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4 years agoon
California’s political leaders, Democrats all, are touting a new state budget that expands spending on services for the state’s poor while building reserves.
While the state’s economy was booming in 2017, and generating record amounts of taxable income for the state treasury, the BEA says in a new report, its “real personal income” growth, adjusted for cost of living, was just 2.6%, lower than all of its neighboring states. Los Angeles-Long Beach had the slowest real income growth of any large metropolitan area at just 1.6 percent.
While nearly all California living costs tend to be high, housing is particularly so, thanks to our chronic inability to keep up with demand and the Capitol’s chronic inability to reduce barriers to construction.
That brings us to the next caveat about the new budget – the increasingly precarious state of California’s economy.
Related Story: California Lawmakers OK $213 Billion Budget. Here's What's Inside.
“The California economy is slowing down,” Jerry Nickelsburg, director of the UCLA Anderson Forecast, wrote in a report this month. “The state is, quite simply, running out of people to be employed.”Late last year, economists at Cal Lutheran University issued a report on Ventura County, saying its economy is stagnant because of a lack of workers and blaming housing availability and costs for the situation. What’s true in Ventura is increasingly true of the entire state, recent data indicate.
Dan Walters has been a journalist for nearly 60 years, spending all but a few of those years working for California newspapers. He has written more than 9,000 columns about the state and its politics and is the founding editor of the “California Political Almanac.” Dan has also been a frequent guest on national television news shows, commenting on California issues and policies.
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