Spending as a percent of GDP means exactly what?
Surely this is not beyond your skill in math to figure out. You take the figure for welfare spending for a given year and divide it by the GDP for that same year. The result is a number between zero and one (assuming spending isn't greater than the GDP, which is unlikely), which is then converted to a percentage, which shows the ratio between GDP and welfare spending.
DO you understand the private sector economy?
Not completely. No one does. But I suspect I understand it better than most folks.
This is GOVT. spending NOT Private sector nor should it be.
Yes, correct.
Does California have double the population of TX?
No.
Could it be that California is a magnet for the poor and poverty because of all that spending?
People who are poor generally don't have the means to move to another state. Wasn't one of your sources somewhere back in this thread saying that people were
leaving California?
Where is the incentive to the poor to get over the poverty level?
The implied argument is not based on evidence. To be sure, there are "welfare families"--people who figure out ways to make a living from government assistance, usually with some small-time criminal activity on the side. I'm sure you'll agree when I say those people should be cut off without mercy if we find them.
The majority of people who accept government assistance do so for fairly limited intervals.
Again, not the issue, they rank at the bottom now so cutting social spending doesn't make a lot of difference in the ranking.
Doesn't make any sense. As has already been pointed out to you, relative performance is only a proxy for absolute performance, which is really all that matters. Suppose for a moment that every state in the union had exactly one person below the poverty line, except California, which had two. They'd be dead last, but it'd hardly be worthwhile criticizing them.
On the other hand, they could have 50%, or even 100%, below poverty level, and that would clearly be much worse than the situation as it exists now.
Anyway, what you're arguing about isn't poverty, for the most part. Look: I make about $135K per year, my wife a little more (I'm a professor, she's an attorney). Where we currently live, that puts us in the affluent class. Were we to move to San Francisco with those same salaries, we'd maybe be able to afford a two-bedroom apartment.
That is what is at issue--it's not that people cannot find jobs in California, or even that they cannot find good jobs in California. It's that so many people live there--so many with plenty of income--that the price of housing has been driven way high by demand. Aside from instituting some form of socialist economy (not welfare spending that you guys like to call Socialism--I mean real Socialism, like what Russia had in the 1970s), I'm not sure what California government can do about that. It's an effect of market economics.
Keep ignoring how much is actually spent and the actual results generated.
You're mistaking the fact that I don't agree with you for my ignoring the data...despite the fact that you also accuse me of writing too extensively on that same data.
Yes many people live well in California as the gap between the rich and the poor is among the greatest in the nation.
Sounds like you're arguing against capitalism.
Things could be worse?? That is your standard? That is why liberalism is a failure, low expectations and terrible economic results by creating dependence
Nothing I said should cause you to make this inference. You're just pulling stuff out of thin air now.
