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One irony is that wildfires diminish the impact of California’s anti-carbon policies. In 2007 environmental scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the University of Colorado at Boulder found that “a severe fire season lasting only one or two months can release as much carbon as the annual emissions from the entire transportation or energy sector of an individual state.” NCAR’s Christine Wiedinmyer estimated that southern California fires that burned for one week produced as much carbon dioxide as a quarter of the state’s monthly fossil-fuel emissions.

The lack of change shows that the progress in the U.S. job market—in 2014 the economy added 2.6 million jobs, the most in more than a decade—have remained insufficient to lift the fortunes of the nearly 47 million people living in poverty.

The official definition has changed little since its adoption 50 years ago, when its threshold was set as cash income equal to three times what a frugal family spent on food. A relatively new unofficial rate is based on a much wider definition of income, including the earned-income tax credit and noncash subsidies for housing, school lunch and home heating. It also adjusts income for taxes, child care, health insurance and out-of-pocket medical costs. The unofficial rate also reflects regional costs of living with different thresholds for renters and people with mortgages.

The environmental lobby has tried to turn climate change into a social justice issue even though its anticarbon policies disproportionately harm the poor. Honest Democrats are starting to admit this, as we saw in this week’s stunning revolt in the California legislature.

Mr. Flores notes that the Democrat-dominated legislature in Sacramento has made a point of spending big on schools with a high concentration of disadvantaged students, with little to show for it. “You could throw millions of dollars into these schools,” he says, “and if there is no accountability, you have the same situation.”

Anyone who rattled down highways replete with moon craters while traveling on Labor Day weekend knows: The government doesn’t excel at managing roads. A major improvement would be bulldozing a permitting process that delays new public-works projects for up to a decade, and a new report from the nonpartisan group Common Good offers a road map.

Scant availability of skilled construction workers has hampered home construction at various times in the past few years of recovery. But the shortfall seems to have grown more acute of late, as new-home sales are up 21.2% so far this year from the same period last year and commercial construction has increased steadily.

Nonfarm job openings rose by 430,000 to 5.75 million in July, the highest level since December 2000, when data collection first began, according to the Labor Department’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, also known as Jolts. Economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal had expected 5.29 million job openings.

During the recession, the share of Americans with disabilities dropping out of the labor force increased. The same occurred with people younger than 65 who chose to retire. But the retiree figure returned to historical norms when the economy improved, while the figure for workers with disabilities continued to rise.

The same is not true for social welfare programs, such as Medicaid, food stamps or housing assistance, which can impose significant financial penalties on recipients who are married, according to new research from the R Street Institute, a Washington think tank.

One feature of the new EPI analysis is a nifty table (see page 8) that goes some way towards answering why the gap has widened. The table highlights how between 1995 and 2000, labor’s share of income grew, despite larger-than-usual growth in inequality of compensation.  Why? Because when labor markets are tight and productivity is rising–two features of that five-year-long golden age—workers’ pay will rise. This suggests that pursuing full employment, generally considered a 5% unemployment rate or below, could go a long way towards generating long-hoped-for upwards wage pressures throughout the economy.

It’s still early to know how the hikes are affecting the job market, but the preliminary data aren’t good. Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute, Adam Ozimek of Moody’s MCO 2.26 % Analytics and Stephen Bronars of Edgewood Economics reported last month that the restaurant and hotel industries have lost jobs in all three cities. Mr. Bronars crunched the numbers and discovered that the “first wave of minimum wage increases appears to have led to the loss of over 1,100 food service jobs in the Seattle metro division and over 2,500 restaurant jobs in the San Francisco metro division.”

The leader of that pack was Texas. The state’s $1.5 trillion economy is larger than Australia’s and grew at an impressive 5.2% clip last year. . . California’s economy, the largest state economy, grew 2.8%. The Golden State was propelled by a 7.7% growth rate in the third quarter of last year. Florida’s economy advanced 2.7% in 2014 and New York’s economy grew 2.5%.

Here’s how this dubious business works. Solar-leasing companies install rooftop systems (which often cost tens of thousands of dollars) at no upfront consumer cost. Homeowners rent the panels for 20 years at rates that typically escalate over time but are initially cheaper than power from the grid. Investors get to pocket the myriad state and federal subsidies while homeowners are promised hundreds of dollars annually in savings on their electric bills.

Gross domestic product, the broadest sum of goods and services produced across the economy, expanded at a 3.7% seasonally adjusted annual rate in the second quarter of 2015, the Commerce Department said Thursday, up from the initial estimate of 2.3% growth.