“People ask my why I live in California where the marriages last 2 months, the trials last 2 years, earthquakes, mudslides, road rage and fires. Then one day you’re playing baseball in the park, it’s 80 degrees out and you think. My gosh! It’s January!” – From the sitcom, Its Like, You Know
I grew up in California and even though I’ve spent more years now in the state of Virginia I still consider myself a Californian. Which is why it pains me to see my state go to pot. (Wait, that’s not the right term…).
California has a fiscal problem. One of the indicators that things are not always sunny in California are the MASSIVE welfare rolls in the state. According to 2010 TANF data provided by HHS California accounts for 32.62% of all the welfare rolls in the country. One third! (Hat tip to Chuck DeVore who posted something like this last year.)
Using one of my favorite tools by IBM called Many Eyes (http://www-958.ibm.com/) I put together some visualizations to show you just how bad it is. (You can play with your own visualizations and the data here).
First let’s compare California in a bubble chart to other states and
Next, welfare rolls by %:
How about a map visualization? The darker the color, the larger the amount of welfare rolls:
How about 2010 compared to 2009. Did rolls increase in California? You betcha but not as big a % as other states. California saw a 6.5% increase in their welfare rolls. The national average was 5%. Wisconsin, by comparison, saw a 25% increase in their welfare rolls. But when you talk about brute numbers… California is still looking pretty bad.
Here’s a tree graph showing the number of welfare recipients added from 2009 to 2010.
Bottom line: California has some serious financial problems. The fact that they own a third of all the country’s TANF recipients is disconcerting.
Interesting!
And I love the Many Eyes tool. Fun stuff!
But as to the data you’re crunching: Agree that it’s pretty eye-opening as raw numbers and sheer volume—but as a percentage of state population, using population figures for 2010 (from WIkipedia), Wisconsin and Washington are in FAR worse shape than California.
The welfare rolls here, while huge, are about 3.8% of our state’s population. Compare that to Wisconsin, where the welfare rolls are more than 9% of the state population and Washington where it’s over 8%.
In any case, it’s way too many people on the welfare rolls, everywhere… I just find per capita numbers helpful for perspective.
That’s a fair context to apply here but comparatively populated states like Texas, New York, and Floria have far smaller per capita welfare recipients than CA (Tx – .46%; New York – 1.39%; and FL .57%). Apples to Oranges?
Great charts! I would like to see a chart of the welfare roles % of population, represented by size of bubble, but colored from dark blue to dark red based on 2008 presidential voting.
Here is another cut at the same data, using 2010 numbers. This chart shows the percentage of total TANF recipients MINUS the % of the U.S. population that lives in the state. A score of 0% means that the percentage of recipients matches the state’s percentage of total U.S. population. A negative value means that the state has a lower percentage than its share of national population. Then there’s California.
http://twitpic.com/7emp1f/full
See Chuck Devore’s explanation of why this situation exists. Interesting.
http://youtu.be/_KgQRNXy8R4