According to official poverty statistics, 16.4% of Californians lacked enough resources—about $24,000 per year for a family of four—to meet basic needs in 2014. The rate has declined a little from 16.8% in 2013, but it is well above the recent low of 12.4% reached in 2007. Moreover, the official poverty line does not account for California’s housing costs—or other key family needs and resources.
In the second quarter, the U.S.’s hottest growth areas traveled toward the coasts where service-oriented sectors like finance and professional services dominate, away from the mining-focused heartland.
Today, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) released–for the first time–gross domestic product (GDP) by state for 21 industry sectors on a quarterly basis.1 These new statistics supplement BEA’s national quarterly GDP by industry statistics first released in April 2014. These new data provide timely information on how specific industries contribute to accelerations, decelerations, and turning points in economic growth at the state level, including key information about the impact of differences in industry composition across states.
However, the official poverty rate calculated for the report used a half-century-old method that makes no allowance for regional differences in either incomes or living costs. The bureau has developed a “supplemental measure” that takes those and other factors into account and by that method, California’s poverty rate is the nation’s highest at 24.3 percent, largely due to its extraordinarily high housing costs.
Since 1990 Los Angeles County has added a paltry 34,000 jobs while its population has grown 1.2 million. In contrast, the Bay Area, which added roughly the same number of people during the same time, gained a net 500,000 jobs, mostly in the suburbs. . . The problem now, however, are the factors in L.A. that drive industry away, such as ultra-high electricity prices and a high level of regulation. Even amidst the recent industrial boom in many other parts of the country, Los Angeles has continued to lose manufacturing jobs; Los Angeles’ industrial job count stands at 363,900, still the largest number in the nation, but down sharply from 900,000 just a decade ago. . . Today San Francisco and its immediate environs, despite its much smaller population, is home to virtually every powerful politician in the state: both its U.S. Senators, the Governor, the Lieutenant Governor and the Attorney General. Not surprisingly, state policies on everything from greenhouse gases, urban density and transit to social issues follows lines that originate in, and largely benefit, San Francisco.
Rapid growth of upper-income households, coupled with an increase in less-educated low earners, has driven the decline of the middle-income population to a hair below 50% of the total this year, Pew found. In 1971, the middle class accounted for 61% of the population, and it has been declining steadily since.
In Los Angeles and Orange counties, 58.5% of renters spent more than 30% of their income on housing last year, the point at which economists consider it burdensome, the report found.
Chapman University in Orange said Orange County employment in five key industry sectors remains “well below” prerecession levels and that payrolls will grow by 2.5% next year after finishing 2015 up 3.2%.
After more than four decades of serving as the nation’s economic majority, the American middle class is now matched in number by those in the economic tiers above and below it. In early 2015, 120.8 million adults were in middle-income households, compared with 121.3 million in lower- and upper-income households combined, a demographic shift that could signal a tipping point, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of government data.
Amid the sea of data in the report was this: California shipments to China in the August-to-October period fell by 11.4 percent, from $4.19 billion last year to $3.71 billion in 2015. Shipments declined across the board, from computer equipment to agricultural products.
Average hourly earnings advanced 2.3% from a year earlier in November, the Labor Department said Friday, a pace that’s roughly been maintained over the past two years. That streak of steady wage gains has coincided with the economy adding an average of 234,000 jobs per month since November 2013, a clear acceleration compared with earlier in the expansion.
The Census Bureau’s 2012 decision to begin releasing an alternative measure of poverty that included cost of living has appeared to have far-reaching effects in California as politicians, community leaders and residents react to the new measure’s depiction of the Golden State as the most impoverished place in America.
Across all states, the growth in total PCE by state accelerated to 4.2 percent in 2014 from 3.1 percent in 2013 (Table 1). This growth reflects the year-over-year change in current-dollar PCE by state. In 2014, growth in total PCE ranged from 2.1 percent in West Virginia to 7.4 percent in North Dakota, with more than 40 states growing faster than in 2013.
U.S. business investment advanced just 2.2% from a year earlier in the third quarter, a slowdown that marks one of the worse performances of the six-year-old economic expansion. The trend seems at odds with ultralow interest rates, consistent hiring and steady, if unspectacular, overall economic growth.
CEOs’ outlook on the economy declined for the third straight quarter, according to a Business Roundtable survey released Tuesday. The same survey showed that 27% expect to decrease capital spending over the next six months—the largest share planning to scale back investment since the middle of 2009, when the economy was just emerging from recession.