The big pension fund said it was the fourth time in five years that it has earned double-digit investment returns. CalPERS is still trying to claw its way back from the crippling multibillion-dollar losses of 2008-09, when the housing bubble burst and the financial markets crashed.
The news symbolizes to many, particularly those in politics, that California has completely weathered the worst recession since the Great Depression and is once again leading the nation, if not the world, in economic progress.
That interpretation, however, does not comport with the decidedly mixed bag of what’s really happening in our economy.
California’s economy has overtaken Russia and Italy’s, with the state now ranked as the world’s eighth largest economy.
Democratic fissures over California’s cap-and-trade mandates deepened on Thursday, with a key moderate Democrat introducing a bill to push back a looming rule expected to cause a spike in prices at the pump.
Thanks to high birth and immigration rates over the last several decades, California has one of the nation’s lowest proportions of over-65 residents – but it also has one of its higher elderly growth rates, a new Census Bureau report reveals.
The Senate Finance and Governance Committee approved the measure, Assembly Bill 2389, but only after adding amendments to limit its effect on the state’s treasury, which proponents said could undermine hopes of gaining the project in competition with other states and companies.
About 956,000 Sacramento residents were employed in 2013, compared to 982,000 in 2007, the year before the recession began. Sacramento has added another 14,000 jobs so far in 2014 but still lags behind the pre-recession total. The United States as a whole has regained all of the jobs lost during the recession.
In a conference call with oil industry analysts in late 2012, Mike Wirth, a Chevron Corp. executive, took stock of California’s greenhouse gas reduction policies and warned that the state’s plan to expand its controversial cap-and-trade program to vehicle fuels in 2015 would result in higher prices at the pump.
There’s also an element of hypocrisy. The state’s Democratic politicians have uniformly rejected criticism that the state’s high taxes and dense regulatory thicket discourage job-creating investment. But if that’s true, why then do they then offer subsidies to certain favored industries to keep them from fleeing . . . Rather than handing our money to particular industries or companies, wouldn’t it be fairer – and more seemly – to make California more attractive to all would-be job creators and avoid the shadowy politics of targeted subsidies?
Despite the steadily decreasing unemployment rate, a majority of voters describe the employment situation in the state as very serious. Sixty-four percent say jobs are difficult to find in their communities, while just 21 percent have the impression they’re widely abundant.
Moody’s Investors Service, one of the nation’s largest credit rating organizations, upgraded its rating of California’s $86 billion in general obligation debt Wednesday, citing the state’s “rapidly improving financial position.”
Highways have slipped below the political radar, even though Californians rack up more than 300 billion miles of automotive travel each year and even though the highways suffer from severe deficiencies that would, the California Transportation Commission says, cost $700 billion over the next decade to erase, several times what current revenue would produce.
The statewide unemployment rate fell two-tenths of a percentage point, to 7.6 percent, the Employment Development Department reported Friday. It was the lowest level since August 2008, a month before the market crash tipped the country into recession.
In the recurring rhetoric of business vs. labor, the measures either protect workers or destroy work. The measures sit on the “job killer” list, published each year by the California Chamber of Commerce, that previews where business interests will play defense against the Democratic-controlled Legislature. All three have emerged from the Assembly and are advancing through the Senate.
One would think that the nearly universal experience of buying electricity – not to mention its indispensable economic importance – would make politicians reluctant to mess with it.
But one would be wrong. The Capitol’s denizens incessantly tinker with the state’s power system, usually in ways that cost consumers more money. And it’s why Californians are already paying power rates that are among the nation’s very highest and headed even higher very soon.