CA absolutely fucks you if you’re poor. there’s almost nothing out there for you. I once made $13,000 in one year and was ineligible for cal fresh (food stamps) because I made too much money.
the housing problem is as bad as it is because there are zero safety nets here and we’ve collectively decided we don’t care as long as we don’t have to physically see them, so they get shuffled around by cities according to how loudly residents are complaining.
even the state $15 min wage was far too little far too late and rolled out way too slowly.
I think whether you are self employed or not, being in the trades is a relatively tough gig because you’ve got to actually work to make money and if you aren’t good at it you either need to constantly be dealing with complaints or doing free “corrections” to your prior work. As an office worker I can say with certainty that it’s a lot easier to coast for days to weeks at a time in a cushy white collar job. I still get paid, and in a corporate setting the cost to fire someone is way higher. If you’re fixing someone’s plumbing it’s a lot harder to do a shitty job and get away with it.
The worst is unemployment, which might be contributing to how bad the homelessness problem is.
No matter what you were making prior, the max unemployment payout is a laughable 425 a week. For a state with the largest cost of living in the country, unemployment benefits equal out to 10.62 an hour, a rate thats impossible to get housing on in almost every city in the state.
Its insanity. For how much good the state does, there are a ton of things that need fixing.
yea CA has some very deep problems that I’m amazed everything runs so well. it’s basically a single party state, which I’m not sure exists anywhere else in the country? not many reasons then stuff can’t get done other than we just dont want to. we have a massive budget surplus.
this article can easily go into the media choices thread with a causality disclaimer, but it does point out at least one real trend that occurred since 2020. it’s not that LA/SF, Seattle, NYC were unique in homelessness problems pre-pandemic. it is that small urban centers also evidently provide greater benefits to residents and homeless, even when housing, energy, environmental factors are all very much high cost. trying to survive surrounded by soy fields and feed lots is in almost all respects worse.
That was my experience (undergrad at michigan, did some cc courses one summer to makeup for a semester I had to medically withdraw from and later on to do a med school prereq for an absurd reason)
This may be true but it depends on Dems being able to articulate how they stop SCOTUS from continuing to be deplorable. They seem intent on “trust the process” platitudes, though, if younger people ask Dems to help stop SCOTUS from ruining their lives the Dems won’t get votes without a convincing pitch. Currently they don’t have one (as far as I know).
The real question is if they can get someone with standing to get an injunction before 1/1. If they can then pretty likely on 1/1 everyone will be paying student loans on their old balances again while this works through the courts (think authority to pause is under the same statute). The legal basis for doing this is dubious and why I’m still frustrated they didn’t address this legislatively.
I saw Ygelesias’ tweet along the same lines and I can’t figure out the logic behind it at least from Yglesias’ point of view. If Ygelsias theory is deliverism or popularism, that is Democrats do good when they deliver popular things to their constituents, then Republicans blocking it seems to be detrimental as the Democrats won’t be able to deliver on what they promised. I’m not sure that people will know that it was the Republican’s fault so I’m not sure it will fire up Democrats or convince non partisans to vote D
I’ve been listening to a lot of Hammer and Nigel (conservative talk radio) because I hate myself. They are convinced that Biden never recovered from COVID and is either dead or in the basement. That’s the only possible explanation for all of these hyper liberal policies and rhetoric. The tears are so salty.
Lol, Chapo was saying something similar - that Biden never had COVID and was just put on ice for week while his handlers calibrated his Dark Brandon drug cocktail. Now that they’ve dialed it in, he’s been activated again and is destroying malarky left and right.
