Why One of America’s Richest States Is Also Its Poorest
4th November 2018
Many measures of poverty exist. The official poverty line is used as a guide as to who should get federal assistance. The state where the largest share of people fall below that line is Mississippi; California is roughly in the middle. But the official poverty line is the same in every state and takes no account of different living costs or of public assistance. So in 2011 the Census Bureau came up with a Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), which most social scientists think a better way of comparing levels of poverty across the country. By this yardstick, 19% of Californians were poor in the three years 2015, 2016 and 2017, the highest rate in the country excluding the special case of Washington, DC. The national average was 14.1%.
Not coincidentally, California and D.C. are both Democrat one-party areas.