Sacramento Homeless, Alhambra Blvd near X St. (Photo: Katy Grimes for California Globe)
California’s Poverty Machine Manages Misery Instead of Solving It
With 5.5 million Californians on food assistance and nearly 9 million who live with food insecurity, that’s not a safety net; that’s a crisis of leadership
By Hector Barajas, October 31, 2025 10:10 am
Something is broken in California. As the federal shutdown threatens to cut off food assistance for 5.5 million residents, we’re once again reminded that our state, the world’s fourth-largest economy (or 5th), is a symbol of wealth and a portrait of dysfunction. How can a place with so much innovation, agriculture, and opportunity have millions dependent on EBT cards to survive?
Because California has built a system that manages poverty instead of solving it.
We make it harder to build, hire, and stay in business. Every year, our state politicians add new layers of regulation that drive up costs and push employers out. Entire industries, from manufacturing to energy and agriculture, are suffocated by new mandates and fees, while state agencies boast about hiring more regulators instead of helping businesses grow. Then we act shocked when jobs disappear, small businesses close, and people end up in food lines.
We spend billions on homelessness programs that produce 220-square-foot units costing $837,000 apiece, with little accountability and few results. We raise taxes in the name of compassion but have less to show for it each year. Meanwhile, the streets of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Sacramento tell a story of tents, addiction, and despair.
Now add this: 5.5 million Californians on food assistance and nearly nine million who live with food insecurity. That’s not a safety net; that’s a crisis of leadership.
California’s political priorities are upside down. Instead of fixing the root causes of high housing costs, lack of skilled job training, and punitive tax policies, the state keeps layering on short-term fixes and pointing fingers elsewhere.
California doesn’t need more taxes. It needs a strategy to make work pay, to make housing affordable, and to make business possible again.
The federal government will reopen, as it always does. But the real question is when California will reopen its promise? The one that says, “If you work hard, you can get ahead.” Until we stop managing poverty and start creating opportunity, this cycle will never end.
California’s wealth means nothing if its people can’t eat, work, or hope. The true measure of progress isn’t how many programs we fund, but how many people no longer need them.
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What incentive does a social services employee have in eradicating dependence on food stamps? None, because they will have worked themselves out of a job. I see the main difference between social workers and their clients is that the first spend their day in an office and the other in front of the tv. Besides, Sacramento needs poor people depending them so they can be riled up with have – have not rhetoric. It’s part of the power game.
Thank you Rusty for the comment. It is a vicious cycle that doesn’t get solved, while the middle-class continues to get squeezed.
Well said!
Thank you, Hal!
The solution to poverty is jobs which are never to return to California.
The impoverished masses are Newsom’s arsenal of power.
EyeInthesky: Jobs and holding people accountable to work are essential. We can’t have a system that says, you can get government services, but not punch in time, try to find work, get training, go to school, or volunteer. Everyone needs to be pulling in the same direction, which is independence.
The solution for the abuse of power by Hair-gel Hitler Newsom and the criminal Democrat thug mafia that has destroyed California while enriching themselves is for them to be hauled before tribunals and be held accountable for their many crimes. They and their annoying trolls like Eyeinthesky need to be shipped and sequestered at GITMO while awaiting sentencing. Bye bye Eyeinthesky!
Jobs and prosperity then will return to California.
We have a big election in 2026—the end of 8 years of this administration. Let the word out and vote.
There is going to a huge comeuppance as soon as the AI-driven capital gains era tanks – which it surely will as all cycles end, particularly frothy bubbles. The illusion that the state is at-best trending water will come tumbling down hard when we get a $100B+ yearly deficit with absolutely no capacity to balance as required by law. It’s probably not going to happen until 2028 or 29 but it’s surely coming.
California is expected to face a $16 billion to $25 billion deficit in the coming years. However, those numbers could be even higher. What we’ve done in the past has been to disguise the deficits, so they are likely to be larger than projected.
Sanctuary city status, extending to the policy of California, propagated the abuse and neglect of addicts and mentally ill creating institutionalized poverty. A social service empire was fostered to accommodate and de -stigmatize uncivil behavior. Massaging the management of poverty through the misery (and profits) of drugs and other criminal activity has driven legitimate business out of state and crippled the middle class.
What a legacy Newsom projects for financially and spiritually bankrupting California… implementing the Cloward and Pivin playbook.
Mayday, then you have to add the NGO that are making massive profits from homeless programs with no accountability. How is it that we have to pay $837,000 for a 220-square-foot homeless studio? $24 billion in homeless money gone….all taxpayer money.
This is the model used throughout the homeless ecosystem also. That’s why homelessness and poverty have increased. There is an incentive to do so.
Exactly. Why solve it when it generates money? Thanks for the comment, Rod.
Santa Monica was once one of California’s most dynamic and popular tourist destinations but it in recent years has been turned into a seedy crime infested homeless encampment under the criminal Democrat thug mafia that controls the city. A Youtuber with a channel called “Santa Monica Close Up” profiled a young woman named Daisy who lives in “transitional” housing in Santa Monica along with a couple of guys whom she calls her kings. She brags that she gets everything for free and doesn’t believe that she should have to work. Daisy said hopes to soon move to the Sea Castle Apartments on Ocean Front Walk in Santa Monica. She said her welfare case manager is helping guide the process who makes sure she gets everything she wants. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baaVvlppsi0)
This liberal insanity is what’s wrong with California with the criminal Democrat thug mafia in control?
Great point about Santa Monica. They keep finding overdosed people in front of businesses, and tourists get harassed. Nothing is ever free; someone pays for it. It might not be Daisy, but it is the rest of us. I can’t with this mindset of “I am owed. It’s my right. I am entitled to X, Y, and Z.”
It’s all part of the plan. It’s too much to elaborate here, but in order to fulfill the revolution society has to collapse. There has to be a pissed off population, insecurity, confusion and uncertainty, there needs to be a famine, transportation crippled barring the shipment of food and supply, water infrastructure dry, and so on. The george floyd riot in minneapolis with mostly white domestic terrorists burning down the mostly black business section was far more about punishing black people for tolerating a police department than floyd dying. Police impede terrorism and violent revolution. Domestic terrorists are targeting federal agents and their families for assassination and some of Trump’s adminstration have to live on military bases due to credible death threats. Leftist politicians in sacramento are doing their part to facilitate the revolution, and domestic terrorists are doing their part in the streets. The communist organizations have been enamored of the terrorism of arson since the 1930s attempt to encite the southern black population into revolution. Drug addled homeless and a bankrupt state are just part of it. As an aside, the terrorists who named their firearm training the “John Brown Gun Club” don’t seem to recall what happened to John Brown for his insurrectionist treason.
I have to clarify the John Brown statement. Brown was an abolitionist and part of the underground railroad, which is cool. Brown, a northeasterner, went over the line when he went to Kansas to be involved with the “Bleeding Kansas” mini war and in the process became a murderer. He then hoped to provoke a slave rebellion and set up an independent state in (now) west virginia, the first attempt at seccession from the union. He seized a federal armory in Harpers ferry, virginia and took hostages. After a standoff/shootout Brown was captured, stood trial and was hung on the charge of treason. His action riled up already paranoid slave holders, which led to the secession of south carolina, then the rest of the states forming the confederacy, and then the firing on fort sumter torched off the civil war. In a twisted way, Brown truly cared about the light of slaves and the evil of slavery. However, the modern left, including the terrorists who put minneapolis to the torch, regard blacks as a tool, a means to a political end.
Check out Palmdale homeless program working well, not “managing”. Also note those endless social service jobs/ngo’s are a way politicians enrich supporters & family members as well😵💫
How is Palmdale’s homeless program working? I’m curious about that. I lived in leona valley and lancaster between 1983 and 1987, when a lot of ‘bangers were being pushed out of LA. My recollection is that whenever I worked in Palmdale there was always a siren sounding off. Likewise, when I moved to Victorville it was quiet at first, but by 1994 I heard gunshots nearly every night.