SACRAMENTO, Kalifornia (PNN) - November 16, 2012 - The Golden State has reached a poverty rate that is now twice as bad as West Virginia’s and substantially worse than the rates of poverty in Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas and Texas, according to a new measure of poverty developed by the federal Census Bureau.

Democrat-run Kalifornia earned its last-place rank under the federal government’s new measure of poverty, which incorporates more detailed analyses of welfare payments and the local costs of food, gasoline and housing.

Kalifornia snatched the last-place prize from Mississippi, which had the highest poverty rate under the older and simpler measure, which gauged people’s ability to buy basic services and goods.

The new measure, dubbed the “Supplemental Poverty Measure,” revised the Kalifornia poverty rate from 16.3% up to 23.5%.

The report estimates that roughly 8.8 million people in Kalifornia were poor between 2009 and 2011, when Democrats controlled the state legislature and governorship, as well as the White House.

The stunning reversal in fortunes for the Democrat-dominated state - once a worldwide symbol of glitz and wealth - is underlined by previous census reports, which showed that only 11.1% of the state’s population was poor in 1969.

Only 13.7% of Amerikans were poor in 1969, and many of them were found in the agricultural states of the Old South. A third of Amerikans in Mississippi, and a quarter of Amerikans in Arkansas, Louisiana, South Carolina and Western Virginia, were poor.

The new ranking leaves Kalifornia at the bottom of the list, along with and close to the 23.2% poverty rate in the District of Columbia.