California’s monthly jobs report last week showed that we lost another 1,700 manufacturing jobs even though the state added 11,000 non-farm jobs and our our overall unemployment rate stayed the same.  We continue to lag the nation’s manufacturing growth by a substantial margin since we started to recover from the recession in 2010.  Manufacturing jobs in […]

Last month we showed you how California shaped up for manufacturing investments in the first three quarters of 2013.  We just got the fourth quarter numbers and we have updated our chart below to indicate how it looks for the entire year.  Basically we got 1.5 percent of the nation’s new or expanded facilities, accounting for 1.2 […]

California’s economy is improving.  Our unemployment rate is down two percentage points over the last year and our state revenue growth has, for the first time in a while, allowed the Governor to project a small surplus in 2013. Still California has far too many workers either unemployed or underemployed. The state currently has the […]

California’s manufacturers are capable of meeting extraordinary challenges and will be the engine of job creation if they have the resources skilled workforce and the long term support of state and local communities. California’s unemployment rate fell from 8.9 percent to 8.7 percent in October but California unfortunately lost another 5,600 manufacturing jobs according to […]

California is a national leader in pushing renewable energy, lower greenhouse gas emissions and energy efficiency.  State manufacturers have contributed to the effort by installing cost-effective technologies and instituting lean manufacturing processes to reduce their demand for electricity, natural gas and transportation fuels. No other state’s manufacturers have done as much. But with more climate […]

The Sacramento Bee and others have written about recent statistics showing that California’s economy grew faster than the country in 2012. They have also pointed out that the state’s manufacturing gdp numbers had an eight percent boom in 2012.  That is very good news! We hope the trend continues because we have a lot of lost ground […]

We updated our manufacturing employment numbers, comparing us to the nation. Since January 2010, the country has seen 4.5 percent growth with 517,000 new manufacturing jobs, while California has been stagnant with the loss of 10,300 manufacturing jobs, about one percent of its manufacturing base. That two-year trend seems to accelerate the gap that has […]

In 2003 California manufacturers lost a sales tax credit on their capital equipment purchases, making them approximately six percent less competitive than manufacturers in most other states.  Since then, there have been no less than 20 proposed exemptions in different forms before our state legislature.  None have made it to even a second committee hearing. […]

Discussions are increasingly centered around California’s job growth and business climate. We decided to look at employment versus population growth to see how the state fared against the country. We also compared median incomes to see if we were keeping pace with the country on that front as well. Over the last decade we have […]

Last week the most independent voice in California policy analysis said the following in a letter:  a cap-and-trade “allowance auction is not necessary to meet the AB 32 goal of reducing GHG emissions statewide to 1990 levels by 2020.” The impartial Legislative Analyst (LAO) responded in a decisive letter to Sen. Henry Perea who had asked three […]