New Census data show that Hispanics in California, our most populous state, are now a minority in name only.
Of California’s 37 million residents, 38% are Hispanic and 40% are white.
Nationwide, the median Hispanic age is 27 compared to a national median of 36 and a median white age of 41. So Hispanics are not just our most rapidly growing demographic, they are our youngest.
Projections show Hispanics reaching 30% of our population by 2050 from about 15% today.
The absence of real reforms coming out of Washington should be of particular concern to these youthful Hispanic Americans. All our growing big government failures, now being institutionalized instead of being reformed, will be dumped disproportionately into their laps.
Take health care.
A central pillar of Obamacare is the government mandate that everyone buy health insurance. This was sold as some great act of compassion to get everyone insured, but there is nothing compassionate about government forcing someone to buy what they don’t need.
Of the 50 million Americans without health insurance, about 65% are under 35. Although it might be tempting to view these uninsured youth as irresponsible, they are often making sensible choices.
It’s because of the ridiculous way we define health insurance. The point of insurance is to protect against catastrophes. Car insurance covers accidents, not tune-ups and oil changes. Home insurance covers fires and floods, not paint jobs and plumbing.
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Yet we’re forced to buy health insurance to cover routine visits to the doctor for a sore throat as well as catastrophes involving hospital admittance for an operation.
The difference in cost for a policy that covers routine health care plus catastrophic coverage as opposed to one that just covers catastrophes can be thousands of dollars per year. What sense does it make for a healthy youth to buy more than catastrophic coverage? It’s much cheaper to do that and pay out of pocket for routine doctor visits.
But logic doesn’t wash for those who love big government.
Obamacare mandates that everyone buy full coverage health insurance and demands especially that youth buy in to get the young and healthy into the risk pool to keep overall costs down. A fundamentally bad idea is financed on the backs of young Americans.
How about Social Security?
In a Pew survey last year, 70% of those under 29 said they would like freedom to take a portion of their payroll tax and invest it in a personal retirement account.
Will big government power brokers let them do it? No way. It doesn’t matter if it is a better investment that will produce a much bigger retirement pot. Or that you actually own it and can bequeath what is left to your heirs.
The goal isn’t to make individuals better off. The goal is to prop up a government program. If we let young workers out whose payroll taxes pay for current retirees, where will the money come from? Raise it by cutting some other government program? No way!!
So because we define the problem as “saving the system” as opposed to making individuals better off, the only Social Security reform we’re hearing about is raising the retirement age for everyone and taking an already bad deal and making it worse for all.
We’re saving a system not worth saving by putting our youth in entitlement prison.
Couple all this with piling on trillions in new debt to pay for more government which all gets dumped onto the next generation.
The new conservative Republican leadership is trying to cut and streamline, to reform entitlements with freedom, choice, and ownership.
These kinds of real reforms that will invigorate us for the future should excite the growing universe of young Hispanic Americans.
They should be a prime target market for this conservative Republican agenda.
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