Capitol Alert

California is the nation's most populous state but ranks fourth in the number of boats plying oceanic and inland waterways.

Conversely, the state is second behind only Florida when it comes to the number of boating accidents and boating fatalities, according to a new data report from the U.S. Coast Guard.

Florida has the nation's highest number of boats, almost a million, followed closely by Minnesota, Michigan and California. Florida was also No. 1 in boating accidents in 2012 with 662, according to the Coast Guard, in fatalities with 50 and in injuries with 398.

However, California was second in accidents (365), in fatalities (49) and in injuries (249). The state has been trending downward in boating accidents, the report's five-year spreadsheet also showed, but the number of fatalities has remained fairly constant, ranging from a low of 45 in 2008 to 52 in 2011.

PHOTO CREDIT: The Peters & May hydroplane race boat driven by JW Myers at Granite State Beach in Folsom on Thursday, September 8, 2011. The Sacramento Bee/Randall Benton

Although California fancies itself a leader in the reduction of greenhouse gases, the state has the nation's second highest level of energy-related emissions of carbon dioxide and has lagged the rest of the nation in reducing those emissions, according to a new report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Under Govs. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jerry Brown, California has adopted a mandate that utilities shift to at least 33 percent of its electrical power coming from non-emitting renewable sources such as wind, solar and geothermal by 2020. It's also adopted a "cap-and-trade" system to compel sources of carbon emissions to reduce their impact.

The EIA report, however, says that California's 369.8 million metric tons of energy-related carbon emissions in 2010 made it second only to Texas' 652.6 million metric tons. But between 2000 and 2010, while the nation's emissions were dropping by 4.2 percent, Texas' fell by 8.3 percent and California's by just 3 percent.

On a per-capita basis, California's energy carbon output dropped from 11.2 metric tons to 9.9 tons - one of the nation's lowest levels and barely half the national average of 18.2 tons. However, the state's per capita decline during that period, 11.2 percent, was lower than the national average decline of 12.6 percent. Texas' per capita decline during the decade was 23.8 percent.

PHOTO CREDIT: Smog covers downtown Los Angeles on Wednesday, March 12, 2008. Monica Almeida/The New York Times

California has 2.6 million residents who are in the country illegally and thus would be heavily impacted by any immigration reform legislation, a massive new study by the USC Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration concludes.

The state's undocumented population is about a quarter of the nation's, and about 72 percent comes from Mexico.

The study also found that California's illegal immigrants have $31.5 billion in income but individually earn less than half of U.S.-born workers, even though 74 percent of working-age immigrants are in the labor force.

PHOTO CREDIT: Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, right, talks at the state Capitol on April 30 about his SB 516 and SB 666 on ensuring immigrants' rights, regardless of legal status. Hector Amezcua / Sacramento Bee

Most California workers are payroll employees of private businesses, and the rise, fall and slow recovery of that employment during the last decade is laid out in a new Census Bureau report.

The report -- which excludes government workers and the self-employed from its calculations -- reveals that in 2001, there were 806,733 "business establishments" employing 13.2 million Californians and paying them $521.8 billion a year.

Five years later, during an historic housing boom that helped drive the state's unemployment rate below 5 percent, there were 878,128 businesses with 13.8 million workers, and payroll outlays hit $633.8 billion.

As the housing bubble burst, however, the state slid into its worst recession since the Great Depression, and the statewide unemployment rate surged over time to more than 12 percent. By 2010, the number of employers had dropped to 849,875 and business employment had declined to 12.5 million - a decline of 1.3 million workers - but payroll costs were virtually the same at $635.6 billion.

The latest employment data files for 2011 show a slight uptick from 2010 as the state's economy began to recover. In 2011, there were 849,316 employers with 12.7 million employees, and they were paying out $663.6 billion in wages and salaries.

PHOTO CREDIT: Construction workers smooth out foundations at a new housing development in Folsom. Renée C. Byer / Sacramento Bee file, 2012

Maybe California is not such a wild and crazy place after all.

The Census Bureau reported Wednesday that 35.7 percent of U.S. births were to unmarried mothers in 2011, but California's rate was markedly lower at 33.9 percent.

A number of other states had higher rates than California's, including rival Texas at 35.8 percent.

Among the states, Louisiana had the highest rate of births that year to unmarried mothers, 48.7 percent, although that was surpassed by the District of Columbia at 50.8 percent.

Utah was lowest at 14.7 percent.

PHOTO CREDIT: A care-giver holds the hand of a 4-month-old baby. Autumn Payne / Sacramento Bee file, 2006

The California Department of Finance's demographic unit calculated that California gained fewer than 300,000 new residents in 2012 for a growth rate of 0.8 percent.

Numerically, that's about half the annual growth California experienced during the 1980s, when high immigration and birth rates hit the state, and proportionately it's scarcely a third of the 1980s rate.

Working off 2010 census data, state demographers estimated the state's population at 37,966,000 on January 1, up 298,000 over the previous year.

The state's still-struggling economy may have something to do with population trends, the report indicated. The San Francisco Bay Area, whose economy is booming, was the fastest growing region last year, with Santa Clara County, home of Silicon Valley, growing twice as fast as the state as a whole.

Population growth last year was lowest in rural counties, where unemployment rates are the highest, and several actually lost population - Alpine, Calaveras, Del Norte, Lassen, Modoc, Plumas and Tuolumne.

Although regionally the Bay Area saw the highest rate of population growth, Santa Clarita, a suburban enclave north of Los Angeles, was the state's fastest growing city at 15.4 percent, followed by Dublin in Alameda County at 6.8 percent.

Despite scant population growth, however, California saw a resurgence of residential construction last year, with a 27 percent increase in new housing units from the previous year. The amount of residential construction in 2012, 45,309 units, was, however, just a fifth of what California was building during the height of the housing boom in the last decade.

PHOTO CREDIT: The San Francisco Bay Area had California's highest regional growth rate in 2012. The Sacramento Bee/Manny Crisostomo 2010 file.

California's state and local governments are at least $648 billion in debt and the total could surpass $1.1 trillion -- depending on how pension liabilities are calculated -- according to a data compilation by a conservative think tank.

The report was published by the California Public Policy Center, which is based in Southern California and concentrates its work on public employee unions and public pension liabilities. It's also a target of criticism by unions and other liberal groups, which accuse it of being part of a right-wing conspiracy to attack unions and public employees.

Anticipating that criticism, the organization took great pains to base its debt calculations on official data, including pension funds' own estimates of their unfunded liabilities, deviating from that methodology only on speculating about potentially higher pension debts.

The heavily footnoted report says the state's official debt stands at $132.6 billion, with general obligation bonds more than half the total. Other state debts include $27.8 billion in "budgetary borrowings" that Gov. Jerry Brown has described as a "wall of debt," $10.9 billion owed to the federal government for unemployment insurance benefits, and $11.3 billion in lease-revenue bonds.

As the federal Affordable Care Act begins to take effect, ever-fewer California employers are offering medical insurance to their workers, according to an annual survey by the California Healthcare Foundation.

From 2002 to 2012, the proportion of employers offering such coverage declined from 71 percent to 60 percent. Meanwhile, the costs of health care insurance have risen by just under 170 percent since 2002, more than five times the overall inflation rate.

The average premium for single-person coverage was $545 per month in 2012, substantially more than the national average of $468, while family coverage cost an average of $1,386 in California and $1,312 nationally, the foundation said.

The survey also found that larger employers with high proportions of full-time workers were most likely to offer health insurance to workers and that deductibles tended to be much higher among small employers than among large ones.

Finally, 21 percent of employers reported that they had increased the share of insurance costs borne by employees during the preceding year, while 17 percent either reduced workers' costs or absorbed increases.

PHOTO CREDIT: Optometrist Aaron Lech, right, examines patient Melanie Kearns of Rocklin in his office in Roseville on April 11., 2013. The Sacramento Bee/Randall Benton

Californians appear to be getting healthier in many respects, with drops in deaths attributable to cancer and many other major illnesses, as well as homicide and auto accidents, a new statistical report from the state Department of Public Health indicates.

However, the state also is seeing an uptick in deaths from Alzheimer's disease, as well as suicide and chronic liver disease. The report covers three years -- 2009-2011 -- with comparisons to 2006-2008.

For the first time, too, the state report on health-related issues compares California's experiences with the recommendations of the federal government's "Healthy People 2020" benchmarks.

California averaged 234,637 deaths a year from all causes during the 2009-11 period for an "age-adjusted rate" of 654.9 per 100,000 population. But the age-adjusted death rate in the state's 58 counties varied widely, from a low of 516.4 in wealthy Marin County to 989.2 in nearby Lake County, which has a high poverty rate.

Were California's state government a business, it would be a candidate for insolvency with a negative net worth of $127.2 billion, according to an annual financial report issued by State Auditor Elaine Howle and the Bureau of State Audits.

The report, which covers the fiscal year ending June 30, 2012, says that the state's negative status -- all of its assets minus all of its liabilities -- increased that year, largely because it spent more than it received in revenue.

During the 2011-12 fiscal year, the state's general fund spent $1.7 billion more than it received in revenues and wound up with an accumulated deficit of just under $23 billion from several years of red ink. Gov. Jerry Brown has referred to that and other budget gaps, mostly money owed to schools, as a "wall of debt" totaling more than $30 billion.

Health care has become, by most measures, the largest single piece of the California economy, well over 10 percent of its $2 trillion output of goods and services -- and destined to grow as the state extends medical insurance coverage to millions of Californians under the federal Affordable Care Act.

Nevertheless, a new nationwide study finds that as large as it may be, the health care spending in California has been relatively small, compared to other states.

The statistical compilation by the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis found that as of 2009, the latest year for which complete data were available, California was sixth lowest among the states in public and private health care spending as a proportion of its economy. The state's relative spending, 12.5 percent of its economy, was just 84 percent of the national average.

Clear majorities of Californians across the ideological spectrum support measures to reduce violence and overhaul the U.S. immigration system, according to a new USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll.

Congress has tackled immigration with a renewed sense of urgency this year, and California voters agree with the premise that the current laws are in need of overhaul: 67 percent of respondents to the poll said the current system is not working.

Nearly three-quarters of California voters backed President Barack Obama's framework, which includes tightened border security, tougher restrictions to ensure employers hire legal workers and a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. The poll found strong support when it broke those components into separate questions -- 75 percent of voters backed stricter employment verification, a figure that rose to over 80 percent for border security and a route to citizenship.

While registered Republicans were less likely to support those proposals, they were more receptive than in past surveys. A 45-percent plurality of Republicans backed the citizenship option, outstripping the third who favored deportation.

"You see the Republican party, at least in California moving away from a deportation mentality," David Kanevsky of the research firm American Viewpoint said in a conference call with reporters.

Declining birth and migration rates have slowed California's population growth to a crawl and "it's only a matter of time before California's population declines," California Lutheran University economist Bill Watkins declares in a new report on the state's demographic and economic prospects.

Such a decline, Watkins says, would mean that "all of California's problems will be much harder to solve than they are today."

Although California appears to be adding jobs slowly as it recovers from the worst recession since the Great Depression, Watkins continues, the state's economic future is cloudy. Despite recent real estate price increases, he doubts whether they imply that a new real estate boom is coming, particularly with much-slower population growth.

Watkins, the least optimistic of the economists who chart California's finances, released his new report today during a meeting of the California Taxpayers Association in Sacramento today.

California's network of local streets and roads "is in crisis" and needs $82 billion in repairs and reconstruction to be restored, a coalition of local government groups declared Tuesday.

The California Statewide Needs Assessment Project report closely parallels recent appraisals by the California Transportation Commission that the state highway network also needs hundreds of billions of dollars in work.

Cities and counties are responsible for 81 percent of the state's roadway mileage, and the report by the California State Association of Counties, the League of California Cities and other groups say that while $2.5 billion is being spent annually on their upkeep, they need another $1.9 billion to keep the roadways from deteriorating further and $82 billion over the next 10 years "to bring the system up-to-date."

Localities receive shares of gasoline taxes and supplement those funds with local sales and property taxes to maintain and expand local streets and roads.

"It costs far less to repair and maintain roads than to replace them," Chris McKenzie, executive director of the League of California Cities, said in a statement accompanying the report, adding, "We can either spend money now and make the repairs, or expect to pay a lot more in the future."

The report does not suggest a way to pay for the work it advocates, but notes that $82 billion would translate into an extra 56 cents per gallon of fuel in taxes.

PHOTO CREDIT: A Sacramento City street division road crew uses jackhammers to remove cracked asphalt on Land Park Drive near 2nd Avenue on April 24, 2008. The Sacramento Bee/Randy Pench

The number of California school districts in financial jeopardy has dropped by a third in the last year, state schools superintendent Tom Torlakson said Monday.

Last May, 188 school districts, including several of the state's largest, were either in "negative certification" or "qualified certification," denoting levels of financial distress, but the number has since dropped to 124 - in part because the state is pumping more money into local school coffers from the sales and income tax increase approved by voters last November.

The new list has seven districts with "negative" status, meaning they cannot meet their financial obligations now, the largest of which is Inglewood Unified in Los Angeles County.

Another 117 districts have "qualified" status, meaning they may not be able to meet their obligations. They include the state's largest school district, Los Angeles Unified, and a number of other large districts, such as Oakland Unified, Antelope Valley Joint Union High School, Compton Unified, Pomona Unified, Capistrano Unified, Elk Grove Unified, Sacramento City Unified, San Juan Unified, Folsom-Cordova Unified and San Diego Unified.

Overall, Torlakson said, 500,000 fewer of California's 6 million K-12 students are being schooled in financially distressed districts, but 2.1 million remain in those districts.

PHOTO CREDIT: State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson, urges legislators to support the tax extension proposed by Gov. Jerry Brown. on March 14, 2011. The Sacramento Bee/Randy Pench

More than 5 million California adults received some form of income-based government assistance in 2011, according to a new Census Bureau report.

The report covered welfare grants, aid to the aged, blind and disabled and medical care through the Medi-Cal program, as well as several smaller programs in which aid is based on recipients' low incomes. But it excluded Social Security payments, public employee pensions and other public payment programs that are not tied to on recipients' incomes.

The 5.3 million Californians receiving aid in 2011 were the largest number of any state by far but the percentage, just under 19 percent of all California adults, was a percentage point lower than the national rate of means-tested public assistance.

Nationally, 30.4 percent of 46 million aid recipients were disabled, but in California it was 27.9 percent, one of the nation's lowest rates.

California's rate of homeownership continued a years-long slide in 2012 and is now the second lowest in the nation, according to a new Census Bureau report.

Just 54.1 percent of Californians lived in homes during the last quarter of 2012 that they or their families owned, the Census Bureau reported. Only New York, at 53.1 percent, had a lower rate.

The report covers the annual housing survey dating back to 2005, when California's home ownership rate was 60.1 percent. It has declined every year since.

Nationally, 65.4 percent of U.S. residents live in homes owned by themselves or their families. States range as high as 76.7 percent in West Virginia.

PHOTO CREDIT: New homes are under construction in West Sacramento on Thursday, July 8, 2010. Randall Benton / Sacramento Bee file, 2010.

Does California's delegation in the House of Representatives lean to the left? So it would seem from an exhaustive ranking of 435 House members on their ideological positioning by the authoritative National Journal.

Five California Democrats are tied with nine Democrats from other states for the title of "most liberal," based on their voting records in 2012.

However, when it comes to "most conservative," the highest any Californian - San Diego County Republican Duncan Hunter - ranked was 18th.

A tony suburb of New York City has the nation's highest concentration of high-income households, but Silicon Valley ranks No. 2 and eight of the nation's 25 wealthiest communities are in California, according to a new Census Bureau report.

The Bridgeport, CT, area has the highest concentration with 17.9 percent of its households having incomes in the top 5 percent, the report said, with San Jose and other Silicon Valley communities in second place at 15.9 percent.

San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont ranks No. 4 at 13 percent, just behind Washington, DC, and its suburbs. Napa is No. 10, with the Santa Cruz-Watsonville area No. 11, Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana No. 15, Santa Barbara-Santa Maria No. 16, San Diego and vicinity No. 18 and Santa Rosa-Petaluma No. 23.

While Latinos are poised to become California's largest ethnic group within a few months, the state's Asian-Pacific Islander community has been growing even faster, according to a new report charting the community's status.

The state's 5.6 million Asians and nearly 300,000 Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders easily make up the largest such concentration in the nation. Despite widespread belief that they are very prosperous, the group is actually the report's title, "A Community of Contrasts," with some nationalities doing very well economically and others among the state's poorest residents.

The report, produced by the Asian Pacific American Legal Center and the Asian Law Caucus, breaks down the overall community into 23 specific Asian and 19 Hawaiian-Pacific Islander subgroups.

It declares, for instance, that while Taiwanese, Fijian, Malaysian, Japanese, Filipino and Indian Californians have levels of poverty below those of white Californians, those of other subgroups are higher, topped by 34 percent poverty among Hmong, more than twice the state's overall rate.

Income levels show a similarly wide spread in the report, with Hmong having per capita incomes of under $10,000 a year, less than a quarter of whites and the upper-income Asian communities, such as Indians, Malaysians and Taiwanese. The report also declares that Asians were hit particularly hard by the recent recession, both in terms of unemployment and housing foreclosures.

PHOTO CREDIT: Lincy Han of the Golden Turtle Lion Dance Association of UC Davis, prepares for the opening ceremony of the Pacific Rim Street Fest on May 20, 2012. José Luis Villegas / Sacramento Bee file, 2012

The trust fund that provides pensions to retired teachers has a $64 billion deficit and would need a $4.5 billion per year infusion of revenue to become fully solvent, according to a new internal study.

The California State Teachers Retirement System produced the report in response to a legislative resolution.

Its release came just days after the Legislature's budget analyst, Mac Taylor, indirectly chided Gov. Jerry Brown for ignoring "huge unfunded liabilities associated with the teachers' retirement system and state retiree health benefits" in his new budget.

STRS receives money from the state, from local school districts and from teachers themselves, but is also highly dependent on investment earnings, which were clobbered during the recent recession. And while its larger cousin, the California Public Employees Retirement System, has the power take money from the state treasury as it sees fit, STRS must receive specific appropriations from the Legislature.

While fully funding teacher pensions would require $4.5 billion more a year --excluding projected investment earnings -- the system says in its report, the burden would be eased by setting lower funding targets and./or stretching out contributions. The most important decision, STRS said, is to begin closing the deficit, rather than allowing it to widen further.

More than two-thirds of California business leaders see the state as an extraordinarily difficult state in which to operate, a new survey by the California Business Roundtable has found.

The poll adds heft to the often-voiced complaints about the state's business climate from Republicans and business groups -- complaints that Gov. Jerry Brown and Democratic legislative leaders say they want to address as the state struggles to emerge from a deep recession.

Brown and top legislators have pledged to reform the California Environmental Quality Act and examine other ways to make the state more attractive to investment, but environmental and consumer groups are leery.

The Business Roundtable polled 1,142 leaders of both large and small businesses and learned that more than 60 percent see the state's economy as worse than the nation's as a whole and 69 percent say it is harder to do business in California than in other states.

The survey also found that just 26 percent of business leaders believe that the results of the 2012 election, in which voters passed new taxes and expanded Democratic legislative majorities, will have a positive effect on the economy while 51 percent said it would have a negative effect.

Comparing California to other states has become a common exercise among politicians, academicians and in the media.

So how does California really shape up? Next 10, an organization dedicated to looking into California's future, commissioned David Neumark and Jennifer Muz of the University of California, Irvine, to produce a voluminous study of California's economy vis-à-vis other states. Among its findings:

Although California's once-soaring population growth has slowed markedly, the state will surpass 50 million by 2050, and by then, Latinos should be nearing a majority, according to a new set of population projections by the state Department of Finance.

Meanwhile, the state's once dominant white population will continue to shrink, becoming smaller than the Latino contingent by early 2014, and the state will become markedly older as the huge Baby Boom generation moves into retirement years.

The 2010 census counted 37.3 million Californians, and population growth, once well more than 2 percent a year, has dropped to under 1 percent. The new projections see 40.6 million by 2020, 44.3 million by 2030, 47.7 million by 2040, 50.4 million by 2050 and 52.7 million by 2060.

The theory that California has evolved into a two-tier society is getting another dose of statistical support from a new nationwide survey of family economic security.

The Washington-based Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED) found that Californians rank 38th among the states in economic security by such indices as poverty rate, savings, and net worth. It means, CFED's report said, that nearly half of California residents have no savings on which to rely in the event of job loss, illness or "other income-depleting emergency."

The state would rank even lower were the federal government to adopt a proposed new standard of gauging poverty. Under the current system, which is reflected in the CFED report, the state ranks 29th in poverty rate at 14.6 percent, but under the proposed new system, which takes into account living costs and other factors, the state would have the nation's highest poverty rate.

The detailed section of the report on California cites as major factors in the state's low economic security ranking its high level of average credit card debt ($13,825; ranked 48th) and its high bankruptcy rate, 6.2 per 1,000 residents, nearly 50 percent higher than the national rate (ranked 45th).

Bucking a national trend of declining labor union membership, California's unions saw a tiny uptick in 2012, according to a new report from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Nationwide, the proportion of wage and salary workers belonging to unions dropped from 11.8 percent in 2011 to 11.3 percent in 2012, the BLS said, but in California, it increased from 17.1 percent to 17.2 percent.

California was one of just 14 states that saw union gains. That translated into an increased in union membership from 2.4 million to 2.5 million, the majority of them state, school and local government employees.

New York has the nation's highest union membership proportion, 23.2 percent, while North Carolina has the lowest, 2.9 percent. California's rate is fifth highest behind New York, Alaska, Hawaii, Rhode Island and Washington state, but the Golden State's number of union members is by the far the largest of any state.

PHOTO CREDIT: This Feb. 28, 2011 file photo shows protests at the state Capitol in Madison, Wis. The nation's labor unions suffered sharp declines in membership last year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said Wednesday. (AP Photo/ Andy Manis, File)

Manufacturing is staging a big comeback in the United States, according to a new U.S. Commerce Department report, but a new state employment report indicates that manufacturing is continuing its years-long slide in California.

The federal report says that between the start of 2010 and the end of 2012, manufacturing accounted for 500,000 new jobs. But a state-by-state survey indicates that the effects are being felt mostly in the Upper Midwest and the South.

In Indiana, for example, manufacturing accounts for 13.1 percent of jobs and 22.3 percent of earnings, making it the No. 1 state in terms of economic impact. All other states with high-impact manufacturing sectors, except for New Hampshire, are in the two regions.

Meanwhile, a monthly report on employment in California, also released Friday, shows that government and manufacturing are among the categories to show declines over the past year.

Manufacturing, once a major component of the California economy, now accounts for less than 9 percent of the state's non-agricultural payrolls. It shed 11,400 jobs between December 2011 and last month.

The federal report's manufacturing employment map indicates that only in a handful of San Francisco Bay Area counties do manufacturers account for more than 10 percent of employment.

California has the nation's third highest fuel taxes, but nevertheless has one of the nation's lowest rates of charging users for highways and other transportation services, according to a new study by the Tax Foundation.

Despite fuel taxes of over 50 cents a gallon, the Washington-based organization found, those and other "user" taxes and fees account for just 30.3 percent of state and local government spending on transportation services, including mass transit, and just 22.7 percent of spending on roads, streets and highways.

The state is the 33rd lowest state in the first category and 39th in the second. On average, states finance 35.8 percent of all transportation spending from user revenue, and 32 percent of roads, streets and highways.

The Tax Foundation argues that most transportation costs should be covered by user taxes and fees, rather than general revenues. Delaware ranks No. 1 in that approach, covering well over 50 percent of its costs with user revenue.

PHOTO CREDIT: Associated Press file, 2008

California has one of the nation's lowest rates of smoking -- just 13.6 percent of adults light up -- but the American Lung Association gives the state low marks for reducing tobacco use, primarily for not taxing cigarettes more and not spending more on anti-smoking programs.

The critique of California is contained in the organization's annual state-by-state "report card" on anti-smoking efforts.

While praising the state as an early leader in persuading its residents to give up cigarettes, the association raps the state for not raising cigarette taxes higher than the current 87 cents a pack and decried voter rejection of a $1 per pack increase last year (Proposition 29). It said California is one of only three states that haven't raised smoking levies since 1999. It also singles out the Legislature for stalling action last year on Senate Bill 575, which would have removed exemptions from smoke-free places.

With a declining birthrate and ebbing migration into California from other states and nations, the historically fast-growing state will see only relatively slow population expansion in the foreseeable future, the state's own demographers conclude.

However, these trends also mean that Latinos are likely to become the state's largest single ethnic group sometime this year, a data-packed section of Gov. Jerry Brown's new state budget plan concludes.

That's a couple of years earlier than previous demographic expectations.

The release last week of Gov. Jerry Brown's 2013-2014 budget proposal has kept reporters busy, particularly Capitol Alert's resident budget expert, Kevin Yamamura.

In the video below, Kevin hosts a California Connections discussion analyzing whether this budget marks California moving beyond the era of gaping budget deficits. He is joined by Senate Republican Leader Bob Huff; Sen. Mark DeSaulnier, who sits on the Budget and Fiscal Review Committee, and H.D. Palmer, a spokesman for California's Department of Finance.

More than a third of the cigarettes that are smoked in California have been smuggled from other jurisdictions, according to an updated study by the Michigan-based Mackinac Center for Public Policy.

The conservative think tank said that California's illegal cigarette rate, 36.08 percent in 2011, was slightly lower than the 36.29 percent rate calculated in 2009 and ranked it seventh highest in the nation, down from fifth highest in 2009.

The Mackinac study cited a strong correlation between "buttlegging" rates and the level of cigarette taxation. It said New York had the highest rate of smuggled cigarette use 60.4 percent, as well as the highest cigarette tax, $4.35 per pack statewide and an additional $1.50 in New York City.

Meanwhile, it rated New Hampshire as being the biggest exporter of cigarettes to other states because its tax is lower than those of most surrounding states. For every 100 packs of cigarettes smoked in New Hampshire, 27 were taken elsewhere.

The number of California's children is shrinking, and more of them are living in poverty, according to two new reports by private organizations.

The release of reports from the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children's Health and the Center for the Next Generation. was coincidental, but both explore the same phenomenon of change in the state's under-10-year-old population.

The Packard Foundation study, using Census Bureau data, reveals that the number of California children declined by nearly 200,000 between 2000 and 2010 and is likely to drop by another 100,000 in this decade. Proportionately, the study found, children are declining from 33 percent of California's population in 1970 to a projected 21 percent by 2030.

California's millions of unlicensed drivers are nearly three times as likely to cause a fatal traffic crash as those who are driving legally, a new Department of Motor Vehicles study concludes.

The findings, the DMV's researchers conclude, "strongly justify the use of countermeasures, including vehicle impoundment, to control (illegal) drivers and to reduce crashes caused by those drivers."

The data provide new grist for the state's perennial political debate over whether illegal immigrants should be allowed to obtain licenses, and local debates in San Francisco and other cities over police seizure of vehicles from drivers who are unlicensed.

For the past 18 years, applicants for driver's licenses have been required to prove their legal status. Advocates of licensing illegal drivers say that it would improve traffic safety.

The study covered fatal accident statistics from 1987 and 2009 and divided at-fault drivers into three categories - licensed drivers, those driving on suspended or revoked licenses, and those who never had licenses.

On average, fewer than 1 percent of licensed drivers will be at fault in a fatal collision, while the rates of those with suspended or revoked licenses and those without licenses approach 3 percent.

The study noted that in a given moment, about two million Californians will have their licenses suspended or revoked, but how many continue to drive is unknown, as is the number of drivers who never had been licensed. The latter number is assumed to have grown since the law was changed in 1994 to require license applicants to prove legal status.

If you sense that California's Legislature is the nation's most active -- or most intrusive -- generator of new laws, a nationwide compilation of 2012 state legislation by the National Conference of State Legislatures seems to prove the case.

The NCSL released its annual list of the nation's 81 most significant new state laws Thursday, and the California Legislature is responsible for 27 of them, or exactly one third. California edged out Illinois, which generated 26 of the noteworthy new laws.

Among California measures cited by the NCSL were those that allow clergy members to refuse to perform same-sex marriages, prohibit prison workers from having sex with inmates, allow life-sentence offenders who were under 18 when they committed crimes to seek release, restrict picketing at funerals, protect breastfeeding rights, require car washes to recycle water, reform state pensions, and no longer require passengers in off-road vehicles to keep their feet flat on the floor.

Steven Glazer, one of Gov. Jerry Brown's closest advisers, tweeted jubilantly Thursday about his hometown of Orinda's being rated the second friendliest community in America by Forbes magazine.

Glazer, an Orinda city councilman, was dismissive, however, about California's poor showing in Forbes' annual ranking of the states on business climate, which also was published Thursday.

California was rated No. 41, just behind Alabama and just ahead of Wisconsin, in the annual survey, which covered six factors ranging from business costs to quality of life. California's lowest score was in business costs while its highest - No. 1, in fact - was in "growth prospects."

When asked whether he also embraces Forbes' business climate ranking, Glazer responded, on Twitter: "Of course not. This is all abt fun. Best 2 argue abt criteria, laugh @ conclusions 4 both. Go Orinda!"

Forbes ranked Utah as the No. 1 state for business, with Maine last at No. 50.

A polite, decade-long disagreement between the federal Census Bureau and California's state demographers developed after the 2000 census.

The Census Bureau saw California's population growing more slowly than did the state, and by the end of the decade, the gap between the two had grown to about a million persons.

The 2010 census officially settled the argument in the Census Bureau's favor. The state, albeit reluctantly, rebenched its population figures to the census.

Two years later, however, the gap has emerged again, only this time the Census Bureau sees California's population growing more rapidly than does the state Department of Finance's population unit.

Last week, the state pegged California's July 1 population at 37.8 million, up 256,000 from 2011. But on Thursday, the Census Bureau said the state had just over 38 million residents on July 1, having grown by 357,500 during the previous 12 months.

The Census Bureau's growth estimate for California was the nation's second highest behind Texas' 427,400, but in percentage terms, the state's annual growth rate, 0.9 percent, was just a tad over the national rate of 0.7 percent while Texas' rate, 1.7 percent, was nearly twice California's.

North Dakota, thanks to an oil boom, had the fastest growth rate of 2.17 percent and Texas was No. 3. California's rate was the 19th highest. At the other end of the scale, Vermont dropped by 581 residents. It and Rhode Island were the only two states to see a population decline.

California's minimum wage of $8 per hour has been frozen for five years and a battle is likely in the 2013 legislative session over whether it should be increased and whether it should be automatically indexed to inflation.

Assemblyman Luis Alejo, D-Salinas, tried to win passage of a minimum wage hike and automatic indexing in 2011, but after Assembly Bill 10 easily cleared the Assembly's Labor and Employment Committee with Democratic votes, it died without a hearing or a vote in the Assembly Appropriations Committee, having drawn stiff business opposition.

Alejo is back with a new bill, also tagged as AB 10, that's slightly less ambitious. It would boost the minimum wage to $8.25 in 2014, with two 50-cent boosts in subsequent years, and then automatic adjustment to inflation beginning in 2017.

Backers of change - labor unions and advocates for the poor - contend that low-income workers lose purchasing power due to inflation. Opponents - restaurants and other employers with large numbers of minimum wage workers - say that raising it would increase their costs and force them to reduce payrolls.

Though the prevalence of cigarette smoking among California high school students has declined over the past decade, smokeless tobacco use has risen among high school students, from 3.1 percent in 2004 to 3.9 percent in 2010, according a report released this morning.

The report, by Ron Chapman, state health officer and director of the California Department of Public Health, attributed the increase in part to a rise in the promotion and availability of snus and other smokeless tobacco products.

The study found the prevalence of smoking was higher at schools in neighborhoods with five or more stores that sell tobacco than at schools in neighborhoods without any stores selling tobacco.

The study also documented a rise in the illegal sale of tobacco to minors. According to the survey, 8.7 percent of retailers sold tobacco to minors this year, up from 5.6 percent in 2011.

"For the first time in the last three years, tobacco retailers are selling tobacco to our youth more often," Chapman said in a conference call with reporters this morning.

California's population grew last fiscal year by 256,000 residents due to natural births, a 0.68 percent increase that brings the state's total to 37,826,000 people.

The data are contained in a new release from the state Department of Finance, whose demographers update population statistics each year.

The state has seen annual population growth rates below 1 percent since 2004-2005. The new report shows California had 503,000 births last fiscal year, 234,000 deaths and a net migration of 13,000 people who left the state.

Placer County again topped the list in population growth with 1.21 percent growth to 360,680 residents. Santa Clara County was close behind with 1.20 percent growth to 1,828,597 residents.

Lassen County saw the biggest population decrease, losing 2.94 percent down to 33,650 residents. Finance spokesman H.D. Palmer said the county suffered significant population declines after the state began shifting lower-level prisoners and parolees to counties, resulting in fewer people at Lassen's California Correctional Center and High Desert State Prison.

Let's say you'd like to know how many Asian residents of Sacramento County moved in the last year, either to a new address within the county or somewhere else.

A new Census Bureau online tool, dubbed Easy Stats, makes finding that information not only easy but instantaneous.

Results from the 2010 Census and other Census Bureau research into demographics, economics, living arrangements and just about everything else are available for every state, every county and every community.

By the way, Easy Stats tells us that about 31,000 Asians living in Sacramento County a year ago have since moved, nearly 24,000 of them to other homes in the county, more than 5,000 to somewhere else in California and more than 2,000 to another state.

About 100,000 more Californians moved to another state in 2011 than California gained from other states, a new Census Bureau report reveals.

However, more than a quarter-million persons relocated into California from other countries during the year and that, coupled with what demographers call "natural increase" - births minus deaths - meant that the state still gained population.

The Census Bureau calculated that 562,343 Californians moved to other states during 2011 with the most popular destinations being Texas (58,992), Arizona (49,635), Nevada (40,114), Washington (38,421), Oregon (34,214), New York (25,761), Colorado (23,234) and Florida (22,420).

Meanwhile, 468,428 residents of other states moved to California during the year, with the most numerous domestic immigrants coming from Texas (37,387), Washington (36,481), Nevada (36,159), Arizona (35,650), New York (25,269) and Florida (22,094).

Finally, the Census Bureau tallied 269,772 persons who moved to California from outside the 50 states, almost all of whom came from foreign countries, but with relative handfuls from Puerto Rico (1,344) and islands under U.S. control (2,817).

California is home to more Americans 100 years or older than any other state, according to a new Census Bureau report, but its percentage of centenarians and other over-70 residents is below the national average.

The report says that in 2010, 53,364 Americans were over 100 years old, including 5,921 in California, topping No. 2 New York's 4,605 and Florida's 4,090, but with just 1.6 percent of its population listed as centenarians, it was a bit below the national average of 1.7 percent and way below the leading centenarian state, North Dakota, at 3.3 percent.

California also fell under the national average in residents aged 70-79 (4.7 percent), 80-89 (2.7 percent) and 90-99 (0.53 percent).

Education may be the largest single segment of California's budget, but the state proportionately spends less of its money on elementary and high schools and colleges than the national average, according to a new Census Bureau report.

The statistic is gleaned from the bureau's annual report on state government finances, the latest of which covers 2011.

The report tallies California's "general expenditures" last year at just under $225 billion -- spending from both the state's own taxes and other resources as well as $64.5 billion in federal funds. Education is almost $75 billion of that, according to the report -- or exactly one-third, somewhat below the national average of 35.8 percent.

California's level of education spending in 2011 was fractionally lower than in 2010. Other states ranged from a high of 46.6 percent in Georgia to a low of 24.9 percent in Alaska.

Thanks to passage of Proposition 30 last month, high-income Californians would pay the nation's highest marginal income tax rates -- nearly 52 percent -- if President Barack Obama and Congress fail to make a deal to avoid the so-called "fiscal cliff," according to a new study.

Without a fiscal cliff deal to the contrary, the Bush era tax cuts on high-income taxpayers would expire next year and rates would return to their previous levels.

Gerald Prante, an economics professor at Lynchburg College in Virginia, and Austin John, a Lynchburg economics student, calculated marginal tax rates -- the highest rates on the highest levels of income -- for all 50 states. They combined state, federal and, where applicable, local income taxes, plus payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare and included the deductibility of some taxes.

Proposition 30 added three percentage points to the marginal state income tax rate for California's highest-income taxpayers, bringing it to 13.3 percent. That action raised California over other high-tax jurisdictions to a marginal rate of 51.9 percent, slightly higher than New York City's level. Hawaii was the only other place with a calculated rate above 50 percent.

Their report was published by the Social Science Research Network.

So how does California compare to other states in measures of economic, fiscal, educational and personal wellbeing?

Not so well, it appears, according to new national study by a heavyweight academic consortium and another report from the U.S. Department of Education.

"The States Project" is a joint effort of Harvard University's Institute of Politics, the University of Pennsylvania's Fels Institute of Government and the American Education Foundation. It gathered data on state and local government finances, educational attainment and other "fundamentals" to create the issue-by-issue and state-by-state comparisons.

Overall, California ranks 33rd among the state in what the project calls "best fundamentals," in which Virginia was No. 1 and Mississippi was No. 50.

California has one of the nation's highest levels of income inequality -- gaps between families in upper income brackets and those in middle and lower quintiles -- according to a new study by the Washington-based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The left-leaning organization, whose California affiliate is the California Budget Project, found that in the late part of the last decade, California had the third greatest disparity between those in the top income brackets and those at the bottom of any state. Only New Mexico and Arizona had greater gaps.

When it came to the gap between those at the top and those in the middle, California had the second widest gap, lower only than New Mexico's. It also had the second largest increase in the gap between top and middle during the preceding three decades, from the late 1970s. Only Connecticut's gap grew more.

Nationally, the organization found that the richest fifth of households had average incomes eight times as large as those of the poorest fifth. It suggested that states with wide income gaps could close them with such steps as raising the minimum wage, making tax systems less regressive, strengthening benefits to low-income families and improving unemployment insurance benefits.

Nearly nine million Californians - almost a quarter of the state's residents - live in poverty under a newly devised federal standard, making the state's rate by far the highest in the nation.

The stunning number will fuel California's perpetual political debate over the state's "safety net" of health and welfare services, which have been reduced sharply due to budget deficits. With voter approval of new taxes, advocates for the poor are demanding that some of the benefit cuts be rescinded.

California's 23.5 percent poverty rate under the "supplemental poverty measure" (SPM) developed by the Census Bureau is approached only by the 23.2 percent rate in the District of Columbia. The highest SPM rate in any other state is Florida's 19.5 percent.

The state-by-state comparison is found in a Census Bureau report on the SPM, which is being tested as a replacement for the current way of measuring poverty, which is a half-century old.

The new, and still experimental, system includes broader data of income and outgo that have emerged since the system was created in the early 1960s, such as payroll taxes that reduce disposable income and government benefits that increase income.The new system also takes into account cost-of-living variations from state to state.

The steep climb in California's poverty rate under SPM, adding nearly 3 million to the poverty rolls, is apparently driven largely by the state's high cost of living.

Under the old - and still official - system, California's poverty rate is 16.3 percent, which translates into slightly over 6 million of the state's 38 million residents. That rate is somewhat higher than the national rate of 15 percent, but by no means the highest in the nation.

The national SPM rate is 15.8 percent, a fractional increase from the official rate, and California's SPM rate of 23.5 percent represents not only the highest in the nation, but the largest of any state's jump from the official rate to the SPM rate. In some states, the SPM rate actually is lower than the official rate.

Latinos made big gains in state legislative bodies during last week's election, including the California Legislature, according to a report from the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials.

The organization called the increases "historic" and said that Latinos now hold legislative seats in 36 states with 70 state senators and 206 members of lower legislative houses.

New Mexico, with 46 Latinos, leads the nation, while California runs second with 26, up from 23 prior to the election. California's Latino legislators include two newly elected Republicans.

High unemployment will persist in California for at least a couple more years, the state Department of Employment Development predicts, and the state's $10 billion debt to the federal government will also persist unless California employers cough up more money.

The projections are contained in a new EDD report.

California began borrowing to shore up its flat-broke Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF) nearly four years ago. The fund pays for the initial 26 weeks of unemployment insurance benefits, plus portions of extended benefits.

The debt grew to nearly $10 billion by the end of 2011. It's expected to hit $10.2 billion by the end of this year and remain at that level through 2013 before slowly declining in 2014 as, EDD expects, unemployment drifts slowly downward.

California has just under 2 million unemployed now. The agency expects that the number will decline slowly in 2013 and 2014. It also expects new claims for unemployment insurance benefits to remain at about 2 million a year through 2014.

The federal government slightly boosted taxes on employers to offset some of the state's UIF debt, but it also started charging interest on that debt -- about $300 million a year -- in 2011. With the UIF in the red and the state budget facing deficits, Gov. Jerry Brown and the Legislature opted to borrow money for the interest payments from the Disability Insurance Fund (DIF), which is financed by payroll taxes on employees.

Brown asked the Legislature this to raise taxes on employers to repay the DIF loan, but there was no action -- nor has anyone proposed a plan to repay the larger, $10 billion UIF debt to the federal government.

It was just a a semi-coincidence that as Gov. Jerry Brown was touting California on Thursday as an engine of economic growth, the California Manufacturers and Technology Association was declaring the state to be falling behind the rest of the country.

Both have data on their sides.

During an appearance before the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco -- mostly to campaign for passage of his tax measure, Proposition 30 -- Brown skewered the "declinists" who believe that California is faltering.

The state has its flaws, he said, but "California ... has made some fabulous decisions, and our collective will ... will not be slowed by the skeptics, the declinists and those fearful individuals who can't see where they are: the greatest place in the world."

One of the California Capitol's longest running conflicts pits personal injury attorneys against business, professional and insurance lobbies over the rules governing lawsuits -- who can sue whom and collect how much.

The conflict has continued in dozens of specific legislative and ballot measure battles over such issues as pain and suffering damages in medical malpractice cases, third-party liability for injuries, auto insurance underwriting standards and "bad faith" handling of insurance claims.

Just this year, the "tort warriors," as they have been dubbed, clashed over lawyer-backed legislation that, if enacted, would have overturned a state Supreme Court decision limiting recovery of medical costs to those actually paid, rather than what medical care providers billed.

It's also been a media war as the contending factions constantly exchange allegations about the extent of litigation in California.

Gov. Jerry Brown has been seeking implementation of a "weighted student formula" that would give more school money to districts with high levels of poverty and other educational impediments and low levels of achievement.

But the proposal has been a hard sell in the Legislature, because districts that would lose money under the redistribution plan are opposed. This year, the Legislature passed only legislation that would create a "task force" to study the issue, but Brown vetoed Assembly Bill 18, saying, "a task force ... may actually delay action on reforms" and adding, "Rather than create a task force, let's work together and craft a fair weighted student formula."

The issue is expected to be joined again in 2013, but prospects for increasing overall school financing are dim. Brown's own tax measure, Proposition 30, is fading, and a rival tax measure just for schools, Proposition 38, is faring even worse. And without more money to lubricate the politics of the situation, districts that would lose under a weighted formula would be even less willing to accept it.

Brown's proposal, which has never been fully fleshed out, is now receiving flak from another source, Education Trust-West, an education think tank based in Oakland. It has issued a report that enthusiastically embraces a weighted formula, noting that only a handful of states are not using such a system, but says that Brown's proposal may fall short.

California, the nation's most populous state, also has the nation's largest number of medically uninsured children, but has lowered that number sharply in recent years, according to a new study by Georgetown University's Health Policy Institute.

Ironically, however, the study attributes that decline from 2009 to 2011, in part, to the state's Healthy Families program, which was repealed this year as part of the 2012-13 state budget, saving $13 million. Children who had been insured under Healthy Families are now being shifted into the Medi-Cal program, a move that has angered children's health advocates.

Georgetown's Center for Children and Families calculates that the number of medically uninsured California children dropped from 890,998 in 2009 to 744,797 in 2011 and the proportion from 9.5 percent of the state's children to 8 percent, just slightly above the national rate of 7.5 percent.

The 2011 rates ranged from a high of 16.2 percent in Nevada to a low of 1.7 percent in Massachusetts, the latter reflecting the universal health insurance program instituted by the state's former governor, Mitt Romney, now the Republican candidate for president. California's 8 percent rate was the 35th highest among the states.

Californians paid the nation's fourth highest state and local taxes in 2010, as a percentage of personal income, and 13th highest on a per-capita basis, according to an annual compilation by the Washington-based Tax Foundation.

The tax burden snapshot reflected, in part, temporary income and sales taxes that then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger had enacted in 2009.

Those taxes have since expired, due to rejection by voters, but Gov. Jerry Brown is sponsoring a new income and sales tax measure, Proposition 30, on the Nov. 6 ballot that would raise about $6 billion a year, or roughly 0.37 percent of personal income.

The Tax Foundation pegs Californians' state-local tax burden in 2010 at 11.2 percent of personal income, more than a percentage point higher than the national average of 9.9 percent and topped only by No. 1 New York at 12.8 percent, New Jersey's 12.4 percent and Connecticut's 12.3 percent. Alaskans had the lowest burden of 7 percent, largely reflecting the state's massive oil extraction revenues.

It was slightly higher than the 11 percent calculated for California by the Tax Foundation for 2009. Since 1977, the state's lowest level was 10.2 percent in 1985.

In per capita terms, Californians paid an average of $4,934 in state and local taxes in 2010, based on an average per capita personal income of $43,919, 13th highest. Connecticut topped the states at $6,984 per capita.

California is home to nearly a third of the nation's 11.6 million Asian immigrants, according to a new Census Bureau report, and the Los Angeles metropolitan area has the nation's largest urban concentration.

California's 3.7 million Asian-born immigrants are 10 percent of the state's population and are three times as numerous as No. 2 New York's 1.2 million. The Philippines are California's largest source of Asian immigrants, with nearly 900,000 from that nation counted by the Census Bureau, but the state also has the nation's largest populations of immigrants from China, India, Vietnam and Korea.

The Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana metropolitan region is home to 1.6 million Asian immigrants, according to an addendum to the main report, slightly larger than the New York metropolitan area's Asian immigrant population.

The San Francisco-Oakland area ranks third in the nation with 707,000, while the San Jose area is fifth at 420,000 and San Diego is 10th at 269,000.

The report covers only those born in Asia, not their American-born offspring and descendents. The overall Asian population of California is estimated at more than 5 million.

The economies of 36 states, including California, "showed signs of worsening" during the second quarter of this year, according to the Bloomberg Economic Evaluation of States.

Ironically, the on-line article by the international economic reporting organization was published just as California was hit with two major corporate pullbacks.

Comcast announced that it was shutting down its California call centers and Campbell Soups said it was closing its Sacramento plant.

Initially, Comcast cited the state's hostile business climate, but after politicians, including Gov. Jerry Brown, protested, the firm changed its stance. Brown has been touting employment gains and other positive economic news of late, and bad news is widely seen as a negative factor for the multi-billion-dollar tax increase, Proposition 30, that Brown and other Democratic politicians are hoping voters will endorse in November.

Recent polls, including one released Friday by the University of Southern California and the Los Angeles Times, indicate that the measure is favored by just over 50 percent of voters now and would be vulnerable to an opposition campaign.

The Bloomberg survey, dubbed BEES, found that 10 states, mostly those with thriving energy sectors, showed economic improvement during the second quarter while 36 stumbled. The first quarter survey had found 35 states improving.

San Francisco is the nation's most livable city, according to an annual evaluation of urban ambiance by Bloomberg/Businessweek, citing its gastronomical, cultural and economic amenities.

"As long as chilly weather, walking uphill, and really expensive real estate don't turn you off, San Francsco has no shortage of positive qualities," the article declares.

"Not everything is golden in San Francisco, of course," the economic website acknowledges, noting that an "influx of young techies has driven up living costs" and as the city "has grown wealthier, it has lost some of its legendary grit" and has "one of the largest U.S. populations of homeless people."

Seattle was ranked second in livability. San Diego came in ninth and Los Angeles 50th.

Does the compact San Francisco Bay Area have a denser population than the sprawling Los Angeles Basin?

Most would say San Francisco does, but it turns out, according to a new Census Bureau statistical report, that it depends on how the information from the 2010 census is viewed.

The Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana region is higher at 2,646 persons per square mile in terms of what the Census Bureau calls "overall population density." That's the second highest rate in the nation, just slightly less dense than No. 1 New York City and its environs, with the San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont region third at 1,754 per square mile.

But when the Census Bureau massages the data a different way to produce "population-weighted density," the San Francisco Bay Area, at 12,144 per square mile, is No. 2 behind New York with the Los Angeles area third at 12,113.

If nothing else, however, the lengthy report confirms that California is simultaneously the nation's most urbanized state and its most prolific agricultural producer, two "firsts" that might seem mutually exclusive.

The report also contains these other nuggets of data pertaining to California:

California's state and local governments spent $434 billion in 2010, according to a new Census Bureau report, the equivalent of more than 20 percent of the state's economic output.

California's 2010 expenditures were $3.3 billion -- less than 1 percent -- higher than in 2009.

Three-fourths of California's 2010 spending, or $326.4 billion, was raised inside the state -- mostly from income, sales and property taxes but also including fees and utility sales -- while virtually all of the other 25 percent came from the federal government, a substantially higher percentage than in most other states. Nationally, just 19.7 percent of state and local revenues came from the federal government.

The report also revealed that education accounted for $102.5 billion, or 23.6 percent, of California's 2010 spending, roughly two-thirds of which was for the state's six million K-12 students and the other third for higher education. Nationally, state and local governments devoted 27.6 percent of their spending to education.

Welfare services took another $52.2 billion, or 12 percent, of California's spending in 2010, nearly three percentage points lower than the national average.

Despite California's national reputation as a low property tax state, thanks to its landmark property tax limit, Proposition 13, its level of property tax revenues is only slightly lower than the national average. California's $53.9 billion in property tax revenues to local governments and schools in 2010 represented 16.5 percent of total state-local revenues while nationally, the average was 17.7 percent.

Relative property tax burdens in other states ranged from a high of 33.6 percent of revenues in New Hampshire to a low of 7.3 percent in New Mexico.

To those who chart state government finances, tax revenues during the second quarter of each year loom large because income taxes are the largest source of income and they peak as the annual tax return deadline arrives in April.

Just as fourth quarter holiday gift sales can make or break retailers' year, second quarter tax collections tell state budget writers whether will enjoy surpluses or face budget deficits. And a new Census Bureau report shows how California's second quarter revenues have gone up and down in the last decade.

California's median household income of $53,367 was only slightly higher than the national median last year while its poverty rate and its medically uninsured population were among the nation's highest, according to a new Census Bureau report.

The national median income in inflation-adjusted dollars was $50,054, a 1.5 percent decline from 2010. Fourteen other states topped California in median household income last year, with Maryland the highest at $68,876 and South Carolina the lowest at $40,084.

California ranks 47th in the nation in its courts' "fairness and reasonableness" regarding business lawsuits, according to a poll conducted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Institute for Legal Reform.

Not only is the state's legal climate as a whole ranked fourth worst in the nation, just ahead of Mississippi, Louisiana and West Virginia, but Los Angeles County has the second worst lawsuit climate among local jurisdictions and San Francisco fourth worst..Delaware, the legal home of many major corporations, ranks No. 1 in business legal climate.

The rankings are based on a survey of corporate general counsels and senior attorneys, conducted by Harris Interactive.

The annual survey has been conducted for the past decade, and California's standing has declined during that period. The survey report called California courts "havens for class action lawsuits because judges certify cases for trial that wouldn't be certified in most other parts of the country." It noted that the largest asbestos verdict in the nation this year - $48 million for one plaintiff - came in a Los Angeles jury trial.

.

California had the nation's ninth highest rate of medically uninsured residents in 2010, according to a new Census Bureau report.

The report -- which covers those under 65 years old, the age at which Medicare kicks in -- found that 6.7 million of the state's 32.5 million under-65 residents lacked medical insurance, for a rate of 20.7 percent.

Texas had the nation's highest rate of 26.3 percent, while Massachusetts, at 5.2 percent, was the lowest, thanks largely to a program that its former governor, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, championed. Most of the states with rates higher than California's were in the South, but they include adjacent Nevada at 25.1 percent.

Within California, the most populous county, Los Angeles, also had the highest medically uninsured rate, 25.9, virtually identical to Texas' rate. The state's lowest rate, 11.8 percent, was in Marin County, which also has the state's highest personal incomes.

California's state government had 9.3 percent more employees in 2011 than it did 10 years earlier - closely tracking overall population growth - but its payroll costs had jumped by 42.4 percent in non-inflation-adjusted dollars, according to a new Census Bureau report.

That data are gleaned from the bureau's annual report on state government employment, which also reveals wide swings in the makeup of the state's workforce, which includes all agencies, regardless of funding source, and institutions of higher education.

In 2001, the state had the "full-time equivalent" of 372,678 employees and was paying them $1.7 billion a month. By 2011, the FTE's, as they are dubbed, had increased to 407,321 and payroll costs to $2.4 million billion.

Over the 10-year span, which included two major recessions separated by a brief period of economic expansion during the housing boom, FTE's in higher education, the largest single component of the state workforce, increased by 23 percent from 128,665 to 158,229, and prison payrolls, the second largest, jumped by a nearly identical amount -- from 48,896 to 60,007. Offsetting declines occurred in transportation agencies and state hospitals.

State employment in 2011 was also slightly lower than in 2010, but the decline was less than the 1.4 percent nationwide drop in state payrolls. Year-to-year declines in other states ranged as high as 7 percent in Arizona while a few states recorded employment increases, topped by 13.3 percent in Arkansas.

Editor's note--Corrected at 12:55 p.m. Aug. 23, 2012 to reflect monthly, not annual, payroll cost. Updated 1:50 p.m. Aug. 24, 2012 to clarify that the 10-year data is not adjusted for inflation.

California may have high taxes and high unemployment, but its residents have one of the nation's lower rates of obesity, according to a new report from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

While the agency says more than a third of American adults are obese, it's just 23.8 percent in California. Other states range from a high of 34.9 percent in Mississippi to 20.7 percent in Colorado.

The report also found that obesity rates are much higher than average among African Americans- nearly 50 percent - and Latinos and tend to be higher among low-income adults.

California has nearly 3 million businesses so small that they have no employees, according to a new compilation by the Census Bureau.

The report, based on 2009 income tax data from the Internal Revenue Service, found 2.7 million "nonemployer" businesses in the state, 12 percent of the nation's total, right in line with California's proportion of the U.S. population. The largest single category of such businesses - 480,000 - is "professional, scientific and technical services" and the smallest is "utilities" at 1,314.

When Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney made a joke that compared California to Greece the other day, the state's Democratic politicians reacted with anger, rather than laughter.

"Entrepreneurs and business people around the world and here at home think that at some point America is going to become like Greece or like Spain or Italy, or like California -- just kidding about that one, in some ways," Romney said during a campaign stop in Iowa.

"Romney knows just as little about the Golden State as he does about the rest of the world," Gov. Jerry Brown's spokesman, Gil Duran, snapped back.

The Atlantic magazine took the dustup seriously enough to generate five charts comparing California with Greece and other troubled European countries. Correspondent Jordan Weissmann concluded, "If anything, Greece, Spain and Italy would love to be in as good shape as California right now."

But at least one of those charts -- dealing with debt -- appears to show California in a better light than it deserves.

California's state-managed public employee retirement systems appear to have outpaced those of other states in 2011 investment earnings, according to a new Census Bureau report.

The annual statistical report reveals that California pension funds' $433.3 billion in assets were 17 percent of all state-managed retirement systems' assets, but that California's investment earnings of $82.4 billion were 20 percent of all earnings.

The three largest California funds are the California Public Employees Retirement System, the California Teachers Retirement System and the University of California's pension system.

The California funds received $19.1 billion in contributions - $13 billion from government employers and $6.1 billion from employees - last year, according to the report. They served 1.9 million active and inactive members, and paid out $27.9 billion in benefits and other payments to 847,135 retirees.

California has the nation's 12th highest average sales tax rate, 8.13 percent, according to a new compilation by the Washington, D.C.-based Tax Foundation.

While four states -- Oregon, Montana, New Hampshire and Delaware -- levy no sales taxes, other states' average rates range to as high as 9.43 percent in Tennessee.

California's basic state sales tax rate is 6.25 percent, and there's another 1 percent levied statewide for local governments. But that 7.25 percent statewide rate swells to near 10 percent in some jurisdictions due to local surtaxes for transportation and other services.

Gov. Jerry Brown's proposed tax increase measure, Proposition 30, would temporarily add a quarter-percent to the state's rate. Several city and county governments have also placed local sales tax hikes on the November ballot.

Editor's note, 4:27 p.m.: This post has been updated to correct the characterization of Proposition 30.

California's unemployment rate - currently 10.7 percent - has been the nation's third highest for months but ranks second worst in a broader measure of employment distress by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

It's called "U-6" and it includes not only unemployment, but "marginally attached workers," and those employed only part-time for economic reasons.

By that measure, 20.3 percent of California's workforce was distressed from the third quarter of 2011 through the second quarter of 2012, the new BLS report says. And that was second only to neighboring Nevada's 22.1 percent.

California is also tied for the top spot with Rhode Island in the "U-4" category - unemployed workers plus discouraged workers - at 11.8 percent.

The "realignment" of California's criminal justice system, implemented in response to a Supreme Court decree to reduce overcrowding in state prisons, has shifted 38,000 felons from the state to local authorities so far, according to an initial study.

The study, conducted by the Chief Probation Officers of California with a foundation grant, says that 23,000 prison inmates have been released into supervision by local probation officers, rather than by state parole agents, and an additional 15,000 felons have been diverted into local jails and probation rather than being sent to state prison.

The underlying concept of the program is to reduce the number of felons deemed to have little propensity for violent crime in the state prison system. So far, the study says, the prison population, once over 160,000, has dropped to under 140,000.

As it slowly recovers from its worst recession since the Great Depression, where does California's economy fit into the global marketplace?

A massive new economic forecast from the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. confirms that were California a nation, it would place No. 9 among the globe's economies, just behind No. 8 Italy and just ahead of Russia.

The data-filled report, to be unveiled today in Los Angeles, pegs California's economy at just under $2 trillion a year (2011 numbers) and implies that it could move up or down in the rankings, depending on what happens to the volatile European economy. The state once ranked as high as sixth.

California's economy saw an inflation-adjusted 2 percent growth from 2010 to 2011, while Italy's grew at just one-fifth of that rate. Among the economies larger than California's, only China, Germany and Brazil, which leaped into sixth place, had higher rates of growth than the state. But Russia's economy grew twice as fast as California's from 2010 to 2011, so it could push California down to 10th place.

The report says that Los Angeles and four surrounding Southern California counties would rank 16th among the world's economies at over $900 billion a year, just behind South Korea. Los Angeles County by itself, at $557.5 billion, would be 21st, lodged between No. 20 Saudi Arabia and Sweden.

Overall, the forecast is for California to recover from recession "slowly but steadily," albeit with double-digit unemployment rates for at least another year.

One might assume that California, the cradle of the global technology revolution, would have the highest penetration of Internet access of any state.

But that assumption would be very wrong, according to data in a new Census Bureau report.

In fact, the proportion of Californians over the age of 3 living in homes with Internet access, 78.2 percent, is only fractionally higher than the national average of 75.9 percent, and 21 states have higher rates, the Census Bureau study, based on its periodic national surveys, shows.

New Hampshire tops the list at 86.2 percent, and other New England states are also high. New Mexico is at the bottom at 64.1 percent. The study breaks down Internet access and usage not only by state but by ethnicity, gender, age and other factors.

California is home to more military veterans than any other state - about 2 million - but it doesn't have a particularly high proportion of veterans, according to a new Census Bureau "infographic."

The state has about 12 percent of the nation's population but only about 9 percent of its veterans, the graphic display of data indicates. Nor do any California cities emerge as having relatively high proportions of veterans in their population.

Killeen, TX, with 28.9 percent of its population as veterans, is tops on that list. It's home to Fort Hood, one of the Army's largest installations. Overall, Texas and Florida have the nation's second largest populations of veterans, 1.6 million each.

California has the worst credit rating of any state now and the nation's worst credit rating record over the past 11 years, according to a new nationwide compilation by the Pew Center on the States.

The compilation is based on Standard and Poor's credit ratings and covers every year since 2001. Thirteen states sit atop the Pew chart with AAA credit ratings while California is alone at the bottom at A-minus and is the only state to dip to the worst possible rating, BBB, during the 11-year period.

That happened in 2003, during a state budget crisis so severe that then-Gov. Gray Davis was recalled. The highest rating California achieved during the period, A-plus, came in 2006.

"The states with the lowest grades typically have trouble keeping their spending in line with their tax revenues." Pew's Stephen C. Fehr writes in an explanation of the research. That observation applies to California, which has struggled to balance its budget for the past decade and whose current budget assumes that voters will approve sales and income tax increases in November.

Credit ratings affect the interest that states and other public entities must pay on their bonds. California politicians have tended to downplay their significance, however, citing a provision of the state constitution that gives high priority to bond service, the state's unblemished record of making bond payments, and the apparent willingness of lenders to buy the state's debt offerings, albeit at somewhat higher interest rates than those paid by other states.

Four states - Missouri, North Carolina, Virginia and Utah - have held AAA credit ratings for 46 years or more, Pew noted.

More than three-quarters of California's public school students who entered the 9th grade in 2007 were awarded diplomas four years later, the state Department of Education reported today.

The 76.3 percent graduation rate in 2011 was up 1.5 percentage points from the previous year, and gains among Latino, African American and "English learner" students were somewhat higher, state schools Superintendent Tom Torlakson said.

"Every graduate represents a success story in one of the most effective job and anti-poverty programs ever conceived, our public schools," Torlakson said in a statement. "These numbers are a testament to the hard work of teachers and administrators, of parents and, most of all, of the students themselves. While they are a great illustration of all that is going right in California schools, they should also remind us that schools need our support to continue to improve so that every student graduates prepared for college, a career, and to contribute to our state's future."

Torlakson said that the remaining 23.7 percent of 2007's 9th graders who did not graduate in 2011 were not all dropouts. Using the state's new computerized tracking system, the Department of Education calculated that 14.4 percent were dropouts and 9.3 percent were either still enrolled in school, were special education students or had passed a high school equivalency examination.

Asian-American students had the state's highest graduation rate at 89.7 percent while blacks had the lowest at 62.9 percent. Filipinos, at 89 percent, were second highest, followed by non-Latino whites at 85.5 percent, Pacific Islanders at 74.3 percent, Latinos at 70.4 percent, and American Indians at 68 percent.

The new data are broken down not only by ethnicity, but by grade, county, school district and individual school.

New ammunition emerged Tuesday for a behind-the-scenes political battle shaping up over California's multibillion-dollar system of compensating workers for job-related injuries and illnesses.

The Workers' Compensation Insurance Rating Bureau reported that the insurers who provide coverage for most employers collected $10.4 billion in premiums in 2011, but paid out $7.7 billion in support benefits and medical care, and had expenses of $5 billion and thus lost about $2.3 billion.

It fuels the nascent campaign of insurers to increase premiums and suggests that they may form an alliance with unions, medical providers and attorneys for injured workers to overhaul the workers' compensation reforms enacted eight years ago. That would create conflict with employers, who enjoyed sharp premium reductions after the reforms were enacted.

Historically, the contending factions have formed alliances and fought pitched battles in the Legislature about once a decade. Lobbyists are anticipating that a new outbreak of political hostilities is coalescing.

The new report said that losses on workers' compensation coverage were greater than those experienced in 2010.

Insurers, the report said, paid out $4.4 million for medical care of disabled workers and another $3 million in direct support benefits to workers. The report, however, does not include data from large private and public employers who typically self-insure for job injuries rather than purchase insurance.

The sudden, deep and lasting effects of California's great recession are revealed in a detailed bloc of business data released Tuesday by the U.S. Census Bureau.

In 2006, at the height of the state's housing boom, California had 13.8 million paid employees of 878,128 businesses and they were earning $633.8 billion a year, according to the Census Bureau report.

But just four years later, in 2010, employers had declined to 849,875 and their work forces had dropped to 12.5 million, although total compensation had risen slightly to $635.6 billion.

The voluminous report for 2010 and earlier years covers every state, every county, every ZIP code and dozens of specific types of businesses, but does not include data on government employment. The Census Bureau issues a separate annual report on state and local governments' spending and roughly two million employees.

Spending by California's state government increased by 42 percent between 2000 and 2010 on a per-capita, inflation-adjusted basis, the nation's 16th highest rate of spending growth, according to a new data compilation by the Tax Foundation.

Oklahoma topped the states with a 74 percent increase in per-capita spending during the decade, the Washington-based Tax Foundation concluded, expressing its findings via a map on its website. Alaska was lowest at 17 percent.

California's 42 percent growth was identical to that of neighboring Nevada and lower than Arizona's 46 percent, but markedly higher than Oregon's 26 percent, one of the nation's lowest. It was also a bit higher than Texas' 37 percent and Florida's 36 percent but similar to New York's 41 percent.

Is this serendipitous or what?

Just as two rival tax measures, both purporting to help struggling schools, qualified for the state's November ballot, the Census Bureau today released its annual report on school finance, revealing that California ranks 35th in per-pupil spending, more than $1,200 per year under the national average.

Furthermore, the Census Bureau report said, California ranks even lower - 42nd - in school spending vis-à-vis personal income.

The report provides new ammunition for Gov. Jerry Brown and civil rights attorney Molly Munger as they peddle their rival tax measures to voters. Brown says his sales and income tax boost would shield schools from deep spending cuts and increase it sharply over time. Munger's broader income tax measure would raise per-pupil spending for the state's 6 million public school students by more than $1,500 a year, roughly to the national average.

The Census Bureau report, covering the 2009-10 fiscal year, differs from the measures of per-pupil spending that are used in California's ceaseless political debates over the issue. The report includes all sources of income, including federal funds, whereas in state budget scoring, only state and local funds are counted and about $4 billion in state payments on school construction bonds and teachers' pensions are excluded.

Thus, the Census Bureau tagged California's $58.9 billion in 2009-10 "current spending" at $9,375 per pupil, which was $1,240 less than the national average of $10,675 and placed it 35th . The District of Columbia was highest at $18,667, followed by New York, Wyoming, New Jersey and Connecticut. Utah was lowest at $6,064.

Total California spending, including $7.2 billion in capital outlay and ancillary costs, was pegged at $68.1 billion.

In terms of revenue from all sources, California's $10,581 per pupil was 40th in the nation. Its revenue, some $65 billion, was calculated at 4.25 percent of personal income, while its spending, 3.77 percent of personal income, was 42nd. In relation to personal income, Alaska was tops in both revenue and spending.

The state government supplied $34.2 billion of school revenues in 2009-10, or 52.6 percent, which was higher than the national average of 43.5 percent. The federal government's 15 percent was also higher than the national average of 12.5 percent, while local source revenues at 32.5 percent were below the national average of 44 percent, reflecting Proposition 13's limits on local property taxes.

The report also provided details on how states divvied up school spending among different categories. Relatively speaking, the only two categories in which California rose above national per-pupil averages were in support staff and school administration.

California's recession-battered economy is improving but at a "slower than desired pace," says a new overview by Beacon Economics, a private firm that advises both private and public clients, including the State Controller's Office.

"California's economy is not headed for a double dip and will continue to grow although reaching the state's pre-recession peaks on some indicators is still several years away," the Beacon report says, adding that technology, agriculture, travel and business services seem to be leading the recovery.

Beacon's forecast, to be presented today at an economic conference in Los Angeles, closely parallels the economic assumptions of Gov. Jerry Brown's latest state budget. It sees a 1.5 percent increase in non-farm employment this year, followed by a 1.9 percent gain in 2013.

"California is clearly past the bottom it hit during the recession in terms of consumer spending, the residential real estate market, state GDP, and international trade," says Beacon economic researcher Jordan Levine, said in a statement.

"And although Los Angeles County is lagging the state, it also didn't fall as far as surrounding communities during the recession," Levine continued. "The biggest worry we have for Los Angeles is the fact that manufacturing -- traditionally an important source of growth in the region -- does not seem to be experiencing the same renaissance being seen in much of the rest of the nation."

California's depressed construction industry generated just 32,000 new housing units between 2010 and 2011, a new Census Bureau report says, a fraction of the 200,000-plus units that California once produced each year.

The 32,000-unit increase, from slightly under 13.7 million units to slightly over 13.7 million, was less than a quarter of one-percent, even though the state's population was growing at least twice as fast. Or to put it another way, with about 12 percent of the nation's population, California had just 6 percent of the nation's year-to-year housing growth.

Traditionally, housing construction has been a major factor in recovery from recession, but it hasn't been happening in California, in part because the recession itself was rooted in the collapse of the housing industry, rather than some other sector of the economy.

Overall, the nation added nearly 500,000 housing units during the one-year period, according to the Census Bureau report, which included a list of the nation's 100 fastest growing counties, in terms of housing units. No California county is on that list, which is dominated by communities in the South and Southwest and topped by Long County, GA, with a 6.3 percent one-year gain.

A number of Texas counties are on the list. Texas had a one-year gain of 97,000 units, almost exactly three times as many as California's increase.

California election officials estimate that 23.7 million Californians could potentially vote - i.e. they are citizens over the age of 18 -- and know that 17.2 million of them are registered to vote.

They're still counting votes from last week's election, but it appears that 5.4 million ballots were cast in person or by mail. That was just 31.6 percent of registered voters and 23 percent of potential voters, a record-low turnout for a presidential primary.

Turnout will certainly be higher for the November presidential election, but how high? Four years ago, there were 13.7 million votes cast in California, nearly 80 percent of those registered and nearly 60 percent of those eligible.

Overall voter turnout in California is among the lowest of any state, but it could be much higher, the Washington-based Center for American Progress says in a new report, if more of the state's fast-growing Latino population would register and vote.

The organization says that there are 4.4 million potential voters among Latinos who are either age-eligible citizens who not registered (2 million) or who are eligible to become citizens (2.4 million), by far the largest numbers of potential voters in any state.

"The numbers don't lie," Angela Kelley, the organization's vice president for immigration policy, said in a statement. "U.S.-born Latinos coming of age as voters have a close connection to their family and their communities' immigrant roots. Add to that the immigrants themselves who are naturalizing and you've got a powerful lens through which candidates from both parties are being examined. If politicians either ignore or demonize immigrants, they can say 'adios' to ever getting a second look by these voters."

A recent Census Bureau report indicated that Latinos are approaching 40 percent of California's population and will become its largest ethic group within a few years.

Latinos will become California's largest ethnic group very soon, a new Census Bureau report indicates.

The bureau issued its first post-2010 census estimates of population growth, birth rates, age cohorts, and racial and ethnic characteristics.

It pegs California's Latino population (it uses the term "Hispanic") at 14.4 million, 38.2 percent of the state's 37.7 million residents, while the non-Hispanic white population is just under 15 million or 39.7 percent, dropping below the 40 percent mark for the first time.

More than a quarter of Californians were born in another country, and those 10-plus million immigrant residents of the state also represent more than a quarter of the nation's foreign-born population, a new Census Bureau report reveals.

California's 25.4 percent of the nation's 40 million foreign-born residents is, by far, the largest concentration of any state, both numerically and proportionately. New York is a distant second with 10.8 percent, followed by Texas.

Nationally, 44 percent of the foreign born have become citizens. The report does not break citizenship down by state, but California's level of citizenship may be lower since Mexico is the state's major source of immigration and nationally, just 22.9 percent of Mexican-born immigrants are citizens.

Latinos, both immigrants and native-born, are now nearly 40 percent of California's population and are expected to become the state's largest ethnic group within a few years as the white population continues to decline. One factor, as the Census Bureau report indicates, is that immigrants have much higher birth rates than native-born Americans, in part because they tend to be younger and in part because they come from cultures that traditionally have high birth rates.

Hawaii, not surprisingly, is home to more Pacific Islanders than any other state, but California isn't too far behind, a new Census Bureau statistical study has determined.

In fact, the Census Bureau says, more than half of the nation's 1.2 million native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders live in either Hawaii or California. And it's a fast-growing population, up 40.1 percent from 2000 to 2010.

Hawaii was home to 355,816 Pacific Islanders, the 2010 census found, while 286,145 lived in California, a 29.2 percent increase from 2000. The third largest concentration was in Washington state (70,322) while the smallest was in Vermont (465), although that was a 51 percent increase.

California saw modest population growth last year, and the biggest boomtowns by percentage were two prison cities, according to a new release from the state Department of Finance.

The state added 250,617 residents for a total of 37,678,563, a jump of 0.67 percent.

According to Finance statistics, some of the most active regions had to do with prisoner counts. The fastest growing city was Calipatria in Imperial County, which grew 4.2 percent after adding 286 inmates at Calipatria State Prison along with some regular household growth. The second fastest growing city? California City in Kern County at 3.7 percent after its federal prison added 392 inmates.

But not all was bustling for state prison towns. Thanks to Gov. Jerry Brown's plan to shift lower-level inmates to county jails, some of the biggest population declines were in places like Delano (-2.1 percent), Coalinga (-6.6 percent) and Chowchilla (-5.1 percent).

Locally, Winters in Yolo County (pop. 6,839) ranked third in growth rate at 3.5 percent.

Sacramento is the state's sixth largest city with 470,956 residents, a 0.3 percent increase above last year. Within the top 10, No. 3 San Jose (pop. 971,372) and No. 5 Fresno (505,009) grew fastest at 1.5 percent each.

The state's growth rate has slowed since the early part of last decade, when annual population increases topped 1 percent. Department of Finance assistant chief demographer John Malson said the state is seeing a decline in natural births, as well as a net outmigration to other states.

Malson said international migration to California is still positive, but owing largely to immigrants from Asia. Malson pointed to recent data showing that migration from Mexico to California may have already reversed due to economic problems here.

Finance bases its May report largely on housing activity, while taking into account previously reported data related to births and migration, Malson said.

Post updated at 11:35 a.m. with prison-related population declines.

California's state and local government pension funds saw a 12.4 percent increase in their assets during 2010, according to a new Census Bureau report, markedly higher than the national pension fund increase.

The increase, from $458.8 billion in 2009 to $516.1 billion in 2010, marked a return to positive growth after pension funds in California and elsewhere were battered by investment losses during the national recession.

Nationally, state and local pension funds gained 10.6 percent in value during the year, rising to $2.7 trillion. California, with about 12 percent of the nation's population, holds nearly 20 percent of public pension assets. The state's pension funds, including the California Public Employees Retirement System, hold $373.7 billion in assets while local funds account for the remaining $142.3 billion.

The Census Bureau report also reveals that during the 2010 fiscal year, California's pension funds earned $63.1 billion on their investments and received another $23 billion in contributions from employees and government agencies while paying out $35.2 billion, including $33.1 billion in benefits.

Virtually all state and local pension funds have unfunded liabilities for future pension commitments, but the size of these shortfalls are in dispute since estimates depend on assumptions of future earnings.

Pension funds generally assume future earnings ("discount rate") in the 7-plus percent range but critics say that's unrealistically high. Lowering the assumption would raise the unfunded liability and increase pressure for more contributions from governments and their employees.

In 2000, the federal government spent $176 billion in California, but by 2010, those expenditures totaled $333.8 billion.

That's just one of thousands of info-bits available in the newest Census Bureau data dump, which makes the numbers available not only for each state, but every county within each state, covering topics that range from agricultural activity to crime and personal incomes.

The new statistical release is drawn largely from the surveys that the Census Bureau conducts between the decennial censues, plus other government data banks. Federal spending is new to the release.

California voters are inclined to support Gov. Jerry Brown's sales and income tax increase, but by a less than overwhelming margin, a new poll by the Public Policy Institute of California has found.

The PPIC poll of likely voters found 54 percent in favor of Brown's tax measure, for which signatures are now being gathered, and 39 percent opposed. The poll also indicated that a rival measure sponsored by civil rights attorney Molly Munger and the state PTA to raise income taxes on most taxpayers for schools faces an uphill struggle.

Brown has attempted to persuade Munger to drop her initiative, but she's poured millions of dollars into signature-gathering and is likely to turn in signatures soon.

Brown has portrayed his measure as one that would save schools from massive cuts, building on an assumption -- confirmed by the PPIC poll -- that K-12 education is the most popular area of the state budget. But Munger contends that Brown's measure would actually give schools little or no new money.

Overall, the poll found, voters are more than willing to tax high-income Californians, as Brown's measure would do. The poll didn't ask about Munger's plan specifically, but showed nearly three-fifths of voters opposed to raising income taxes on most taxpayers for schools, which her measure would do. They also oppose the sales tax component of Brown's proposal, a quarter-cent increase. That opposition drags down overall support for the governor's approach.

The PPIC poll also found that Brown's approval rating among all adults is 43 percent and among likely voters 47 percent, but support for his handling of public education - -the broad subject of PPIC's polling -- drew approval at just half of those levels. In fact just 23 percent of likely voters like his education policies.

However, Brown is doing much better than the Legislature, which gained the approval of just 15 percent of likely voters in the PPIC poll.

California has a global reputation for an anything-goes lifestyle - fueled, perhaps, by the lavishly publicized antics of Hollywood's glitterati.

A new Census Bureau report indicates, however, that Ozzie and Harriet may be more accurate exemplars of Californians' lifestyles than the Kardashians.

The report analyzes the composition of American households from 2010 census data, finding - not surprisingly - a trend toward more nontraditional living arrangements.

Those would include more singles, more single-parent households and more interracial and interethnic couples - the latter growing by 28 percent between 2000 and 2010.

The data show, however, that 49.4 percent of California households are old-fashioned husband-and-wife types, and that's one percentage point higher than the national average of 48.4 percent. And those California couples are more likely than those in other states to have children at home.

California's population will grow much more slowly than current official projections as immigration and birth rates decline and the state's residents will grow markedly older, according to a massive new study by University of Southern California demographers released today.

The state Department of Finance currently projects that California will add roughly 5 million persons each decade to its population through 2050, but those numbers are five years old and the department is now upgrading its calculations in response to the 2010 census.

Meanwhile, researchers at USC's Sol Price School of Public Policy project that the state will add only about 3.5 million per decade as growth shrinks to under 1 percent per year. If that's true, it would mean about 5 million fewer Californians in 2050 than previously thought.

The USC report, available here, says it will mean "a new era of aging" as baby boomers and then their children retire. The state's 65-plus population is expected to rise from 11.4 percent in 2010 to 18.6 percent by 2030.

The California Taxpayers Association handed ammunition Monday to opponents of this year's proposed tax increases - a report that outlines $7.3 billion in operational savings and non-tax "revenue enhancements" in state and local governments.

That's roughly 5 percent of annual state and local tax collections and approaches the revenue estimates for Gov. Jerry Brown's sales and income tax boost and a rival income tax increase sponsored by wealthy attorney Molly Munger. Brown's measure would address the state's budget deficit while Munger's would boost spending on schools.

"This report makes tangible, pragmatic recommendations that will yield long-term savings to address our current fiscal constraints and get state and local governments back on solid financial footing," CalTax president Teresa Casazza said in a statement that accompanied the report's release.

CalTax is a Sacramento-based organization, supported mostly by business groups, that tracks state and local government tax and budget matters and generally opposes tax increases. Its report lists $4.01 billion in permanent savings items, another $104 million in one-time savings and $3.19 billion in revenue increases.

None of the individual proposals involves big money, as the Capitol defines it; they are a grab bag of operational changes, such as reducing lease costs and privatization of some public services, many of which have kicked around the Capitol for years, mostly as Republican suggestions.

The "revenue enhancements" are fewer and larger, such as cleaning up delinquent tax accounts that, CalTax says, could produce $2.3 billion in one-time revenue,

If you want even more information about California from the 2010 census than was released last year, the Census Bureau is providing it.

Beginning today, the bureau is releasing information about as many as 331 racial and ethnic groups down to the census tract level for California and four other states.

The new data dump will cover such topics as age, family relationships and home ownership not only by racial or ethnic group but by counties, communities, ZIP codes and congressional districts, as well as census tracts.

The Census Bureau goofed when it declared that California had the nation's third fastest rate of state revenue growth during the 2010-11 fiscal year, it said Tuesday.

The Census Bureau issued a revised report on state tax collections with a note that the change was "due to a calculation error that caused California's sales tax to be overstated by $6.4 billion. New Mexico replaced California as one of the four states with the largest percentage tax increase."

The revised report places California's $116.7 billion was sixth highest in the nation.The corrected April 12 Capitol Alert item on the earlier Census Bureau report can be found here.

Although its economy was stagnant and its state budget was imbalanced, California saw one of the nation's sharpest increases in state tax revenues during the 2010-11 fiscal year, according to a new Census Bureau report.

California's 11.3 percent increase to $116.7 billion over the previous fiscal year was the sixth highest jump among the states. North Dakota (44.5 percent) and Alaska (22.4 percent) -- topped the list, likely because of increases in oil prices,. Oil severance taxes accounted for nearly half of North Dakota's state revenues and more than three-quarters of Alaska's.

California's increase, meanwhile, appears to have come mostly from some temporary sales and income taxes increases that were enacted in 2009 but since have expired. Gov. Jerry Brown is now proposing to restore those revenues with a plan on the November ballot to raise the sales tax by a quarter cent and increase income taxes on those earning more than $250,000 a year.

The Census Bureau report covers all tax collections, regardless of source or destination, including vehicle and fuel taxes. Nearly half of the state's revenues -- $60.1 billion -- came from personal and corporate income taxes while sales taxes generated another $45.1 billion.

Editor's Note: This post has been updated to reflect corrected numbers for California provided by the U.S. Census Bureau. Updated 2:54 p.m., April 17, 2012.

Longtime California Coastal Commission Executive Director Peter Douglas has died. Douglas, 69, had battled lung and throat cancer in recent years.

Commission spokeswoman Sarah Christie said Douglas died Sunday evening at his sister's house in La Quinta outside of Palm Springs.

"He loved the desert as much as he loved the coast," she said.

Friends and colleagues remembered Douglas as a champion for preserving California's coastline.

"His vision and leadership over nearly half a century has shaped a coast that is accessible to all and whose beauty has been protected," California Natural Resources Secretary John Laird said in a statement. "Peter is an inspiration to me for the thoughtful work he has done protecting our coast, and the unrelenting commitment he showed to his work even in the final year of his life."

Assemblyman Jared Huffman D-San Rafael, praised Douglas as a "great friend and a hero to all of us who care about the environment "

"He was a unique combination of warrior and philosopher and he was green to the core," Huffman, who chairs the Assembly Committee on Water, Parks and Wildlife, said in a voicemail message.

Douglas, who was appointed to the commission director post in 1985, stepped down late last year. He had previously been on sick leave related to his lung cancer.

"It was a very difficult decision and it was disease driven," he told the Associated Press at the time of his retirement announcement. "I'm at peace with it - it's been an incredible 41 years. It's been a meaningful, purposeful legacy."

Douglas previously worked as the agency's Chief Deputy and as a legislative aide and committee consultant, where he helped draft and win passage of the ballot measure that created the commission.

Douglas is survived by his sister, Christina Douglas, a brother, Dieter Claren, two sons, Vanja and Sascha Douglas, his former wife Rotraut and two grandchildren, Charlie and Madelina. He asked that in lieu of flowers donations are made to a fund to support coastal work fellowships and a coastal conservation project created in his name.

Donations to the fellowship fund can be made through the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary Foundation at this link. The conservation project will be run by The Wildlands Conservancy.

RELATED POSTS:

Coastal Commission Director Peter Douglas to retire

PHOTO CREDIT: PHOTO CREDIT: A Wednesday March 30,2005 file photo showing Peter Douglas, executive director of the California Coastal Commission, at in his office in San Francisco. Jeff Chu, Associated Press.

Editor's note: This post was updated at 10:37 a.m. with statements from Laird and Huffman.

California Common Sense is out with a new report on spending in the 2010 elections, calculating that more than $358 million was spent on California campaigns, which set a new high.

Its findings include these:

"Among Assembly races, Democratic candidates outnumbered Republican candidates 94 to 58 and fundraising strongly favored Democratic candidates. Democrats received 93% of union donations, 80% of PIA donations, 75% of trade association donations, and 70% of corporate donations.

Among Senate races, Democratic candidates outnumbered Republican candidates 19 to 14 and out-raised Republicans by more than a 3:1 ratio. Democrats received 92% of all union donations, 88% of trade association donations, 80% of PIA donations, and 70% of corporate donations."

Researcher Sydney Evans, author of the report, said he was struck in retrospect by just how much Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman spent.

"She basically singlehandedly (accounted for) a third of the money in the entire election season," he said. To identify overall trends, therefore, he also made calculations that eliminated personal spending by candidates from the data.

"You see some of the real California politics at work when you take away some of the outliers," he said.

The group also produced plenty of customizable charts of the spending.

As California's economy boomed and then plummeted during the latter years of the previous decade, more people (372,331) left Los Angeles County for homes elsewhere than any other county in the nation.

However, as a new U.S. Census Bureau statistical study found, more people (212,882) also moved into Los Angeles County during the 2005-2009 period than to any other county.

The study covered only movements within the nation, not migration from and to other countries.

Los Angeles, San Diego, Orange, San Bernardino and Riverside counties in Southern California and Alameda County in Northern California ranked among the national leaders in both outflow and inflow of residents.

The Southern California counties also ranked highly in what the Census Bureau calls "origin flow" -- high numbers of destinations for those moving out. Los Angeles, for instance, was second only to Maricopa County, AZ, in the number (1,091) of other counties to which the ex-Angelenos moved, indicating they scattered widely around the nation.

San Diego was 4th on that list, San Bernardino 15th, Orange County 16th and Riverside 19th.

Conversely, while Maricopa County was also No. 1 in the variation of places from which its new residents came, called "destination flow," San Diego was 3rd highest, with its new residents coming from 795 other places in the country. Los Angeles was 4th at 741 previous homes.

Edited at 11:23 a.m. to reflect that study covered only movements within U.S.

California may lead the nation in agricultural production, but being a society of great contrasts, it's also the nation's most urbanized state, according to a new Census Bureau report.

Based on 2010 census data, the bureau calculated that 94.95 percent of the state's 37.3 million residents live in urban areas, albeit some that are quite small, with New Jersey second at 94.7 percent.

How small? How about Delano?

The nation's four most densely populated urban areas are in California, led by No. 1 Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, at nearly 7,000 persons per square mile. It's followed by San Francisco-Oakland at 6,266, San Jose at 5,820 and tiny Delano, in the San Joaquin Valley, at 5,483. Delano's population is denser even than the New York-Newark urban area at 5,319 per square mile.

The latter, however, remains the nation's largest urban area at 18.3 million, followed by Los Angeles, et al, at 12.2 million and Chicago at 8.6 million.

Overall, the Census Bureau says, the nation's urban population - defined by population density - increased by 12.1 percent from 2000 to 2010 while the overall growth was 9.7 percent.

The latest monthly employment report, released Friday, was not particularly good news for California, whose jobless rate was unchanged in February at 10.9 percent with more than two million workers unemployed.

That's a bit better that it was during the depths of the recession, but not much, the data from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistic indicate.

But what about those green jobs that Gov. Jerry Brown and other political figures frequently tout as California's economic salvation? Another report from the BLS indicates that they're a tiny part of the state's economy and would have to grow exponentially for a long time to become a major factor in reducing the state's high jobless rate.

The BLS counted 338,445 jobs related to green products and services in California in 2010, just 2.3 percent of the state's 14.4 million employees, slightly below the national proportion of 2.4 percent. And when it comes to non-governmental employment, it's even lower at 1.9 percent, also below the national average.

Vermont tops the states in green jobs at 4.4 percent while Florida is lowest at 1.3 percent. And for those fond of comparing California to Texas, the Lone Star State's proportion of green jobs is 2.3 percent, exactly the same as California's, but in private employment, Texas is slightly higher at 2 percent.

As the nation's economy recovered, albeit slowly, from recession last year, most states saw a surge of revenues - but not California, a new Census Bureau data dump indicates.

Nationally, state government revenues rose 3.5 percent to $183.8 billion during the fourth quarter of 2011 over the same period of 2010, the Census Bureau report said, but in California, they dropped 8.2 percent to $25.6 billion.

But there may be less import than those numbers would indicate. Temporary income and sales tax increases enacted by the Legislature in 2009 were still in effect in 2010, but had expired by late last year, which largely explains the sharp declines in revenues from those two sources.

Fourth-quarter California income tax revenues last year were $11.3 billion, the Census Bureau report said, down from $12.2 billion in 2010, while sales taxes dropped from $8.1 billion to $7.5 billion.

Gov. Jerry Brown tried to get the temporary taxes extended, but Republican legislators refused to support his plan. He's now pushing a November ballot measure that would raise sales taxes by a quarter-cent and sharply boost income taxes on high-income Californians. He says it would raise about $9 billion a year but the Legislature's budget analyst says that number is likely too high.

California has - by far - the nation's largest Asian-American population with nearly a third of the 17.3 million counted nationally in the 2010 census, according to a new Census Bureau report.

California's Asian-American population of 5.6 million is nearly 1.5 million higher than it was in the 2000 census and more than three times as large as New York's 1.6 million, the second largest population.

California's 2010 percentage of Asian-American residents, 14.9 percent of its population, is surpassed only by Hawaii's 57.4 percent. But growth in the state's Asian-American population, 33.7 percent between 2000 and 2010, was surpassed by that of many other states (Nevada's increase was 116 percent) and well below the national growth rate of 45.6 percent.

New York City has the numerical largest population of Asian-Americans of major urban areas at 1.1 million, but California cities - Los Angeles, San Jose, San Francisco and San Diego - hold the next four places while Fremont is 9th and Sacramento is 12th.

Gov. Jerry Brown's decision to shut down a state-run "transparency" website has caused California to slip in an annual ranking based on access to government spending data.

California, one of eight states to receive the ranking's second-lowest grade of "D minus," saw its score drop 13 points from last year, according to the California Public Interest Research Group's third annual report on government spending transparency.

The report cites that the shutdown of the "Reporting Transparency in Government" website is a major force behind the change, saying the move left "state spending information scattered across multiple agencies' websites." Brown's administration replaced the site, which was launched by former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, with links to other state websites where the same information could be found last year, along with a note saying the Democratic governor "is committed to keeping state government open and transparent while eliminating inefficiencies and unnecessary costs."

"As home to the tech industry, it's disappointing and embarrassing that California is not only lagging behind, but actively moving in the wrong direction when it comes to keeping pace with current online transparency standards," CALPIRG Legislative Director Pedro Morillas said in a statement.

Brown spokesman Evan Westrup defended the move, saying the website "was poorly maintained, underutilized and had not been regularly updated by the previous administration."

"All information previously posted on the site continues to be available to the public," he wrote in an email. "We remain committed to transparency, while also working to eliminate redundancies, make government more efficient and save taxpayer dollars."

Not all groups give the state's online efforts such low marks. As The State Worker reported this week, the nonprofit Sunshine Review recently honored the state's ca.gov website with an award and an "A-" grade.

Click here to read the full report.

RELATED POSTS:
Jerry Brown shuts down government transparency website

Editor's note: This post was updated with a statement from Brown spokesman Evan Westrup.

While California's Latino population is growing, and is likely to become the state's largest ethnic group within a few years, only a tiny percentage of Latinos are seeking and receiving college educations, according to a new data compilation by the Campaign for College Opportunity.

The Los Angeles-based organization says in a new report that while 57 percent of Latino students graduated from high school in 2009 - markedly lower graduation rates than those for white or Asian American students - just 16 percent graduated with the course requirements for the state's four-year colleges, and just 8 percent enrolled in one of those colleges.

The bottom line, the organization says, is that just 7 percent of California's Latinos 25 years or older have baccalaureate degrees, while 30 percent of all Californians have at least bachelor's degrees.

Latino attendance at community colleges is higher. Of Latinos who pursue college educations, two-thirds go to community colleges, but just 20 percent earn certificates or associate degrees or transfer to four-year colleges.

Michele Siqueiros, the campaign's executive director, calls the data "cause for significant alarm" because with the overall Latino population continuing to expand, low Latino college attendance could affect the larger society, especially in jobs that require post-high school education.

"California cannot succeed if its Latino students do not succeed," she said in a statement accompanying release of the report. "At present, our education system, including the community colleges, do not serve Latino students well."

Editor's note: Comments on this story were closed due to hate speech.

California employers' costs of providing workers' compensation insurance rose slightly in 2011, but are scarcely half of what they were before then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Legislature enacted a major overhaul of the system in 2004.

The data are contained in the annual report of the Workers' Compensation Insurance Rating Bureau, which was released Monday.

The average cost of workers' comp insurance rose from $2.32 per $100 of payroll in 2010 to $2.37 in 2011 as payouts to injured workers and their medical care providers also rose from $7.8 billion to $8.1 billion.

In 2003, coverage averaged $6.29 per $100 of payroll but after the reforms, which tightened eligibility for benefits, it dropped to as low as $2.16 in 2008 before beginning a slow rise. Payouts also dropped from $12.3 billion in 2002 to as low as $6.7 billion in 2005 before also beginning a slow rise.

The data are ammunition for the Capitol's never-ending war over workers' compensation costs and benefits. Since the 2004 overhaul, labor unions and attorneys who specialize in employee injury cases have pressed for rolling back some of its provisions - saying they have denied adequate benefits to disabled workers - but Schwarzenegger refused. His successor, Jerry Brown, has not yet addressed the issue.

The state is losing an estimated $10 billion a year in revenue due to the underground economy, non-filing of tax returns, overstatement of deductions and other forms of tax evasion, a new study by the Franchise Tax Board staff estimates.

That's nearly twice as much as what Gov. Jerry Brown hopes to realize from his tax increase ballot measure.

Scott Reid, the state tax agency's research director, told the board this month that the estimate, which is up from $6.5 billion seven years ago, is extrapolated from an extensive study by the federal Internal Revenue Service.

Reid gave the board one example of how the state's "tax gap" emerges: A taxpayer who donates to charity a slightly used suit of clothes that originally cost $300 and values it at $75 for a tax deduction, only to see the suit actually listed for sale at $10.

California's economy may be hurting, but Forbes magazine, in its latest listing of the globe's 1,226 billionaires, says that 100 are Californians.

Standing at the top of the California billionaires is Oracle Corp.'s Larry Ellison at $36 billion, the world's sixth richest person and third richest American behind Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. Mexican media mogul Carlos Slim and his family top the global rankings at $69 billion.

The California list includes Meg Whitman, the Republican candidate for governor in 2010, who ranks 913th globally with a fortune estimated at $1.4 billion, about 10 times what she spent on her unsuccessful gubernatorial run. The poorest of the 100 California billionaires, No. 1153, is Charles Munger, a Los Angeles lawyer who is Buffett's business partner and whose wealth was tabbed at $1 billion.

Munger has shared his wealth with his children.

Charles Jr. is a Republican scientist at Stanford University who bankrolled successful ballot measure campaigns to shift legislative and congressional redistricting from the Legislature to an independent commission.

Daughter Molly is a Democrat who is spending heavily this year on a ballot measure that would raise income taxes and devote proceeds to education.

The highest levels of income inequality in California are found in its most urbanized regions - Los Angeles County and the San Francisco Bay Area - and in a few rural areas, according to a new Census Bureau report.

The Census Bureau used data from the American Community Survey to calculate income disparities for every one of the nation's counties, using a "Gini index" of zero (perfect equality, in which all households have precisely the same incomes) to one (perfect inequality, in which just one household has any income).

The median income of Californians who filed state income tax returns for 2010 declined slightly, the Franchise Tax Board reported Tuesday, but it went up for those filing joint returns.

The median income on 2010 returns was $33,933, down 0.4 percent from 2009, but on joint returns it was $65,772, up 1.1 percent.

Median income is the point at which half of the reported income is above and half is below and it differs from average income,

Californians filed 15.5 million state tax returns for 2010 with $1.1 trillion in adjusted gross income, up 0.2 percent from 2009.

As usual, San Francisco Bay Area counties had the highest incomes, with Marin County on top with a a $114,060 median income for joint filers, an increase of 5.2 percent from 2009, followed by San Mateo, Santa Clara and Contra Costa counties.

Just over a quarter of the tax returns came from Los Angeles County, but its median incomes of $29,779 for all returns and $57,010 for joint filers were well below the state as a whole - ranking 38th and 27th respectively.

Sierra County had the largest percentage gain in median income, 4.5 percent, but for joint returns, Mono County led at 6.4 percent.

Democrats dominate statewide, legislative and congressional offices in California, making it a "decidedly blue" state, but its overall political matrix is much more complex, a new statistical study concludes.

"California's Political Geography" is being published by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC), based on both official voting and registration data and PPIC's frequent opinion surveys and written by PPIC staffers Eric McGhee and Daniel Krimm.

"Although California votes solidly Democratic, Californians (including non-voters) hold important elements of conservative belief in most parts of the state," they write. "On an ideological scale ranging from strong conservative to strong liberal, public opinion data show the average Californian falling in the middle and leaning slightly conservative.

"Statewide, Californians are divided between those who say they are willing to pay higher taxes for more government services (48 percent) and those who would prefer paying fewer taxes and receiving fewer services (43 percent). And both non-Hispanic white and black Californians are slightly more likely to say that immigrants are a burden on the state (48 percent) rather than a benefit (44 percent).

"In fact, growth in Democratic support over time has not been uniform across the state, but has had a strong geographic dimension. It is common to say that a north-south divide - with the north voting Democratic and the south voting Republican - has been replaced with an east-west, or coastal-inland divide (with the coast voting Democratic and inland voting Republican). But this shorthand tells only part of the story."

The conclusion about an east-west split has been apparent in previous journalistic and academic surveys of the state's politics. And the paper's observations about the Democratic dominance being driven by the party's strength in Los Angeles County and the San Francisco area have long been apparent - in fact was a chapter in a similarly titled book, "The New Political Geography of California," written by the author of this Capitol Alert posting.

The housing industry meltdown in California sharply reversed a trend of steadily increasing homeownership, a new statistical compilation by the Census Bureau reveals.

The result: The percentage of Californians who live in homes that they and their families own dipped to 55.3 percent in 2011, the second lowest rate of any state, just ahead of New York's 53.6 percent.

The current California level is just about where it was during the 1980s and 1990s before climbing to as high as 60.2 percent in 2006, just before the housing market implosion.

The home ownership data is just one of a number of statistical reports on housing trends in the Census Bureau report, including housing vacancies rates.

California's nonprofit, charitable foundations boomed both in number and assets between 1999 and 2009, according to a new study by the Center on Philanthropy and Public Policy at the University of Southern California.

The study, a followup to one done in 2001, concludes that during the 10-year period, the number of foundations in California grew by 71 percent, topping 7,100, contributions to them more than doubled to $6 billion, and foundation assets grew by more than one-third to $93.3 billion. After adjustment for inflation, however, contributions increased by 55 percent and assets by 2.6 percent.

The state's deteriorating economy late in the decade took its toll on foundation growth, however. "While the number of foundations grew throughout the period," the study says, "the robust growth in 2000 and 2001 gave way to a tapering off by the end of the period. On the other hand, foundation giving and assets exhibited peaks and valleys over the 10 years with the swings in assets more pronounced than the swings in giving."

Growth in the number of California foundations, contributions and assets all outpaced national trends during the 10-year period. There are 14 California foundations with assets over $1 billion, up from nine in 1999. They account for 52 percent of all assets and 53 percent of all foundation giving.

Speaking of which, giving by California foundations also has gone up and down during the decade, peaking in 2008 at $4.9 billion, just before a severe recession struck the state.

The thrust of foundation grant-making has also changed. Health care was the largest single category of giving in 1999 but by 2009 education had emerged as the foundations' top priority, garnering nearly a quarter of all grant money.

The J. Paul Getty Trust, endowed by the late Los Angeles oilman, is California's wealthiest foundation with $9.3 billion in assets, but when it comes to spending, Getty was fairly stingy at just $14.8 million in 2009.

The second biggest foundation at $6.9 billion, named for computer pioneer William Hewlett and his wife, Flora, was the biggest spender at $342.5 million. It was followed by the Genentech Access to Care Foundation at $292 million and a $5.9 billion foundation endowed by Hewlett's partner, David Packard, and his wife, Lucille, at $282.8 million.

California has the nation's highest state sales tax rate, but its overall rate, including local sales taxes, drops to 12th highest, according to a new report from the Tax Foundation, a Washington-based organization that collects nationwide tax data.

California's state government levies a 7.25 percent sales tax rate, and that would jump another half-percent if Gov. Jerry Brown's tax increase plan wins voter approval in November. The Tax Foundation says local governments add an average of .86 percent for an overall average of 8.11 percent. However, in a few jurisdictions the overall rate approaches 10 percent, according to data from the state Board of Equalization.

Tennessee, the Tax Foundation says, has the nation's highest average sales tax rate of 9.45 percent, followed by Arizona and Louisiana. Five states levy no sales taxes, but of those that do, Colorado is lowest at 4.54 percent.

Gov. Jerry Brown wants to hit California's highest-income taxpayers with billions of dollars in new taxes, and is jousting with other groups with their own tax-the-rich measures over which, if any, will win voter approval.

But the number of Californians with $500,000-plus annual incomes declined dramatically from 2007 to 2009 as the state's economy stagnated, leaving fewer to tax, the California Taxpayers Association points out in a compilation of data from the Franchise Tax Board.

The latest FTB statistical report covers the 2009 tax year, and Cal-Tax points out that it listed just 98,610 California tax returns with adjusted gross income of $500,000 or more, down nearly a third from the 146,221 in 2007. Data for 2010 are not yet available.

Those 98,610 tax returns were just over a half-percent of the 14.6 million returns filed for 2009, but they accounted for 18.8 percent of the taxable income and 32 percent of the income taxes paid that year.

Economists believe that most of the decline reflects lower incomes, rather than an exodus of high-income taxpayers from the state, but there are no hard data on that point.

Expanding the 2009 sample to the top 1 percent (144,071) drops the cutoff to just under $400,000 a year in adjusted gross income. The one-percenters accounted for 21 percent of the taxable income that year and 35.5 percent of the taxes levied.

At one time, the top 1 percent of California taxpayers accounted for half of the state's income tax revenues but their incomes, tied to stocks and other capital markets, declined the most of any income class and currently, state officials say, they are believed to provide about 37 percent of the state's income taxes. That decline accounts for much, if not most, of the state's revenue declines in recent years.

Those with adjusted gross incomes of $400,000 or more paid $25.7 billion in state income taxes for 2007, but two years later, that had dropped to $12.3 billion. Their taxable incomes had declined from about $278 billion to $156 billion.

Not only does California have more than 2 million unemployed workers, but nearly half of them have been jobless for 27 weeks or more, according to new data assembled by the state Department of Employment Development.

"Between May 2007 and February 2011, the number of people who were jobless 27 weeks or more in California rose an astounding 620 percent," says the EDD report.

Those who are called "long-term unemployed" grew from 15.9 percent of the jobless population in late 2007 to 46.8 percent last March, remaining over 46 percent in December.

"The rapid rise in long-term unemployment can be directly tied to the collapse of the housing bubble in California," the report continues. "This event had dramatic effects on the construction and finance industries and on the duration of unemployment among workers displaced from these industries."

It notes that housing construction permits reached a peak of 20,554 in September 2005, then plummeted to 2,418 in January 2009.

Long-term unemployment knows no gender or ethnic boundaries, although Latinos -- who were heavily engaged in construction -- were hit somewhat harder than non-Latino workers. Among all workers, those middle-aged and older have fared worse than those younger, perhaps reflecting their heavy involvement in construction trades.

Gov. Jerry Brown told a television interviewer this week that California has lost manufacturing employment "at about the same rate as the rest of America, so this is a national problem."

True or false?

It depends on one's definition of "about."

Data from Brown's own Department of Employment Development reveal that over the last 10 years, manufacturing employment in California has declined by one-third, from 1.8 million to 1.2 million.

Brown's right about the decline in factory jobs being a national phenomenon, but the rest of the nation has fared a bit better with a 28.8 percent drop over the last decade, from 14.9 million (excluding California) to 10.6 million, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

California's neighboring and competitive states have also seen declines, according to data compiled by the California Manufacturing and Technology Association, but not as steep as this state.

Texas' decline has been 23 percent. Nevada's is 18 percent, Arizona's 28 percent, and Oregon's 26 percent.

Brown made his comments Wednesday in response to a question from Current TV talk show host Jennifer Granholm, the former governor of Michigan.

When it comes to financial security - such factors as savings and low debt ratios - Californians resemble the residents of Southern and Rust Belt states, according to a new national survey by the Washington-based Corporation for Enterprise Development.

California's place on the organization's national chart of economic opportunity and security, 39th among the states and the District of Columbia, is largely determined, the detailed data show, by its very low rankings on credit card debt, loan delinquency and bankruptcy.

The study found that nearly a third of California households are "asset poor," meaning they have little or no financial cushions, even if they are employed. And excluding equity in homes or cars, more than 43 percent of Californians could not sustain themselves for three months if they lose their incomes.

California households rank 49th in average credit card debt at $14,677, nearly a third higher than the national average and 45th in bankruptcy rate. Its ranking is similar to those of other southern tier states while the highest levels of economic security are found in the northern tier of states bordering Canada.

Vermonters are No. 1 in economic security and Georgians are 51st.

Union membership among California's workers declined fractionally in the last year, according to an annual survey by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, but remains seventh highest among the states.

The BLS report says that 17.1 percent of California's private and public employees are union members, down from 17.5 percent the previous year. That translates into 2.4 million union members, down more than 50,000 from a year earlier, in a total employed workforce of 13.9 million.

The numbers and percentages of workers represented by unions, including non-members, are slightly higher at 2.5 million and 18.2 percent. California is tied for the seventh highest rate with Oregon. New York is highest at 24.1 percent and South Carolina the lowest at 3.4 percent. The national rate is 11.8 percent, down from 11.9 percent the previous year.

The survey report does not break down state membership by private and public sectors. Nationally, 37 percent of public workers are unionized, while just 6.9 percent of those in private employment belong to unions.

EDITOR'S NOTE, 1:27 p.m.: This post has been corrected to show that California's rate is tied with Oregon's for seventh place, not fifth.

California's 6 million-student public education system receives high marks for setting high academic standards but very low grades for meeting those standards and school finance in the latest national rankings by Education Week magazine.

Overall, the state receives a "C grade for its public schools with a mark of 76.1 on the 1-100 scale, slightly below the nation as a whole. For the fourth year in a row, Maryland's schools came out on top at 87.8 while South Dakota came in last with 68.1.

The magazine rates states' schools on six criteria - chances for successes, K-12 achievement, standards and assessments, teaching profession improvement, finance and preparing students for work or college. California received an "A" grade for standards and assessments, a "B" for preparing students, a "C" in chances for success, teaching profession improvement and finance, and a "D" in K-12 achievement.

School finance is the area that draws the most political attention, and in that, Education Week says California does well in equalizing support among schools, with a "B-plus," but is given an "F" for spending, reflecting the state's relatively low level of per-pupil support from state and local taxes.

The state's schools have lost billions of dollars in state aid due to chronic budget deficits and are likely to see more cuts this year, but Gov. Jerry Brown has also proposed an overhaul of how aid is allocated, eliminating many "categorical aid" programs and creating a simpler method that gives more aid to schools with poor and/or low-performing students.

The number of Californians reporting incomes of more than $1 million increased sharply last year, as did their share of the income stream, a new report from the Franchise Tax Board reveals.

The new data will fuel the political debate over whether high-income Californians should pay higher taxes.

There were 10,000 taxpayers in the million-dollar income club during the 2009 tax year -- just one-third of one percent of all returns -- but that number jumped 27 percent to more than 13,000 for 2010, based on tax returns filed in 2011.

The income millionaires reported adjusted gross incomes of $22.4 billion in 2009, an average of $2.2 million each. In 2010, the total jumped 30.2 percent to $29.1 billion, with the average remaining virtually unchanged.

California, long considered to have the world's eighth-largest economy, has slipped to ninth place, according to the Palo Alto-based Center for the Continuing Study of the California Economy.

Blame it on Brazil.

With a fast-growing, $2.1 trillion economy, Brazil has slipped past California ($1.9 trillion) into eighth place, according to the center's calculations from the latest World Bank economic rankings.

California was once as high as seventh but was later surpassed by Italy, which remains No. 7, just ahead of Brazil and just behind No. 6 Great Britain.

The United States, of course, is first at $14.5 trillion, followed by China at $5.9 trillion, Japan at $5.5 trillion, Germany at $3.3 trillion and France at $2.6 trillion.

California is just ahead of India's $1.7 trillion. The Los Angeles area, with a $886 billion economy, would rank 16th in world, just behind Australia and just ahead of the Netherlands. The Sacramento area's economy, incidentally, would rank 59th, just behind Qatar and Kazakhstan.

By a wide margin, the economic think tank says, California's economy is the largest of any state, with Texas second at $1.2 trillion, based on data from the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis. They're followed by New York, Florida and Illinois.

However, Texas is catching up fast, with an economy growing half again as fast as California's. The Palo-Alto-based center notes that between 2000 and 2010, Texas had the nation's fourth-fastest growing economy at an average of 2.4 percent per year. California trailed at 1.8 percent. Wyoming's economy was growing the fastest at a 4 percent average, followed by North Dakota and Nevada.

When it comes to economic output per capita (2010), California is also trailing many other states at $51,470, but it's slightly higher than Texas' $48,617. Alaska is tops at $70,030, while California is 10th.

Gov. Jerry Brown's introduction of a proposed 2012-13 budget for California not only touches off the annual wrangle over what to spend on what, but the annual debate over the budget's dimensions.

Officially, the governor's budget is $137.3 billion, consisting of a general fund budget of $92.6 billion, $39.8 billion in special funds (Caltrans, Department of Motor Vehicles, etc.) and just under $5 billion in bond funds.

But that official number ignores about $70 billion in federal funds that will be funneled through the budget, thereby bringing the total to more than $200 billion, or roughly 10 percent of the state's economy.

But wait, as the TV pitchmen say, there's more.

California's economy may be suffering and the state budget may be in disarray, but when it comes to healthy lifestyles, Californians -- or at least coastal Californians -- are leading the nation, according to The Atlantic magazine.

The magazine rates San Jose as the nation's healthiest metropolitan area, based its low rates of obesity and smoking, with nearby Santa Cruz No. 2 and seven other California coastal regions in the top 15.

The Atlantic devised a Metro Health Index, which "measures the share of people who smoke or are obese across 315 U.S. metro regions. The higher the score on the index, the lower the rates of smoking and obesity, and the better a metro's health outlook. Smoking is measured as the percentage of the population who are regular smokers. Obesity is measured as the percent of the population with a body mass index of 30 or more. It's notable that smoking and obesity themselves are closely related across the United States."

More than 1 million jobless California workers could have their unemployment insurance benefits cut off soon if Congress does not continue federally financed benefit extensions of up to 99 weeks, state officials said Wednesday.

At least 100,000 of those workers, those who have been unemployed the longest, could see a cutoff of benefits as early as the first week of January.

The state has more than 2 million unemployed workers, and 1.1 million of them are now collecting benefits -- either the 26 weeks of state-financed payments, or the up to 73 weeks of federally financed extended benefits in five tiers, in order, of 20, 14, 13, six and 20 weeks. Benefits range from $40 to $450 a week.

In all, California is paying out about $1.2 billion in state and federal unemployment insurance benefits a month.

Texas, whose economy has been stronger than California's in recent years, is also seeing a much stronger population growth, according to the first post-2010 census estimate from the Census Bureau.

Texas added 529,000 residents to its population between the census date of April 1, 2010, and July 1 of this year, the Census Bureau said, which also made it the nation's fastest growing state at 2.1 percent. California was second in numerical gain at 438,000 but its 1.2 percent growth rate was scarcely half of Texas' and only slightly above the national average of .98 percent.

The Census Bureau's new estimate for California, 37.7 million, is still nearly 50 percent higher than Texas' population of 25.7 million. The California estimated population also comports with the most recent data from the state Department of Finance. During the previous decade, the two estimates grew more than a million persons apart, but both agencies started the new decade with numbers from the 2010 census as their bases for estimates and projections.

California's unemployment rate has been edging downwards in recent months in an apparent sign of slow recovery from the state's worst recession since the Great Depression, dropping to 11.3 percent in November.

But it's a mixed bag of numbers.

The good news is that a quarter-million more Californians were working in November than a year earlier, and that was more than enough to offset a 34,000-person increase in the labor force, so the unemployment rate dropped by 1.2 percentage points from the previous November, although it's still one of the nation's highest.

The bad news is that about 2 million Californians considered to be in the labor force are still jobless, and that's about a million more than were unemployed before recession struck the state. Roughly half of the 2 million jobless workers are receiving unemployment insurance benefits and the state fund that pays them is nearly $10 billion in the red and subsisting largely on loans from the federal government.

That fund covers only the first 26 weeks of unemployment for about a half-million recipients. Benefit extensions for another half-million, up to 99 weeks in total, are financed by the feds, but the longest extensions will expire in less than two weeks unless Congress renews them. They are ensnared in a sharp partisan battle in Washington.

Bill Watkins, who heads the Center for Economic Research and Forecasting at California Lutheran University, has consistently been the most pessimistic of economists who closely follow the California economy, and the center's latest report is no exception.

Watkins, who for many years headed a similar organization at the University of California, Santa Barbara, believes that the state is fated for a long and slow economic recovery that will lag behind the national recovery, with persistently high unemployment rates.

"It is amazing how California, which once led the world in economic vigor and change, is now so resistant to any change," says a summary of the center's quarterly forecast. "Its economic joints are becoming arthritic, and its arteries clogged, faster than those of its aging population."

The forecast points to the state's losing more people to other states than in-migration, weak home prices and "very weak" economies in the state's Central Valley as signals of the continued economic malaise.

Economists in other public and private venues, especially at UCLA's Anderson School and Beacon Economics, have been more optimistic about the state's recovery from the worst recession since the Great Depression, and the state government's own economists generally are more optimistic as well.

More details from the Cal Lutheran forecast can be found here.

The 2010 census pegged California's population at 37.3 million, 12.1 percent of the nation's, and a new Census Bureau report says California's government accounted for 13 percent of all state government spending last year.

California's general fund budget accounted for roughly half of its $210.4 billion in "general expenditures" last year, with federal funds, bond funds and special funds accounting for the remainder. The total was almost a billion dollars lower than 2009 spending.

The Census Bureau report also revealed that education accounted for $70.3 billion or 33.4 percent of California's spending, which is about two percentage points below the national average, while social service spending, $63.8 billion, was 30.4 percent, 1.4 percentage points higher than the average.

As employers, labor unions, lawyers, insurers and medical care providers gird themselves for another round of battle in the decades-long political war over workers' compensation, a new set of data from the Workers' Compensation Insurance Rating Bureau is providing ammunition.

The multi-billion-dollar-a-year system provides payments and medical care for workers who incur job-related illnesses and injuries and approximately once a decade, those with stakes in the system clash over its rules governing eligibility for benefits, the level of the benefits, and payments to medical care providers.

The last such battle occurred in 2004, when a newly inaugurated Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, wielding an employer-sponsored ballot measure, bulldozed the Legislature into tightening up the system. The results was a dramatic reduction of costs and of insurance premiums paid by employers - but the new data indicated that both are starting to edge upwards and that insurers are beginning to lose money.

California's housing market may be in the dumps along with its economy, but it's still a very expensive place in which to live, a new nationwide comparison indicates.

Four California communities are among the nation's 10 most expensive locales, according to the quarterly survey of living costs by the Arlington, VA.-based Council for Community and Economic Research.

Two New York City boroughs, Manhattan and Brooklyn, top the survey rankings, which are based on 90,000 prices of 60 different items, followed by Honolulu and San Francisco. San Jose is the sixth most expensive community, the Truckee area is ninth and Orange County is 10th.

Harlingen, Texas, is the nation's least expensive community in which to live. All others on the 10 least expensive list, with the exception of Richmond, Indiana, are in the nation's southern tier of states.

Truckee, incidentally, has the nation's fourth highest grocery costs, the survey found.

California's worst recession since the Great Depression has hit all economic classes, but has had a particularly harsh effect on those in the lower income brackets and has exacerbated the state's socioeconomic polarization, a new study by the Public Policy Institute of California determined.

One result has been that the ranks of the economic middle class have thinned to less than half of the state's population, PPIC found.

"Unemployment and underemployment are the hallmarks of the Great Recession," Sarah Bohn, who co-authored a report with Eric Schiff, said in a statement accompanying its release. "This suggests that policies that create jobs and promote full-time employment - rather than those that target wage rates - are more likely to be effective in raising family income to pre-recession levels."

That conclusion provides fodder for California's ongoing political debate over what, if anything, the state's political policymakers could do to hasten recovery and make a dent in what remains the nation's second highest unemployment rate, just under 12 percent with more than 2 million workers on the jobless rolls.

California's major corporations have rung up hundreds of billions of dollars in profits in recent years, but have paid only a few percentage points of those profits in income taxes here and in other states, according to a new nationwide study by several liberal organizations.

The compilation of corporate profits and state taxes was conducted by the Institution on Taxation and Economic Policy and Citizens for Tax Justice and released in California by the California Public Interest Research Group.

It covered 265 of the Fortune 500 corporations that reported profits for three straight years, 2008-2010, including 33 based in California.

Nationwide, the 265 firms had a combined $1.33 trillion in profits during the three-year period but on average, paid just 3 percent of those earnings in state corporate income taxes.

California is still growing, adding just over a quarter-million people during the year that ended June 30, according to the state's annual population survey, but is not attracting immigrants from other states and nations as it once did.

In fact, the state Department of Finance's demographers concluded, the state had a net outmigration of 22,000 persons during the year - 132,000 immigrants from other countries minus 154,000 Californians who moved out. Or to put it another way, births (511,000) and deaths (228,000) accounted for all of the state's net population growth of 260,000.

In numerical terms, that's less than half of what the state experienced during the 1980s, but it still means that California, with an estimated 37.6 million people as of July 1, is likely to approach 40 million by 2020.

Previous state estimates put California's population about one million higher, but demographers have adjusted the number downward to comport with the 2010 census.

Riverside was easily the fastest growing California county during the 2010-11 period, both in numbers (34,752) and percentage (1.59 percent), while 18 rural California counties lost population. Los Angeles, with 9.9 million residents, remains California's largest by a wide margin, with more than a quarter of the state's population, but its growth, just 30,497 during the period, was less than a third of the state's growth rate.

California had one of the nation's first state-financed anti-smoking programs, but it is now being criticized by a national health coalition for its relatively low level of spending.

The Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids says in a new nationwide report that California ranks 22nd in the nation by spending just 15.8 percent of what the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends on smoking prevention.

The state's spending on anti-tobacco programs, $70 million a year, is financed entirely by a special increase in cigarette taxes in 1999. The coalition is critical of California and other states for not spending more from a massive, multibillion-dollar national settlement of a lawsuit against tobacco companies. The state is now receiving $1.7 billion a year from that settlement but, like most other states, is using the money for general purposes.

The Tobacco-Free Kids group, a coalition of health and children's advocacy groups, contends that 13.8 percent of California's high school students smoke. However, smoking has plummeted in California in recent years to the second lowest level of any state, 12.8 percent of adults. Only Utah, at 9.8 percent, is lower.

The issue is likely to be rejoined next year because a measure has qualified for the June primary ballot that would increase California's cigarette tax by $1 per pack to finance cancer research and anti-smoking programs.

"Next year, California voters can make their state a leader again in the fight against tobacco by approving the California Cancer Research Act," said Matthew L. Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. "Increasing the cigarette tax will reduce smoking, especially among kids, while providing much needed funds for cancer research and tobacco prevention. This initiative will save lives and save money by reducing tobacco-related health care costs."

PHOTO CREDIT: Two packs of cigarettes are stamped with California tax stamps. Sacramento Bee file, 2006 / Randall Benton

California's population increased by 10 percent between 2000 and 2010 but the number of Californians living in poverty grew more than three times as fast, a new U.S. Census Bureau report reveals.

The data are found in a massive compilation of poverty statistics broken down by state, county and school district. And if the Census Bureau adopts a proposed new method gauging poverty, which takes into account regional and local costs of living and other factors, the state's poverty rate may climb even higher.

In 2000, 4.3 million Californians were living in poverty but by 2010, the number had increased to 5.8 million, a 34.3 percent jump that reflected the serious recession that has gripped the state in recent years. The state's overall rate climbed from 12.7 percent in 2000 to 15.8 percent in 2010.

Virtually every region of the state was affected, from the most affluent counties in the San Francisco Bay Area to the poorest in interior agricultural areas.

San Mateo County had the state's lowest poverty rate in 2000 at 5.1 percent and was still lowest in 2010, but had seen a rise to 7 percent. Imperial County, in the state's southeastern corner, had the highest poverty rate in 2000 at 24.7 percent, nearly twice the state rate, but by 2010 had ceded that dubious title to Fresno's 26.8 percent.

As the holiday buying season begins, Californians' confidence in their economic futures is declining, a new statewide survey by San Jose State University finds.

SJSU's Survey and Policy Research Institute says that its overall consumer sentiment index has dropped 10 points in the last year to 64.5, and the index of future expectations has dropped as well. The poll, conducted in October, found that 43 percent of California adults described their personal financial situations as worse than they were a year earlier.

As constructed, the index rates anything above 100 as positive and anything below that level as negative. It's similar to the national index of consumer confidence developed at the University of Michigan, and the latest SJSU survey results closely track those at the national level in the latest Michigan poll.

"The good news here is that we are starting to see some improvement in consumer
confidence statewide," said Melinda Jackson, the institute's research director. "The bad news is that attitudes are still fairly pessimistic overall. We may have turned the corner on the worst of the recession, but there is not a lot of hope for a quick recovery in these numbers."

In fact, 85 percent of the survey's respondents believe that the state remains in recession, even though technically it has hit bottom and is in recovery, and more half said they expected recession to continue for at least three more years.

California has more children living in poverty than any other state -- more than 2 million -- but its rate of child poverty, while rising, is about average, a new U.S. Census Bureau report indicates.

The report on child poverty is one of several new Census Bureau data dumps that deal with immigration, various indices of poverty, disability among children and the rising numbers of Americans who are 90-plus years old.

The analysis of data from the American Community Survey found that the number of American children living in poverty rose from 14.7 million in 2009 to 15.7 million in 2010 with the rate also rising from 20 percent to 21.6 percent.

In California, the number rose from 1.8 million to 2 million and the rate from 19.9 percent to 22 percent, apparently reflecting the severe recession that was still deepening.

California's state and local governments spent well over $300 billion in 2009, accounting for nearly a fifth of the state's economy, according to a very detailed new report from the U.S. Census Bureau.

A Census Bureau spreadsheet reveals not only the gross amounts of revenue and spending, but details about how the money was collected and where it was spent.

Overall state and local revenues were $317.6 billion during the year, with the federal government supplying $66.7 billion or just over a fifth of the total. The remaining $251 billion was almost exactly divided between the state and local governments, with property, income and sales taxes contributing the bulk of the total, which also included fees on users of services, retirement fund contributions and other miscellaneous sources.

Total state and local spending was listed at $430.1 billion, but that included duplications from intergovernmental transfers. Net spending was closer to $350 billion, including about $47 billion in public works, much of which was financed from bonds.

California generally - and the Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay Area specifically - have higher levels of household income inequality than the nation as a whole, according to a new Census Bureau statistical analysis.

California is one of seven states, plus the District of Columbia, that have the highest levels of inequality on all three indices of disparity used in the report, although California's inequality scores are the lowest of the eight. The District of Columbia has the highest level. The others -- a mixture of high- and low-income states -- are New York, Connecticut, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas and Alabama.

However, a number of major (more than 1 million residents) California communities are cited in the report as having relatively low levels of income inequality, such as San Diego, San Jose, the Riverside-San Bernardino area, the Sacramento-Roseville metropolitan area.

Elk Grove is also cited as having a low level of inequality, and two of the state's census tracts, one in Kern County and another in Los Angeles County, are on short list of tracts with the nation's lowest levels of inequality.

The data and the indices were developed from a series of surveys conducted by the Census Bureau.

The number of Californians living in poverty increased to nearly six million - more than the populations of most states - between 2009 and 2010, according to a new Census Bureau report.

Californians living in poverty increased from 5.1 million in 2009 to 5.8 million in 2010, and the state's poverty rate jumped from 14.2 percent to 15.8 percent during the one-year period, virtually mirroring national trends. That means that California was almost exactly in the middle of the states, whose poverty rates last year ranged from a high of 22.4 percent in Mississippi (not counting Puerto Rico) to a low of 8.3 percent in New Hampshire.

The rates were derived from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey and were based on how many families were below a "poverty threshold" that varies by age, number of children and family size and is updated to account for inflation.

Four of California's larger urban areas were included in the Census Bureau's 10-region list of those with the highest poverty rates, with Fresno the nation's second most poverty-stricken area at 26.8 percent, Bakersfield-Delano fourth highest at 21.2 percent, Modesto sixth at 19.9 percent, and Stockton seventh at 19.2 percent.

No large metropolitan area in California is found on the list of those with the lowest poverty rates, which is topped by Washington-Arlington-Alexandria at 8.4 percent.

A separate Census Bureau report, meanwhile, found that California is one of the relatively few states in which the percentage of families receiving some form of welfare assistance increased between 2009 and 2010.

The welfare report, also derived from the American Community Survey, says that the proportion of California families receiving welfare at some point during the year increased from 3.7 percent in 2009 to 4 percent in 2010. Both numbers were well above of the national rates of 2.6 and 2.9 percent.

The survey analysis found that while 449,059 California families received welfare support in 2009 and the number increased to 500,432 in 2010, by far the largest numerical increase of any state.