◼ The newly in-vogue theory in the national media and in the particularly stupid wings of the California media is that the Golden State’s recent revenue surge suggests Sacramento has gotten on the right track and surmounted all its vast dysfunction, incoherence and incompetence. - Chris Reed/Cal Watchdog
“• Shockingly, California now has the highest rate of poverty in the nation, measured at 23.5 percent, significantly higher than any of the states of the Deep South. …
“• The state that historically was among the last to fall into recession and among the first to pull out it, has flipped. In the last three national economic recessions, the California job market has fallen farther and taken longer to recover than the U.S. market. Unemployment in California today, though thankfully falling, remains among the highest in the nation. Of California’s 58 counties, 27 are burdened by unemployment at or above 10 percent; four of them have a jobless rate higher than 15 percent. In Imperial County, the jobless rate in April was 24 percent. It was 19.9 percent in the Central Valley’s Colusa County.
“• The educational performance of California students now ranks near the very bottom as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as ‘the nation’s report card.’ On the state test for 2011-2012, only 56 percent of students scored at the proficient level or above in English. Even fewer, 51 percent, were proficient in math.
“• The state lost 33 percent of its industrial base from 2001-2012, declining 11 percent more than in the United States as a whole. The state is now increasing manufacturing jobs at an anemic rate that lags far behind that of the nation.
“• Once the national leader in export growth, California has been losing ground for more than a decade and is now a distant second to Texas in total exports.”
