dramatically cut eligibility and thus the rolls. The Legislature is balking, natch.
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Chet says:
I dare you to defend it: California contains 33% of all welfare recipients in the whole country.
Something went wrong somewhere, guys.Uh, why, exactly?
Why would you expect welfare recipients to be evenly distributed amongst every state, or even according to population? Suppose a state made significant inroads in lifting people out of poverty, and as a result, got everyone in the state off welfare. That would mean that 49 other states would now have greater than their share of the nation’s welfare recipients as compared to their share of the population, but that would not indicate that something “went wrong somewhere”, that would indicate that something went right in a single state.
California somehow manages to support a large welfare population and subsidize other states via its tax base, so I’m struggling to see any indication that “something went wrong.” In fact it seems like California is doing something right.
Well, remember that welfare and unemployment boost the economy, so surely California must be enjoying spectacular economic growth right now. If only the rest of us were so lucky. Let’s apply the lessons of this miracle to the entire nation!