We’re #1! California Still Has Highest Poverty Rate in U.S.A

The State of California still leads the United States in poverty, according to new U.S. Census data released Tuesday.

CalMatters.org reported:

The “supplemental” rates are calculated on three years of data and California has held the top spot for a number of years, almost entirely because of its extraordinarily high costs of housing, utilities, fuel and other consumer needs.

Nationally, the new supplemental rate is 9.8% but once again California tops the states at 13.2 percent, more than a third higher than the national rate.

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The ultimate irony of California’s high poverty rate is that it’s a deep-blue state where all of the political power is held by left-leaning Democrats who profess to sympathize with the plight of the poor.

Within the state, CalMatters.org notes, poverty is highest in the Los Angeles area, and lowest in the San Francisco area.

The District of Columbia is the only jurisdiction with a higher supplemental poverty rate than California, at 14.8%, though it is not a state.

As City Journal noted in 2018, “Unfortunately, California, with 12 percent of the American population, is home today to roughly one in three of the nation’s welfare recipients. The generous spending, then, has not only failed to decrease poverty; it actually seems to have made it worse.”

The Census report also showed that the official, non-supplemental poverty rate in the U.S. was 11.5%, roughly unchanged since 2021, though the poverty rate for black Americans fell fom 19.3% to 17.0% from 2021 to 2022.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.