An interesting evaluation and study of poverty rates around the United States places California as the worst State:
So how is it that California, which has spent nearly $1 trillion on antipoverty programs, has the highest poverty rate in the nation?… the state’s war on poverty is one of the causes of California’s impoverished state, and why it is home to about one-third of the nation’s welfare population despite having just 12 percent of the population.
It turns out that state and local bureaucrats who administer California’s antipoverty programs have proven stubbornly resistant to pro-work reforms that have been effective at spurring individuals to pull themselves out of poverty.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman warned about this problem more than 40 years ago: “One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.”