Los Angeles County's Middle Class Poverty

LA Weekly bemoans the rapidly rising price for living in Los Angeles.

This paper among the many still publishing in the region are partly to blame.

After all, they have been pushing the very illiberal policies pushing working men and women out of the county!

L.A.'s Middle Class Is Now a Minority

Those angry right-wingers who want to rewind us back to the 1950s might have a point.

There we go. The LA Weekly news staff cannot help but jab at the conservatives, the limited government advocates, etc.

While they're a bit twisted about postwar America, a time when taxes on the rich were much higher, education was well-funded by people who still sent their kids to public schools, and even the under-educated could luck out with the help of a Big Government G.I. Bill, one thing is true: The middle class ruled back then.

Actually, much of the prosperity of the Post-War boom followed from massive cuts in taxes and spending from the federal government. Dwight D, Eisenhower warned Americans about the growth of the military-industrial complex.

The same folks who complain about this not being the '50s have pulled their kids from public schools, fought against tax increases and balked at funding infrastructure repairs and improvements. Then they complain about how crappy things are today.

How about discussing where all of California's money is going? Pension debate, high salaries, lawsuits. Pet projects for special interest groups, while ignoring the public interest.

Of course Los Angeles made a strong showing.

"In about a quarter of the metropolitan areas in 2014, middle-class adults do not constitute a clear majority of the adult population," the Pew report states. "Notably, many of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas fall into this group, including Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA, where 47 percent of adults were middle income; San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward, CA (48 percent); New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ-PA (48 percent); Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA (49 percent); and Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land, TX (49 percent)."

The reasons why the middle class is disappearing in Los Angeles: hostile business climate, high taxes, regulatory burdens, big labor abuses, etc. How about all that high crime and congestion eating away at the core infrastructure of this great city?

Yep, the middle is now the minority in Los Angeles. Of course, it's not a minority in strict terms. It's a plurality, meaning that more people belong to the middle class than any other income group. But it's clearly a shrinking group.

"In the Los Angeles region," Pew says, "the middle class is relatively small because the share of adults who are lower income is greater than average."

And that $15 minimum wage. Wow! Now all those agitating entry-level workers don't have jobs to enter at all! All those young people who are looking for their first job are going to have to wait a lot longer.

Way to go, Los Angeles!

Indeed, our individual median income of $27,897 is a few grand more than poverty pay for a family of four. It's low.

Hmm.

Yet our median home price of $575,000, by one account, is mansion money in many other cities. You can start to see here that the much talked-about American gulf between rich and poor thrives in L.A.

Los Angeles isn't alone.

"From 2000 to 2014, the share of adults living in middle-income households fell in 203 of the 229 U.S. metropolitan areas examined in a new Pew Research Center analysis of government data," Pew says. "The decrease in the middle-class share was often substantial, measuring 6 percentage points or more in 53 metropolitan areas, compared with a 4-point drop nationally."

Metropolitan areas are more expensive because of the pandering Democratic politicians who give away taxpayer dollars to labor unions

Californians are having a harder time finding a home because they cannot afford the homes. The regulations and the restrictions on home construction and ownership have turned off a lot of middle-income investors. More high-income earners are merely moving to another state.

Let's get our middle back. Let's elect a billionaire as president!

LA Weekly seems keen on liberals. Do we want to elect an old influence-peddler who earned her multi-millions through corruption?

Or how about "Weekend at Bernie" Sanders? He rants about the rich getting richer, and the poor getting poorer. The discrepancy of wealth has taken place under the unprecedented progressive Presidency of Barack Obama.

Final Reflection

Middle Class Poverty is a result of .... Democratic policies.

Destructive, useless, painful, outrageous. Kill businesses, drive up costs, impose special interest perks at the expense of the public.

Permit bad schools to under-educate youth and overburden taxpayers.

Los Angeles, run by the elites to run down the poor and run out the middle class.