California raised a bunch of taxes this year. Its economy hasn’t collapsed.
By Jim Tankersley
Six months ago I wrote that California was diving into an interesting political and economic experiment: Could it keep adding jobs even after slapping its wealthiest residents with the highest state income tax rate in the nation? Most of the economists I talked to in the state predicted the tax hikes wouldn’t matter much. A lot of conservatives wrote me to predict the opposite.
What’s happened since? Well, California kept adding jobs, and at about the same rate as the nation overall. Private-sector employment rose by 0.8 percent in the Golden State from January through July. Across the country, it rose 0.9 percent.
The analysts at Beacon Economics in Los Angeles noted recently that California accounted for a quarter of the nation’s net job growth last month. The State Department of Finance reports that there were 374,000 fewer unemployed Californians in June than there were a year earlier: “The year-over-year decrease was the largest on record.”
Unemployment isn’t as good of a measure as job growth, because it includes people moving in and out of the labor force. Still, the stats show California’s unemployment rate a) remains higher than the national average and b) has fallen faster than the nation’s since January, dropping a full percentage point.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/08/22/california-raised-a-bunch-of-taxes-this-year-its-economy-hasnt-collapsed
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In alternate Earth LA is burning and San Diego is in shambles...
. In the right-wing world, there is no hell like California. They just can't explain why people, in particular innovative people, want to live there. But the right-wingers posting on blogs never seem to work, always post on any subject, spell atrociously and consider themselves permanent victims. 