Ending Poverty Requires Serious Policy, Not Political PlatitudesAnother exercise in nonsense by state lawmakers in California.
STEVEN GREENHUT
8.4.2023
At times, the California Legislature is reminiscent of a high-school student council, except that instead of working with few-hundred-dollar activities budget lawmakers are spending more than $300 billion in revenues. I'm not the first commentator to notice that politicians often promise things they can't possibly provide—and are no more realistic than a student body president offering free pizza on Fridays.
What can you do? Democracy is, as Winston Churchill said, "the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." Fast forward to the latest capitol silliness. A group of Democratic lawmakers is starting the End Poverty In California caucus, which is unlikely to be as EPIC as its name suggests. Ending poverty is a large promise—and the Legislature is much better at passing laws that exacerbate poverty (minimum wage, anti-competitive union work rules, onerous licensing requirements) rather than reduce it.
For starters, legislative caucuses are notoriously ineffective. They're the equivalent of those high-school clubs where like-minded people get together to engage in virtue signaling and whatnot. The state legislature has 16 caucuses centering on identity (gender, ethnicity), issues (aviation, environment), or locale (rural communities, the Bay Area).
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Sinclair was a socialist and Tubbs is best known for promoting "universal basic income." Sinclair's EPIC campaign plan promised to "develop a state-managed cooperative economy that would initially provide livelihoods for the unemployed while pointing the way to the eventual replacement of the private economy based on profit," the University of Washington explains.
The new EPIC chairman is Assembly Majority Leader Isaac Bryan (D–Los Angeles) so this comes from one of the Legislature's most powerful members. Tubbs has created a nonprofit group of the same name. He served as the mayor of one of the state's most impoverished cities—a San Joaquin Valley industrial city best known for its municipal bankruptcy (caused in part by excessive benefits for city employees) and atrocious crime rates.
Tubbs apparently was so busy basking in his national attention as a young progressive rising star that he didn't tend to matters at home. He lost re-election to a Republican political neophyte in a city with a two-to-one Democratic voter registration advantage. After his loss, he became an economic adviser to Gov. Gavin Newsom. Tubbs' major initiative was that privately funded project to provide $500 monthly in free money to select residents.
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Tubb's group is correct that poverty rates in California are atrocious. "California has the highest rate of poverty at 13.2% of any state in the U.S.," it notes. "28.7 percent of all California residents were poor or near poor in fall 2021." EPIC doesn't address that California's poverty rate is the worst in the nation—especially when cost-of-living factors are included—despite this being the nation's most progressive state. It offers the most generous welfare programs.
One would think that politicians who are serious about ending poverty would at least address that paradox. The video features union organizers who point to the need for an even more powerful union presence in our state, yet unions were on the vanguard of some of the state's most poverty-inducing policies—such as Assembly Bill 5, which tried to ban most forms of independent contracting and destroyed moderate-income jobs throughout the freelance economy.
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Source:
https://reason.com/2023/08/04/ending-poverty-requires-serious-policy-not-political-platitudes/
