The line, uttered by James Carville as he managed Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 campaign for the White House, still holds true, as this year’s presidential election proved anew.
Whatever we may hope for California in 2017, it all begins – or ends – with the state’s uniquely complex, notoriously volatile economy.
The housing meltdown-centered Great Recession that struck a decade ago clobbered California harder than all but a handful of other states.
Our unemployment rate soared to more than 12 percent, hundreds of thousands of Californians who thought they were homeowners learned that they weren’t as the housing bubble burst and lenders foreclosed, and the state experienced a 20 percent decline in general revenues.
We’ve been recovering ever since, gaining more than two million jobs since 2010, and seeing our unemployment rate cut by over half and our housing market boom again.
In fact, at 80-plus months, this has been California’s fourth longest recovery from recession since 1960, albeit one that has been very uneven across economic sectors and regions.
The technology-heavy San Francisco Bay Area has almost single-handedly lifted California’s economy and while other regions are better off than they were during the depths of the recession, their recoveries have been more sluggish.
The question hanging over the state, therefore, is whether technology can continue to buoy its economy, or whether another recession is just waiting to happen.
The consensus among economists appears to be that our economy will likely continue to expand for at least a couple of more years.
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