CERF Blog

California’s water regulatory environment is a mess.  One result is that it’s expensive and often arbitrary.  It’s expensive to support, but that’s the not biggest cost.  The real loss is in the efficient use of water. Since allocation in California is increasingly a political process, there is no reason to believe it’s economically efficient.  Indeed,… Read more

The folks at Chapman University have produced an important new paper.  We’ve said for a long time that reducing California’s Carbon Emissions is both expensive and futile, if the goal is to reduce global atmospheric carbon.  Here’s what the report has to say: This paper demonstrates that even the complete elimination of state GHG emissions will have no… Read more

California has now had three consecutive months of job gains, and the State’s unemployment rate has been declining, albeit slowly.  That’s an improvement, but it’s not time to break out the bubbly. For one thing, those job gains have been pretty darn small, and they haven’t been enough to drive down the unemployment rate.  Outmigration… Read more

The October 29, 2009 issue of Time Magazine had an article titled “Why California is America’s Future.”  I sure hope not.  California is fast becoming a post-industrial hell for almost everyone except the gentry class, their best servants and the public sector. We only need a few numbers to demonstrate that California is clearly on… Read more

NASSCO-General Dynamics announced that it was laying off 290 workers.  Here’s part of what the Union-Tribune had to say: “NASSCO-General Dynamics , the last major shipbuilder on the West Coast, laid off 290 of its 4,100 workers in San Diego on Monday because of a downturn in business and fluctuations in the repair work it… Read more

Below are two quotes from this article: “We’ve actually walked through this horrible recession with our economic base unscathed,” said Stephen Levy of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy. “The core of the California economy is still in place,” said Chris Thornberg of Beacon Economics in Los Angeles. With all due respect,… Read more

The November California jobs report showed the unemployment rate subsiding a bit from 12.5 percent in October to 12.3 percent, the result of a declining workforce and not a result of new jobs. The year-on-year job growth comparison showed that non-farm job level was 4.2 percent less than last November, better than the 4.6 percent… Read more