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Last year, Steinberg got a bill passed that bent the CEQA rules to expedite the proposed new arena in downtown Sacramento. Two years before, the billionaire owner of Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles also got legislative relief for his proposed and still-unbuilt football stadium.

If Steinberg wants to leave an economic legacy larger than Musk’s battery factory (which, again, we support), he would use this opportunity to get CEQA fixed – not just for billionaires and sports teams – but for everyone.

The California Public Utilities Commission has paid bonuses to what it calls “California suppliers” totaling $52 million. Of that sum, nearly $39 million has gone to one company, Bloom Energy Corp., based in Sunnyvale.

It’s fine to talk about government programs to help the poor, but wouldn’t it be better to alleviate the high living costs they face every day, and to create an economic climate that would give them more opportunities to climb the ladder through better jobs?

While the Bay Area will continue to lead the state, and the drought will hurt the recovery in the Central Valley, the UOP quarterly forecast says job gains will ripple throughout the state. Soon, California will have recovered all of the jobs lost to the recession, “a year earlier than previously forecast,” the forecast says.

Demand for the state’s first round of business tax credits under the new California Competes program far exceeds supply, with applications totaling $559 million for only $30 million in credits available this year.

Gov. Jerry Brown said Wednesday that California is a “job creation engine,” defending his administration’s handling of the economy and state budget in a forceful election year speech.

But the Toyota relocation is just an anecdote and does not paint a full picture of what is happening economically in the state – thus, it is unlikely to point to a cure for what ails California. The real solutions to the state’s problems are actually quite simple, but unfortunately don’t appeal to politicians, pundits or lobbyists. Unless something changes in that calculus, the state will continue to legislate largely by anecdote rather than analysis, ultimately failing to help California grow.

In-state businesses shipped merchandise valued at $15.43 billion in March, up a robust 9.6 percent from $14.07 billion in March 2013, according to an analysis of Tuesday’s U.S. Commerce Department figures by Beacon Economics, a consulting firm with offices in the Bay Area and Los Angeles.

The revival of California’s economy and a rising housing market mean some hefty property tax increases for homeowners, the Legislature’s budget analyst believes.

California has the nation’s highest rate of poverty — nearly a quarter of its 38 million residents — under an alternative calculation devised by the Census Bureau that takes the cost of living into account.

Last year’s overall population growth, driven largely by the state’s having many more births than deaths, continued the slow pattern of the last decade. Immigration from other states and countries, once the major driver of growth, has dropped to near-zero.

California workers who suffer permanent, job-related injuries and illnesses are entitled to workers compensation payments that are among the lowest in the nation, an exhaustive state-by-state comparison reveals.

The state began borrowing in 2009 and accounted for more than $10 billion of the debt at its peak, but it has declined only slightly – thanks to a political stalemate in the Capitol – and California now accounts for nearly half of the national debt total.

Texas struck again Monday, luring Toyota Motor Corp.’s headquarters away from Torrance and forcing California officials to defend the state’s business climate anew.

A fairly constant refrain among California’s Democratic politicians and their liberal allies is that corporations should be paying more in taxes to support public services. . . There is, however, no consistency. The same folks who demand higher business taxes as a matter of supposed principle are often willing, even eager, to give certain industries and even certain corporations big tax breaks.