Swamping the Lifeboats

In an article about the cuts in CA's budget, the reporter lets slip with a statistic that, more than any other, captures the unintended consequences of CA's ostensibly generous social safety net. State's Long Spending Spree Halted Abruptly

California has added social welfare programs, like Healthy Families in 1998 to provide health insurance for children that do not qualify for Medi-Cal. That program took a major hit in the budget cuts this year - about $178 million - and health advocates said it will result in about half-a-million children losing the insurance.

Still, the state has more people on welfare than anywhere else in the nation. Thirty-two percent of people receiving welfare in the United States are in California, (emphasis added) according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

"What we've done is created incentives for people to move here just to take part in the generous social safety net," said UC Davis' Yetman.

CA's population, in case you wondered, is approximately 35 million, which is roughly 10% of the population of the US. What a deal. While other states have been competing for business and entrepreneurs, CA has been accepting everyone else's welfare rolls. Everyone else in the West is hanging "Open for Business" signs, while we are saying "Freeloaders Welcome!" (I think we can assume that a significant percentage of those receiving welfare from CA are illegal immigrants, but that number is a closely guarded secret that, if known, would result in some sort of popular uprising against the welfare state and open borders)

The draconian spending cuts decried by the "for the children" crowd have resulted in a drop of per capita state spending equal to what CA was disbursing in 1998 (oh, the humanity!), which means we could cut a lot more without causing the mass starvation and homelessness that supposedly lurks behind every social service budget cut.

The CA budget crisis has been a crisis of Big Government, not a crisis of CA's supposedly polarized electorate. Behind the fine-sounding words of "helping" the weakest among us lies a massive redistribution of wealth, not to native Californians, but to anyone who could manage to make their way here, whether from Nevada, Pennsylvania or Mexico. To be blunt, CA and its voters owe these people nothing. Moreover, CA doesn't even need to be doing this. There are federal welfare programs that can provide the bare minimum for someone to eat and sleep. The welfar reform express obviously passed CA by, but there's plenty of time to catch up and remove this dead weight from the state's budget.