The Northern Virginia voting block has been flexing its muscle in the last few elections, and has established itself as the dominant region as far as determining the direction our state will go. While affluent, the region is also very left leaning. We have heard more than once, is there a way to make Virginia as progressive as Cali?
Maybe not so fast. Californians want out of the Golden State. According to a recent poll, nearly half of the Bay Area’s residents want to move out; unaffordable housing and sky-high taxes have driven more than 138,000 people out of the state in one year alone, and over a million since 2007.
- Highest Poverty Rate in the Nation — California’s Democratic leaders claim to be the champions of the poor, and yet California has the highest poverty rate in the nation. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, when California’s stratospheric cost-of-living, housing and taxes are accounted for, the poverty rate is a shocking 20.6 percent.
- Most Expensive Place to Live: Homes in California cost on average 44 percent more than the U.S. average, and rental rates are 37 percent above average. According to a Kiplinger report, San Diego has the highest housing cost in the country, a whopping 138 percent above the national average.
- High Taxes: California’s state tax is at 8.25 percent, income tax goes as high as 13.3 percent, and corporate taxes are at 8.84 percent. Out-of-control taxes and policies have driven countless companies out of California in the last two years, including Carl’s Jr., Toyota, Nissan, Jamba Juice and Chevron.
- Huge Homeless Population: California’s homeless population has ballooned to more than 134,000 people living on the streets. Meanwhile, the government keeps dumping funds (to the tune of $700 million) into programs that not only fail to address the problem of homelessness, they actually perpetuate it.
- Nation’s First Safe Injection Sites: On July 1, San Francisco’s Department of Public Health plans to open the nation’s first two “safe injection sites” in which drug addicts will be able to shoot up under supervision.
- Guaranteed Income: One California city has a brilliant plan to combat their poverty problems by handing out a “no strings” guaranteed basic income of $500 a month to its residents. Apparently, Stockton’s mayor didn’t get the memo about Finland’s recent failed attempt at a similar plan, which you can read more about here.
- Nation’s First Law Limiting Water Use: California has a new law limiting toilet flushes. Just recently, California became the first state in the nation to pass a law that will limit water usage to 55 gallons per-person, per-day, starting in 2022. By 2030, the amount falls to 50 gallons.
A San Francisco Story
As of Thursday, there have been 16,022 complaints made about ‘feces,’ and thousands of others made using words like ‘sh*t’, ‘poop’ and ‘excrement’, to San Francisco’s municipal authorities.
“Human feces still not cleaned up despite multiple complaints. How many weeks will pass?” reads one complaint lodged Wednesday.
“Bodily fluids and feces down the whole street, garbage, cloths, food thrown all over sidewalk,” reads another.
“Homeless encampment is blocking sidewalk and creates a health hazard w trash and feces. Please move them, and send a cleaning crew. Sidewalk is impassable, forcing pedestrians into the street,” reported one user, his complaint accompanied with a photo of a tent pitched under a tree in the city’s central Mission district.
San Francisco residents can make non-emergency ‘311’ municipal complaints with the touch of a button, thanks to a website and a mobile app. Complainants can attach photos as proof, and the authorities send a notification when the problem is resolved.
Many of the complaints are connected to the city’s homeless problem. Rent in the city averages over $3,500 per month, pricing out all but the highest earners and creating a city of wealthy tech employees on one side, and a teeming homeless underclass on the other.
There are an estimated 7,500 homeless people in San Francisco at any given time, almost one percent of the city’s 871,000 population. Elsewhere in California, the problem is almost as grave, with more than one quarter of the US homeless population living in the state.
The city’s seedy underbelly leaves behind other forms of hazardous waste too. A February NBC report revealed that in addition to feces, downtown San Francisco is polluted with more garbage and used syringes than some of the world’s poorest slums.
Dr Lee Riley, an infectious diseases expert at the University of California in Berkeley, told NBC reporters that in some parts of the city, the contamination is “much greater than communities in Brazil or Kenya or Italy.”
Getting stuck by a used needle can pass on diseases like HIV and Hepatitis B and C. San Francisco has one of the largest HIV-positive populations in the US, with an estimated 16,010 people living with the disease.
Complaints about human waste in San Francisco have skyrocketed, increasing by 400 percent from 2008 to 2018, according to the City. The 311 site and app received over 21,000 reports last year. At the current rate, that figure will be more than doubled by the end of 2018.
The problem is starting to hit the Golden Gate City where it hurts too. This week, a major medical association decided to pull its annual convention out of the city, citing safety concerns.
The convention was expected to draw 15,000 attendees and bring $40 million into the city’s economy, but organizers told the San Francisco Chronicle that members were afraid to walk the streets and felt threatened by open drug use, unchecked mental illness, and threatening behaviour from the city’s vagrant population.
Twitter users have not been shy about their disgust with the city’s problems, with many blaming years of Democrat leadership for allowing the problem to fester.
About the Author
Like the game of Monopoly, life in America is a zero sum game, and in America greed is considered good, as can be seen from this above article:
MARKETWATCH By Kari Paul Published: July 31 2018 11:51 a.m. ET:
The gap between the rich and the poor in America has ballooned over the last several decades.
In 2015, the top 1% of Americans made 26.3 times as much income as the bottom 99 percent — an increase from 2013, when they earned 25.3 times as much, according to a recent study released by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning Washington, D.C. think tank.
The top 1% of Americans took home more than 22% of all income in 2015, the study found.
That’s the highest share since a peak of 23.9% just before the Great Depression in 1928.
The answer is a resounding YES!
More and more, the far Left Progressive’s have been slowly taking control of our Legislative, Executive and Judicial branches along with the 17 agencies of the intelligence community; Also our grade schools and colleges teaching their Leftists rhetoric. In turn, those students open businesses, passing along their Progressive beliefs through their employees, etc.
People better wake up. But no, they have no stomach for sound teaching, but will fill up on spiritual junk food—catchy opinions that tickle their fancy. They’ll turn their backs on truth and chase fables and commandments of men (2Ti 4.3-4 and Mat 15.3-9).
Why is all this happening? Because the god of this world, the prince of the power of the air [Eph 2.2], the father of lies [Joh 8.44], sprinkled with truth [2Co 11.14], has blinded non-believers, making all things seem right when they are not (2Co 4.4).
Hold firm, let nothing divert you from the truth of the Living God until the end (Heb 3.14). For the whole duty of man is to Fear God, and keep his
Hey! Jimmy, why the hell should we fear God? That doesn’t seem to be conductive to establishing a relationship with him does it?
Progressive beliefs? What are those? Is there some kind of membership form that needs to be completed? Are there membership dues, secret handshakes? All of these communities that you claim to be taken over by the Leftists Progressives sure seems to me, to be comprised of male and females, black, white and Hispanic among others, Democrats and Republicans, young and old.
Are they Progressive Leftist because they thought Blacks should maybe use the front door instead of the back. That women should be able to vote, get paid the same amount as a male, etc instead of being barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. That there should be a minimum wage a person should earn. That requiring a seat-belt while driving might be a good thing for everyone, a car seat too. That maybe 6 year olds should not work in factories.
Just wondering why i should fear God and blanketly fear progressives?
“Fear” in “fear of the Lord” is often misinterpreted as “servile fear” or the fear of getting in trouble, when it is actually “filial fear”, the fear of offending someone whom one loves.
In the future it might be best to check these things out before denigrating a fellow contributors beliefs and sounding like a complete jerk.
Well Ray, then why don’t you explain to Jimmy that God loves all peoples, even Progressive Leftist. And using either definition, just what is Jimmy trying to warn / tell us about?
What’s God’s political affiliation? Is God a Conservative? The flood seemed to be a conservative act or his he more liberal – the loaves and fishes thing. That sounded like some kind of social welfare miracle. Now before you get on me and say, that was Jesus lets just wrap it all up into one being.
What am I trying to get at? God doesn’t belong in politics. So, whether you read the “fear God” thing as he was going to smite the Progressive Leftists or the Progressive Leftist should fear God it doesn’t matter. You can thump your bible all you want and pull as many lines as you want out of it but the overall theme is God loves everyone.
Ray, if you can tell me what his beliefs are I may apologize. However, if anyone tells me God loves conservatives or something like that – I’ll keep denigrating them.
God is indeed a conservative Republican, tokenny, and he favors laissez faire and a free market economy, which is to say that God is also a capitalist, not a COMMIE, since they don’t have a god outside of Marx and Trotsky, and he surely isn’t a socialist, either, or Bernie Sanders would be in the white house instead of Trump.
Don’t you remember George W. Bush saying “I BELIEVE that God wants me to be president.”
And then it happened.
What more proof do you need than that?
God is also a mean banjo player, tokenny, and he can play Foggy Mountain Breakdown just about as good as Earl Scruggs.
I bet that is something you didn’t know about the dude from your Sunday school lessons.
No, tokenny, God did not love the Philistines.
Don’t you remember the story of Goliath?
So axiomatically speaking, that is proof positive that God does not love everybody.
tokenny, dude, as to God loving everyone, what about Thomas Bradwardine’s epic tome “On the Cause of God against the Pelagians,” which greatly shaped the views of John Wycliffe, and thus, can be said to have led to the Hussite Wars in Europe?
If God truly loved everyone, Philistines excepted, of course, because everybody knows who they were and why God didn’t love them, then why was God against the Pelagians?
I mean, let’s be serious here, Thomas Bradwardine wasn’t just some ordinary schmoe out there howling at the moon – the dude was a scholar, mathematician, physicist, courtier and, very briefly, Archbishop of Canterbury and as a celebrated scholastic philosopher and doctor of theology, he is often called Doctor Profundus, a medieval epithet meaning “the Profound Doctor.”
In line 476 of “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” no less an authority than Chaucer ranks Bradwardine with Augustine and Boethius.
Pelagius, as you must recall, was a progressive theologian of British origin who advocated free will and asceticism, for which he was accused by Augustine of Hippo and others of denying the need for divine aid in performing good works, understanding him to have said that the only grace necessary was the declaration of the law; that humans were not wounded by Adam’s sin and were perfectly able to fulfill the law without divine aid.
As to his progressivism, Pelagius denied Augustine’s theory of original sin, and his adherents cited Deuteronomy 24:16 in support of their position.
Pelagius was declared a heretic by the Council of Carthage, and his interpretation of a doctrine of free will became known as Pelagianism.
So if God loves everyone, Philistines excepted, why didn’t he love Pelagius?
What’s up with that do you think?