The problem with California is that while they have a massive Democratic majority, they have absolutely no intent of acting like the social welfare alternative Democrats are nationally claiming to be.
Democrats have full power in California, yet it’s a place full of poverty and homelessness, where poor people are screwed over hard, where housing initiatives are literally destroyed, and “undesirables” are soft-quarantined in Skid Row.
California is a place where the rich benefit and the poor suffer. Democrats chose to make that happen, and they choose to perpetuate it. Progressive efforts in California amount to nothing but lip-service, it’s a blue-painted right-wing state. The only conservative things it rejects is religion.
This is your daily reminder that no politicians have your best interest at heart. You can say one party is better than the other but they’re both bought and owned and you didn’t get to put in a bid.
One side actively tries to take basic human rights from people, and the other doesn’t. They both may have been bought, but only one is actively trying to make sure groups of people don’t exist
What you said is true, but let’s not do mental gymnastics to get to the conclusion. Actually giving a damn about the people, means actively opposing the bad guys. You pointed out 1 good thing about the dems: being passive. Is that all they’ve got? I have basically the same problem in my country, the quality of life for the average person here got worse more or less constantly in the past 20 years, with any major party in power
Your problem is that the parties have shifted so far right, most of the democratic support in California would actually be centrist republicans.
California is overwhelmingly not super liberal, though there are notable exceptions.
There is no easy fix for poverty and homelessness in CA. It should legitimately be a national level issue given that the homeless populations here are near to small size city.
CA has grown all it could in the last 6 decades and now is contracting. I moved here 20 years ago and the grown is absolutely staggering.
The biggest problem CA has with housing is that it’s housing and zoning policies cater to people who (or whose grandparents) moved to Cali in the 50s and 60s. “Neighborhood character” is defended by even nominally left-wing demagogues in California.
You fix housing costs by creating more places to live. Californians rejected this to such an extent that Newsom had to take a nuke, statewide, to local zoning ordinances.
I moved where I am 4 years ago. I was able to afford it by working hard as fuck and saving every penny. I didn’t inherit shit from my parents and we came to US in late 90s.
Am I a shitty person for not wanting a homeless housing anywhere near my neighborhood? Fuck it, I’ll take it one further - I don’t even want apartment buildings anywhere near me.
I’m not an exception. Vast majority of people around me are immigrants with similar stories.
Republicans will give you all the social conservatism capital will tolerate, while Democrats will give you all the social progress that capital will tolerate. It’s a very fuckin’ narrow window.
Capital wants to build more in Cali. Residents don’t.
Capital is right, again.
Any time capital is “right” from the point of view of human well-being, it is a coincidence. Our needs are secondary and only important to the degree that they affect capital. Capital will never provide adequate housing on its own because it depends on the realistic threat of homelessness to exploit the working class and extract vastly more value could be obtained without coercion.
Some capital does. Some capital opposes building in Cali. I mean, it’d (rightfully) destroy the value of a lot of beautiful homes used in part as investment vehicles. Otherwise, why would anyone be concerned with property values?
How long have you lived in California?
I’m sick of hearing these sweeping generalizations from people who have never lived here. We have amazing social welfare programs when compared with the rest of the US. We have state grants for college, tuition waivers, scholarships and programs for different populations including the most disdvantaged. We have Medi-Cal, which improved so much since the Obama admin that it covers ten times more than my parents’ private insurance did when I was a kid. This includes addiction treatment and mental health. (This is actually a federal requirement so not sure why CA should be any different). Methadone, suboxone (again, federal, as Biden just increased access to suboxone doctors), rehab, ER, ambulance, derm, psychiatry, inpatient psych, birth control, reproductive care, etc. However, the city/county you live in needs to have that healthcare infrastructure before Medi-Cal can pay for it, and geographically, much of this state is pretty conservative. To your “point” about progressivism being “lip service,” our metro areas have large enough populations to counter that. I mean, idk if you ever paid attention in high school civics, but geography and population density are two different things. The San Juaquin valley is pretty red, but it consists of…Fresno. The advantages we have here are astronomical compared to Medicaid in other states, especially red states. Not to mention housing, food programs, K-12 and pre-K education, reproductive rights. The way we handled covid was far better than most of the country, but Pelosi got her hair done when she shouldn’t have so I guess it doesn’t count. Oh, and homeless people exist, so I guess all the rest of it is invalid too. Which is exactly why education is so important. Decent higher education teaches you to think for yourself and identify what’s true and what’s not, instead of buying into rhetoric. They call it “media literacy” and it’s taught in our state subsidized colleges. Good luck with all those book bans though.
But no one can convince someone of reality when they’d rather believe clickbait. This is America - no state is going to have social welfare that is anywhere near as extensive as it should be, and no state in the union is “progressive.” California is only doing the absolute bare minimum of what a decent direct democracy should be doing for it’s people, and even that is just so fucking radical that the rest of the country seems to think we’re Sodom and Gomorrah (while simultaneously arguing about how we’re not liberal enough. Hmmm.) So it’s just disingenuous to argue that it’s “not progressive enough” when that’s just…not even a thing in the US. But if whining about someplace they’ve never been, that has such a high GDP that it probably subsidizes their own state, is so much fun for people then who am I to try to stop their bitching. If you want to have perfection be the enemy of progress, then I guess that’s on you.
I’ve visited. Your state is a shithole with some walled gardens and towers of gold. Your streets smell of piss and worse, there are tents everywhere people can get one up without the cops immediately coming over to throw them out. And that’s how you intend to keep it, because you have no interest in housing the unworthy.
What you have are a lot of programs with a lot of names that are supposed to sound like they do something. You have a lot of things to mention.
What you don’t have are results, or an interest in getting results.
I live in Norway. I know what a democracy with solid welfare should look like, even when it’s never perfect.
I also know why you’re not getting the results you should:
You don’t believe you should make it THAT easy to just not be homeless. You simply don’t believe in just paying to build the buildings and handing out the keys. It’s not the way you want to solve it.
So, when all is said and done, and another decade has passed; You stilll won’t have solved it and you likely still won’t want to solve it.
California is only doing the absolute bare minimum…
You said it yourself.
You’re from fucking Norway, of course your standard of living is way better than anywhere in the US. It all sucks over here, but California is marginally better, which to Americans is leagues better than other states. It’s sad, we are forced to fight for Breadcrumbs. The town I live in in Oregon has the highest amount of homeless people per capita. Other states and cities may not because they bus homeless people to partocular cities in California and in Oregon, or throw them in jail. Homelessness is a US issue.
I’m an American who has been living in Turkey for many years.
In Turkey, the political leaders in both sides of the aisle tell you not to pay income tax or property tax or payroll tax or any of the normal things Americans complain about. What is the result? An iPhone costs more than $3k. A ford focus that costs about $20k new in the US is over $50k in Turkey. EVERY package you receive is opened by the post office and inspected to see how much they can tax you. If you leave Turkey and want to bring the things you bought with you, you are taxed an exit fee… You can potentially be charged three or four times for the same item.
Whenever I hear Americans bitching about taxes it drives me insane. They have no idea what they’re asking for. The government needs money to function and they are going to get it one way or another…
Not only does the government needs money, services centralized in the hands of the government end up costing less because they have a monopoly and they don’t run them for a profit! Over here road insurance is private only for the vehicle, our insurance as today users (you know, the stuff that costs a fortune to insure because breaking both legs costs more to the system than whatever car you’re driving) costs peanuts in comparison to places where it’s the private sector that controls it (if I lived across the border from where I am my registration + insurance cost would be double what it is now).
Trains aren’t important because they make a lot of money. Trains are important because they make the land around them worth a lot of money. Businesses near train stations get more customers. People pay more for houses near train stations. Cities with strong transit systems have a higher GDP.
Despite this, England privatised its rail system and expects the rail companies to make a profit. Instead, English people are poorer and the government has less money.
England privatised its rail system
I have a dear friend from Docklands in London, who ran trains. We argue constantly about privatisation vs a government-run consolidated service like healthcare. He’s adamant that a mass transit system has to be run as a separate capitalist company, that it must be cash-positive, and that’s the only way to do it.
He also believes the Tube is overpriced, cramped, sweaty, and a really low value for money that is propped up by people who can’t afford to drive into London nor park once they arrive, and have no other choice.
services centralized in the hands of the government end up costing less because they have a monopoly
Where I live privately owned utility companies provide much cheaper services than govt. Also govt is very bad at providing them consistently (if people outside of big city lose electricity for example, they have to go and block nearest highway, otherwise govt just ignores their complaints)
I guess monopoly might be beneficial for some period of time but ultimately it’s bad, both in private and public sector.
Where I live privately owned utility companies provide much cheaper services than govt
where is that?
I understand that the government needs money to function, I just want them to stop taking 30%+ of my income in order to buy billion dollar boats that shoot million dollar bullets.
I’m okay with the 30% so long as they stop using it to buy more and more expensive toys to murder brown children with. We’re not getting what we pay for as a society, but the idea that we can make that right by privatizing everything is ridiculous and just continuously doesn’t work.
Sidenote: part of the reason those things cost SO much more is because they’re also no longer domestic products. They’re now imports, such as Americans paying more for Mercedes Benz than you would in Germany.
One of my favorite examples of this is Starbucks. The already psychotic 6 dollar drink in the US is 9 dollars in Thailand 😳
What you said about Turkey is mostly true. Your causality is wrong. The reason Turkey is absurdly expensive and full of taxes is extreme amount of corruption caused by radical islamist government going full nepotism. Our head of economy was literally the groom of Erdogan for so many years.
Disclaimer: I am a Turkish dude who haplens to be an economics PhD student.
When I moved to America, I was surprised by the amount of fees. Fees to pick up garbage, visit a doctor, and drive on most highways.
The country I lived in had higher taxes, but almost no fees.
Americans seem dumb when it comes to taxes and fees.
It’s the illusion of freedom that Americans are obsessed with. The idea is that we are free to choose our insurance provider, doctor, utility provider, etc.
The reality is we are stuck with the insurance plan our employer provides or that we get on the healthcare marketplace and we go to the doctor that our insurance company partners with. Utility providers are restricted to whoever provides service at our address.
Add to that, Americans as a whole are extremely selfish. My Uber-conservative parents and in-laws would give us their last dollar but thumb their nose at the idea of helping someone they don’t know.
None of us have the actual numbers, but I would bet a hefty amount that if we just socialized everything that we already pay for, the bill each month would not be much different.
My Uber-conservative parents and in-laws would give us their last dollar but thumb their nose at the idea of helping someone they don’t know.
You see that a lot with people on the right (it drives a lot of their opinions that put them on that side of things.) Fundamentally it is an inability to meaningfully experience people outside of their bubble as real people like the ones inside of it and rather than work to rationally overcome that limitation they simply treat everyone outside of that bubble like an object. Almost nothing the right does to others is an unreasonable or unacceptable way to treat an object and is usually something they would never do to someone they actually intuitively perceive as a real person.
While we can (and should) hold people responsible for working to rationally overcome those limitations, the reality is that we all have them to a greater or lesser degree and there will always be people who aren’t able to do better than they do now.
Not only is it unfair to them to maintain an environment wherein they are expected to have empathic abilities well beyond what they are able to manage (and to have them, fairly, be treated as though they are cruel and heartless for it, when if they only had to deal with situations within their grasp they’d actually be very kind and caring people) but pragmatically we just cannot expect to overcome the issues caused by that without making changes. Sociatally we cannot keep setting people up for failure and then being mad at them for the issues that failure causes.
NB it’s also important to acknowledge that none of us are able to perfectly experience strangers as exactly the same thing as people we know and love and that while people can suck more or less at this, all of us are being asked to be better at it than we reasonably can be.
Americans have a cultural dislike of taxes (for a wide array of reasons, including selection bias on who actually moved to America).
Thus, Americans (painting with a broad brush) tend to favor policies that charge people who do/consume a thing, rather than the tax base as a whole.
I find this immensely frustrating, but it is unfortunately true.
The premise is solid though. Charge the people that use the thing more than those that don’t. It all breaks down though because the people that use them the most are corporations and receive the largest tax incentives.
Sounds great until you need an ambulance or firefighters to come save your ass.
Yeah no matter how much you weaken that I am not going to believe it until you produce a detailed study proving it. Especially the bit about immigrants.
I mean, I’m not going to sit here and try to change your mind.
However, if you wanted to look into it, the field of study is called behavioral genetics and it’s incredibly controversial… But the research suggests that upwards of 50% of our behaviors are inherited genetically.
So the group of people that left Europe in search of the new world, and the group of people that sided with America and against England in the war, etc… Those are the people who reproduced and created American culture. Pioneering, willing to die in search of opportunity, oppositional, etc.
If you think about it it makes perfect sense.
Also, many Americans dislike taxes because they don’t want “their” money being spent on people with whom they feel no affinity. It’s always going to be a problem in large countries with diverse populations.
And if it seems like I’m beating around the bush and phrasing this comment in charitable terms, it’s because I am. Deliberately.
There are some communities in the USA that consistently vote down funding any sort of public fire department through taxes. Obviously they still need a fire department, so their “solution” is “private fire companies” with a subscription model.
These private firefighters will show up to any fire and they’ll save lives … but after they pull you out they’ll let your house burn to the ground if you didn’t buy a fire protection plan from them.
Don’t take offense to them calling Americans dumb. It’s a generalization of our culture. Not you as a person.
Americans are dumb with how we deal with taxes and money and socialization of services.
Well it wouldn’t be the issue that it is if we had a system that was designed to at least be somewhat responsive to popular opinion. It’s not like anyone can just wave a magic wand and reform our antiquated system. It was very deliberately designed to be very difficult to change and there are powerful interests doing everything they can to make sure it that it doesn’t.
Taxes are way too high anywhere anymore. I used to live in Chicago but those taxes are criminal
Yeah, I miss the good old days, like, if we could just go back to the tax rates of the 1950s, that would be great.
As by design. What a joke of a country.
