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U.S. worker productivity declined in the first three months of the year as labor costs jumped, reflecting a slowdown in growth.

Agriculture, which uses 34 times more water per worker than the average business, is most at risk. Cuts could also pinch the thriving technology and life-sciences sectors, which employ nearly 124,000 workers — who use 45 percent more water than average.

The U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, through the Department of Commerce, announced today that the goods and services deficit was $51.4 billion in March, up $15.5 billion from $35.9 billion in February, revised. March exports were $187.8 billion, $1.6 billion more than February exports. March imports were $239.2 billion, $17.1 billion more than February imports.

By a greater than 2-to-1 margin, however, Americans said they’re less worried about the income gap, per se, and more worried about how middle- or working-class Americans can get ahead financially, according to the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.

Trade figures released by the Commerce Department on Wednesday suggest gross domestic product, the broadest measure of economic output, contracted in the first three months of the year.

The nation’s trade deficit expanded by 43.1% in March from February, the largest monthly widening since 1996, the Commerce Department said Tuesday. A record level of non-petroleum imports flowed into the U.S. after a labor dispute at West Coast ports ended, causing the seasonally adjusted trade gap to widen to $51.37 billion.

The presidential election in 2016 is will be a defining generational election for California’s future. Just as we are coming out of the recession, efforts are now underway by special interest and public employee unions in Sacramento to raise $20 billion in new taxes to fund increased benefits for their members.

The Golden State has historically led the United States and the world in technology, quality of life, social innovation, entertainment, and public policy. But in recent decades its lead has ebbed. The reasons for this are various. But there is one area of decay whose story is a parable for California’s other plights—that area is infrastructure.

But California, from this drought onward, will be a state transformed. The Dust Bowl of the 1930s was human-caused, after the grasslands of the Great Plains were ripped up, and the land thrown to the wind. It never fully recovered. The California drought of today is mostly nature’s hand, diminishing an Eden created by man. The Golden State may recover, but it won’t be the same place.

We have a “two-tier economy,” says the California Business Roundtable, which represents many of the state’s largest employers. It points out that the Bay Area, with less than 20 percent of the state’s population, is accounting for 60 percent of new jobs since 2007.

U.S. labor costs accelerated in early 2015, a sign that the job market may be tightening and beginning to generate a long-awaited pickup in workers’ wages.

As measured by PIT levied per capita (per person), the Bay Area (specifically, the San Francisco/Oakland and San Jose MSAs) and Orange County are above the statewide average, while nearly every other part of the state is below. Outside of Orange County and those two Bay Area MSAs, only Napa County (grouped in the table above with two adjacent jurisdictions) has per capita PIT assessed ($1,856) at a level above the statewide average.

The latest version — the third in three years — brought down the cost from $25 billion to $17 billion. But it made the project even more risky politically.

The WCRI, based in Cambridge, Mass., said that in 2013, the first year the reform took effect, the average medical payment per claim declined by 5 percent after steady increases over the preceding half-decade. The decline in California also contrasted with medical cost increases in other states, the study noted.

The Legislature’s budget analyst, Mac Taylor, disaggregated recently released 2013 income tax numbers from the Franchise Tax Board by geographic region. His staff discovered that on a per capita basis, the roughly six million residents of the immediate Bay Area paid an average of $3,119 in state taxes, well over twice the state average of $1,460.