Capitol Alert

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.

California's housing market is still in turmoil with foreclosures, short sales and only a relative handful of new homes being built.

The bottom line, at least as shown by the 2010 census, is that California wound up with the nation's second lowest rate of home ownership, just ahead of New York, or third lowest if the District of Columbia is included, according to a new Census Bureau report.

California had 12.2 million housing units in 2000, the Census Bureau says, and while its population was growing by 10 percent during the succeeding decade, housing units rose by 12 percent to 13.7 million, of which 12.6 million were occupied. But those occupied by owners increased by just 7.5 percent.

That meant that 55.9 percent of California's houses, apartments, condominiums and other forms of housing were occupied by owners, barely higher than New York's 53.3 percent. Washington D.C.'s rate was 42 percent.

West Virginia, one of the nation's poorest states, had the highest rate of home ownership at 73.4 percent. The national rate was 65.1 percent. Overall, the Census Bureau said, the South and the West, which are the nation's fastest growing regions in population, also led in housing growth.

The surge of foreign immigration into the United States - and especially into California - during the last few decades has slowed markedly, thanks largely to prolonged economic downturn, but immigration will continue to have major effects, thanks to the burgeoning second generations, a new demographic study indicates.

The percentage of U.S. residents who are foreign-born or children of immigrants will increase from 22.5 percent in 2010 to 30.5 percent by 2040, the study issued by the University of Southern California's Population Dynamics Research Group forecasts. And by 2030, the researchers found, a majority of the nation's foreign-born residents will have lived in the country for at least two decades.

Previous research by the same group determined that immigration has had more than twice the impact on California as it has on the nation as a whole, and thus immigrants, who are mostly from Mexico and other Latin American countries, and their children are already more than half of California's population. Latinos alone are expected to be the largest single ethnic group in California by mid-decade.

"We're marking a major transformation in America," said Dowell Myers, a professor in USC's School of Policy, Planning and Development and co-author of the report.

The USC report estimates the foreign-born population in 2010 based on a detailed demographic accounting of annual population changes through births, deaths and migration. These estimates provide information not available in the 2010 Census, the first census in over a century that did not record residents' place of birth.

California's economy remains locked in recession and wages have been stagnant, but nevertheless living costs - especially taxes - have risen. That's putting a squeeze on many families, according to a new county-by-county compilation of the "true cost of living."

The report from the Oakland-based Insight Center for Community Economic Development provides statistical ammunition not only for advocates of raising minimum wages and other steps to aid the poor, but for conservative anti-tax groups since the center found that taxes are the largest single element in living cost increases.

The study was designed as an alternative to the commonly used federal poverty standard, which critics say does not take into account the real costs of living. It updates a report previously issued in 2008, and found that double-digit increases in living costs are common throughout the state.

"The Self-Sufficiency Standard...provides us with a true picture of the needs within the communities we serve, informs how we tailor our approaches to increasing financial stability and helps us measure progress toward our collective goals," Peter Manzo, president of United Ways of California, said in a statement accompanying release of the report. "We believe that to build financial stability, you have to see and address all the issues including health, education, and income."

California workers are less likely than most Americans to have employer-sponsored retirement plans, according to a new academic report, and nearly half of them will retire in or near poverty status.

The report was issued Monday by the Center for Labor Research at the University of California, Berkeley. Among other thing, the researchers, Sylvia Allegretto and Nari Rhee, found that California's retirees are overwhelmingly dependent on Social Security for retirement income because of the relative lack of supplemental retirement benefits.

Social Security, they said, provides 79.1 percent of retirement income for those in the bottom quartile of retirees by income, and 70.3 percent for the middle 50 percent.

Employer-sponsored pension systems account for just 15.5 percent of income for the middle 50 percent, but only 52 percent of California employers offer pension plans, markedly lower than the 58 percent nationwide. And of those California plans, 61 percent are defined-contribution systems such as a 401k, rather than traditional defined-benefit plans.

The researchers project that 46.7 percent of California's workers aged 25-64 will have retirement incomes below 200 percent of the federal poverty threshold.

"Our research shows how important Social Security is to the middle class," Rhee said in a statement that accompanied release of the study, "and in order for today's workers to retire in dignity, they also need access to a supplemental plan that can provide secure income in retirement."

Mark DiCamillo has a bone to pick with the U.S. Census Bureau over its report this week on 2010 voting patterns.

The report said that in last November's election, 22.8 million Californians were eligible to vote - i.e. citizens 18 years or older - but that just 13.8 million were registered and 10.7 million voted. The data were reported in a Capitol alert item, sparking an email from DiCamillo, who directs the state's oldest and most respected polling operation, the Field Poll.

"I was puzzled when I read your latest posting about how CA's registration and voting rates are among the lowest in the nation. So, I went to the census report link to see why this was so, DiCamillo wrote. "Lo and behold I think the people at the census department really blew it."

Although the Census Bureau had said 13.8 million Californians were registered to vote last year, DiCamillo noted that actual registration, as compiled by the secretary of state's office, was 17.3 million for the November 2010 election. State election officials also calculated the potentially eligible voter number at 23.6 million, nearly a million higher than the Census Bureau's number.

So obviously the Census Bureau's figure was numerically wrong - by a lot. But was it statistically wrong as well?

This is one of those anomalies that stems from California's status as - by far - the nation's most populous state.

A new Census Bureau report reveals that California has the fifth largest black population of any state - 2.7 million - but proportionately, the state's black population is scarcely half as large as that of the nation as a whole and is shrinking in relative terms.

The 2010 census found that California's black population rose by just 170,000 in the previous decade, or 6.8 percent. That was markedly lower than the state's overall population growth of 10 percent, and reduced the state's black proportion to 7.2 percent, just over half of the 13.6 percent recorded in the nation as a whole.

California has the nation's second-lowest rate of voter registration and one of its lowest voter turnout rates, according to a new Census Bureau report on the 2010 elections.

Just 50.1 percent of California's 27.4 million voting-age residents were registered to vote for last year's election, higher only than Hawaii's 48.3 percent, the state-by-state breakdown of political participation found. The national rate was 59.8 percent.

The state's voter turnout, 39.2 percent of voting-age residents, was one of the lower rates, but not the lowest. Ten other states had lower voting levels with Texas, at 31.4 percent, the lowest; the national rate was 45.5 percent.

California's low participation is explained, in part, by the fact that many of its residents (17 percent, twice the national percentage) are non-citizens -- a factor that shows up in the racial and ethnic breakdown as well. Just 64.5 percent of voting-age Latinos are citizens, for example, which explains why just 33.6 percent of voting-age Latinos are registered to vote, while 52.9 percent of white voting-age Californians are registered.

The survey found that 38.1 percent of voting-age Asian Americans in California are registered to vote -- another number depressed by relatively low levels of citizenship (76 percent) but that 54 percent of African Americans are registered, higher than the white registration level.

PHOTO CREDIT: Sacramento County residents vote at the voter registration and election office in Sacramento on Nov. 1, 2010. Sacramento Bee file / Randy Pench

California may have the largest number of same-sex households -- married and unmarried -- of any state, a new Census Bureau study indicates, but several other states have higher percentages.

The report is a revision of what the 2010 census found, correcting what census officials said was a potential error in the wording of a question.

The 2000 census found that just over one-half of 1 percent of households were same-sex couples, but the 2010 census resulted in the much-higher figure of 0.773 percent. The latter resulted, officials said, from "an inconsistency of responses ... that artificially inflated the number of same-sex couples."

The California politicians who complain that the state is being shortchanged in federal spending got some new statistical ammunition Tuesday from an exhaustive report by the U.S. Census Bureau on federal spending during the 2010 fiscal year.

It revealed that on a per capita basis, California was the seventh lowest recipient of federal spending among the states at about $9,000, although its total of $333.8 billion was by far the highest of any state. The states ranged from a high of nearly $18,000 per capita in Alaska to under $8,000 in Nevada. To put it another way, California, with 12.1 percent of the nation's population, received just 9.8 percent of federal spending.

The state's generally younger population depressed relative spending on Social Security and other pension programs, its defense industry has declined sharply with the end of the Cold War and state government has been unable, for budgetary reasons, to maximize federal support for health, welfare and education programs.

A separate Census Bureau report reveals that in direct federal aid to state and local governments, California fared a little better last year - 13th lowest at a little under $2,000 per capita. The total was $66.6 billion, slightly over 10 percent of the national total of government-to-government aid.

California may be mired in recession, but it's still collecting state taxes that are markedly higher, in proportion to its population, than the nation as a whole, according to a new data release by the U.S. Census Bureau.

California has 12.1 percent of the nation's population but during the second quarter of 2011 accounted for 15.9 percent of state tax collections with $35.9 billion. That was $2.4 billion more than in the second quarter of 2010, but more than $3 billion lower than in 2008, before the housing market collapsed and the state spiraled into recession.

The numbers come from the Census Bureau's quarterly report on state and local finances. Overall, states collected $226 billion in taxes during the second quarter and local governments added another $108.5 billion. The revenues include both taxes for general purposes and those restricted to special purposes, such as those on fuel.

California's second quarter total was influenced by the expiration of a temporary personal income surtax at the end of 2010, but the overall quarter-to-quarter increase in revenues indicate that slightly improved economic conditions offset the loss. Even so, income taxes accounted for 46.7 percent of total California collections.

Two other temporary tax increases, on sales and automobiles, expired on June 30. Gov. Jerry Brown wanted to extend all of the temporary taxes, which were first enacted in 2009, to balance the state budget, but was unable to gain enough Republican votes to put the extensions on the ballot this year. He's now planning an initiative tax measure for the November, 2012, ballot, but has not settled on what the mix of levies would be.

Californians are worried about the stagnant economy and are generally sour on the direction the state is headed, but Gov. Jerry Brown gets relatively high marks for his performance to date, according to a new poll by the Public Policy Institute of California.

PPIC found that 41 percent of Californians and 45 percent of likely voters approve of Brown's efforts to balance the state budget and otherwise govern -- not an overwhelming endorsement but, compared to most other politicians, relatively strong.

Just a few days earlier, the Field Poll came up with similar results, a 49 percent approval rating for Brown.

"Most Californians -- regardless of political party -- say things are going in the wrong direction in the state and the nation," Mark Baldassare, PPIC's president, says in a statement accompanying release of the poll results.

"Most don't see evidence that the president's attempts to stimulate the economy have had a positive impact -- although when asked to choose, they side with him over the Republicans in Congress," Baldassare added. "And for most Californians, the impact of the state's budget problems have hit home. In every region of the state, majorities say that state budget cuts have affected their local government services a lot."

Here are other findings in the PPIC poll:

California's state and local governments employed more than two million full- and part-time workers in 2010, and they were paid about $10 billion a month, a new data dump from the Census Bureau shows.

The California data were gleaned from the Census Bureau's annual census of government employment, taken in March 2010, and indicate that state and local governments are, collectively, one of the largest segments of the state's $2 trillion per year economy.

California's 2.16 million government employees translate into 1.79 million "full-time equivalent" workers, and the $9.7 billion paid to them in March 2010 translates into an average full-time salary of nearly $5,500 per month.

The state employed the full-time equivalent of 410,653 workers that month, while local governments, including schools, had the equivalent of 1.4 million employees on their payrolls. The Census Bureau noted that the state's local agencies had dropped nearly 48,000 part-time workers since the 2009 census while California's state government added 2,836 part-timers.

Higher education, with the full-time equivalent of 158,064 workers, was by far the state government's largest category of employment, followed by the prison system's 61,710. Education, with the full-time equivalent of 722,847 workers, accounted for more than half of local government employment, followed by law enforcement with 90,263, public hospitals with 66,260, and welfare with 64,879.

The California state government report is available here while local government data can be found here.

When recession struck the California economy, it eliminated more than a million jobs and, a new statistical report shows, it also cut workers' compensation coverage and benefit payouts.

The report from the Washington-based National Academy of Social Insurance says that in 2009, the number of California workers covered by workers' compensation for work-related illnesses and injuries dropped by 5.7 percent from the previous year to 14.4 million.

Similarly, wages covered by workers' compensation -- either insurance or employers' self-insurance funds -- dropped 5.6 percent to $738 billion. And workers' compensation benefits, both cash and medical care, declined by 1.6 percent to $9.3 billion.

Since recession hit harder in California than in most other states, the workers' compensation effects were more pronounced here than nationally, the report indicates. Nationwide, the number of workers covered by workers' compensation programs dropped 4.4 percent in 2009 and covered wages by 4.7 percent while benefits remained virtually unchanged.

Californians were just as likely to get married in 2009 as everyone else in the nation, but were markedly less likely to get divorced, according to "Marital Events of Americans," a new data report by the Census Bureau.

Overall 19.1 of every 1,000 California men got married in 2009, exactly the same rate as all American men, while the marriage rate of California's women that year, 17.6, was ever-so-slightly higher than the national rate of 17.5.

Marriage rates ranged widely in 2009, from a high of 30.7 for men and 28.7 for women in Wyoming to a low of 13.5 for men and 12.2 for women in Maine. That was in keeping with regional trends of high marriage rates in the West and low marital activity in the Northeast.

California's men had a divorce rate in 2009 of 8 per 1,000, well under the national rate of 9.2, while the state's women, at a rate of 8.9 divorces per 1,000, were also below the national women's rate of 9.7.

Like those of marriage, national divorce rates also showed a wide state-to-state variance.

The highest male divorce rate was in Arkansas at 13.5 and the lowest in New Jersey at 6.1. New Jersey also had the lowest women's divorce rate at 6, while Alaska had the highest, 16.2. Regionally, the South had the highest incidence of divorce while the Northeast, lowest in marriage, was also lowest in divorce.

When it came to widowhood, California's rates for both men and women were well below the national average, perhaps reflecting its relatively young population. But California's women were more than twice as likely as its men to lose a spouse during the year, mirroring the national data.

PHOTO CREDIT: Minutes after their wedding ceremony, Jeremy Rutledge holds his new wife Andrea Griffey's hands as they walk through the rose garden at Sacramento's McKinley Park on July 19, 2011. Manny Crisostomo / Sacramento Bee

While state school officials continuously lament reductions in state education financing, they also continue to report fractional gains in academic achievement, with the latest being an upbeat report on high school exit examination passage rates.

State schools Supt. Tom Torlakson said Wednesday that nearly 95 percent of those in this year's senior class passed the test and passage rates among African American and Latino students increased.

"It is heartening to see that our students continue to learn and achieve despite the painful toll that budget cuts are taking on our schools," Torlakson said. "The results of this year's exit examination--and the progress schools are making to close the achievement gap--are yet another sign of the remarkable commitment that teachers, school employees, and administrators have to the students of California."

The results, are broken down by county, district and school as well as demographic subgroup.

Torlakson said they show increasing passing rates among most demographic subgroups with approximately 94.6 percent or 422,558 students in the Class of 2011 successfully passed both the English-language arts and the mathematics portions of the exit exam by the end of their senior year. The passage rate in 2010 was a tenth of a percentage point lower, 94.5 percent.

The exit exam completion rate among black students increased from 89.6 percent in 2010 to 90.9 percent this year while that of Latinos increased from 91.4 percent to 92.3 percent. That of Asian American students also increased from 97.4 percent to 97.7 percent while among white students, it increased from 98.1 percent to 98.4 percent.

Another trend in the latest report is that more students are taking and passing the test in the 10th grade, the first time it is administered. More than 82 percent of this year's sophomores have already passed the English and mathematics portions of the test.

California voters are unhappy with their political figures' performance and want change, but are ambivalent that would improve government efficacy, a new "deliberative poll" has found.

The poll was organized and financed by a consortium of foundations and think tanks under the rubric of "What's Next California?" and brought together a cross-section of more than 400 voters in Torrance two months ago.

Their attitudes were tested at the onset and then again after they received briefings on legislative representation, the initiative process, local government and tax and budget policy. The results were released Monday at a Sacramento news conference.

While there were marked attitudinal changes on some issues, the net results largely mirrored results of recent telephone surveys by the Field Poll, the Public Policy Institute of California and the USC/Los Angeles Times poll.

Some indices of well-being among California's children -- educational progress and access to health care, for instance -- have been improving, but most are relatively unchanged and some economic factors have worsened in recent years, an exhaustive new data compilation indicates.

More than a third of California's nearly 10 million children are living in homes in which no parent has full-time, year-round employment, according to the Kids Count Data Book, a nationwide report on children's conditions underwritten by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

The yearly compilation, released Wednesday, includes two new factors related to the recession -- children affected by home foreclosure and those with at least one unemployed parent. It found that while nationally, 4 percent of children had been impacted by foreclosure, in California it's 7 percent. And while nationally 11 percent of children had a parent who lost a job, in California it's 13 percent.

More than 200 Californians with severe mental illnesses have found housing under a new state program, but changes are needed to achieve its goal of helping 10,000 homeless mentally ill persons with housing by 2027, a new legislative report says.

The program, financed primarily from proceeds of a 1 percent income surtax on very high income taxpayers, is aimed at creating "permanent supportive housing."

Initially, the program has a $400 million commitment of surtax funds that otherwise would have been spent by counties on direct services to the mentally ill. That's supposed to finance 2,500 units of housing. The report from the Senate Office of Oversight and Outcomes says that while urban counties have moved aggressively to create housing, the program has lagged in small rural counties whose allocations of mental health funds are small and whose officials lack experience in housing development.

The report recommends that rules governing the program be relaxed in the 11 smallest counties to make it easier for them to apply the housing funds.

The Office of Oversight and Outcomes was created by Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg and staffed largely with ex-Capitol reporters. Steinberg was the chief author of the 2004 ballot measures that imposed the surtax on those with incomes over a million dollars and dedicated its proceeds to local mental health services.

The report, written by Nancy Vogel, a former Sacramento Bee and Los Angeles Times reporter, can be found here.

California's smallest businesses - those without employees - were clobbered by the first two years of recession, a new Census Bureau report shows, with more than 80,000 ceasing operations and the survivors' annual incomes dropping by more than $20 billion.

The number of California's non-employee businesses hit a high mark of 2.76 million in 2007 but by 2009 had dropped by 82,878, the Census Bureau report, based on Internal Revenue Service data, found. Business receipts declined from $145 billion to $121 billion during the two-year period.

While small business took big hits throughout the nation during the same period, the impact on California was markedly heavier than on most states. It trailed only New York and Pennsylvania in the decline between 2008 and 2009, the Census Bureau said, while San Diego County suffered the second largest decline of any county, losing 2,829 small businesses in one year. New York County in New York saw the largest numerical decline.

Not surprisingly, the impact has been the heaviest on California businesses with direct roles in the real estate market meltdown, particularly real estate firms, which dropped by 47,000 from 2007 to 2009, and construction, down about 10,000.

Not all states suffered declines, however, with Texas adding 8,260 small firms between 2008 and 2009. The full report, with state-by-state interactive data, is available here.

Two groundbreaking studies of illegal immigrants have concluded that while California has far more than any other state -- 2.6 million -- the number has declined slightly as other states become more attractive working and living destinations for border crossers.

The studies were conducted by the Public Policy Institute of California, one a survey of illegal immigration from the national perspective and the other concentrating on California. Both were done by Laura Hill and Hans Johnson and were aimed at creating a factual basis for the often heated debate over the impact of illegal immigration.

The national study concluded that illegal immigrants comprise more than a quarter of the U.S. foreign-born population and slightly less than the entire national population. But the numbers have declined slightly in recent years, due to the shrinkage of employment in what's been termed the "Great Recession" and stepped up border security and immigration law enforcement. The latter has nearly quadrupled deportations since the late 1990s.

The last decade saw a major housing boom, followed by a cataclysmic bust, and the net result was a declining rate of home ownership in California, according to a new analysis of 2010 census data by University of Southern California demographer Dowell Myers.

Beyond the raw numbers, says Myers, the census data revealed a generational and ethnic transfer between an aging white population and a relatively young Latino population. During the last decade, white home ownership dropped by 157,877 units while Latino-owned homes increased by 383,778 with the latter group accounting for more than three-quarters of ownership growth in the state.

The overall increase in owner-occupied homes, just under a half-million during the decade, was less than half the numerical increase in the 1980s and the state's overall home ownership rate, 55.9 percent, is one percentage point lower than it was in 2000 and the second lowest rate in the nation, just ahead of New York.

Within California, home ownership rates vary widely from a low of 35.8 percent in densely populated San Francisco to well over 70 percent in foothill and mountain counties.

The slowing incidence of home ownership, Myers noted, lessens upward pressure on home prices in the supply-demand equation.

The full study from USC's Population Dynamics Research Group can be found here.

After a half-decade of drifting downward, California's public school enrollment edged upward during the 2010-11 school year, according to a new collection of data from the state Department of Education.

Enrollment hit a high of just over 6.3 million in 2004-05 and dropped to just under 6.2 million in 2009-10 before increasing by about 27,000. Education officials say the upward trend "may be the result of a more complete data collection" but it could also reflect an increase in births in recent years.

The data was collected through CALPADS, the state's new education data collection system. Ironically, however, Gov. Jerry Brown's new budget would eliminate money for the system, saying that it needs an in-depth evaluation before continuing.

The new enrollment report, which includes data by county, grade level and ethnicity, can be found here.

While California's population is aging, it's still one of the nation's youngest, according to a new data set from the Census Bureau.

The 2010 census found that Californians' median age is 35.2, up two years from 2000, but it's still lower than all but four other states and the District of Columbia, the bureau's report says.

The state's median age is also two years younger than the nation's, at 37.2.

The oldest state is Vermont, with a median age of 41.5. The youngest is Utah at 29.2. (The two states are adjacent to one another in the alphabetical listing.)

Other states (and districts) with lower median ages than California include Texas (33.6), the District of Columbia (33.8), Alaska (also at 33.8) and Idaho (34.6).

California's Latino population grew nearly three times as much as the state as a whole in the last decade, making the state home to more than a quarter of the nation's Latinos, according to a new Census Bureau report.

While California's population grew by 10 percent, the 2010 census found, the Latino growth was 27.6 percent, accounting for more than 90 percent of the state's overall population gain. Latinos accounted for more than half of the nation's growth during the decade and now are 16.3 percent of the U.S. population.

Latinos, the census said, now are 37.6 percent of all Californians, up more than five percentage points since 2000. That percentage is exactly the same as that of Texas, with both states trailing only New Mexico, at 46.3 percent.

Many states have seen higher Latino growth rates than California, some nearly 150 percent, such as Alabama and South Carolina.

Latinos now trail non-Latino whites in California by about four percentage points. They are expected to become the state's largest ethnic group by mid-decade.

Their expanding numbers are playing a major role in redrawing legislative and congressional districts. The maps now being drawn by the state's new redistricting commission are expected to result in a sharp increase in Latino officeholders. Preliminary versions of the new maps are to be released on June 10.

The four most dangerous metropolitan areas for pedestrians are in Florida, a new nationwide study has found, but No. 5 is the Riverside-San Bernardino area of Southern California.

California, meanwhile, ranks as the nation's 16th most dangerous state for pedestrians, according to the detailed study of pedestrian death data by Transportation for America, a Washington-based coalition of private organizations and local governments that lobbies for transportation spending. It contends that spending more money on better design would reduce the number of pedestrians who are killed and injured.

Riverside-San Bernardino is the only large metro area (over one million population) in the 10 most pedestrian-dangerous. Sacramento is 21st, Los Angeles-Long Beach is 27th, San Diego is 28th and San Francisco-Oakland is 41st on the list of 52 large regions.

Within California, Del Norte County has the highest pedestrian fatality rate. The study also found that Latinos and African-Americans are about 50 percent more likely to be a pedestrian injury or death victim than white or Asian-American Californians, mirroring a nationwide trend.

Details on the study's findings about California are available here.

Recently released details of the 2010 census in California reveal two important sociological trends about the state, according to analyses by the University of Southern California's School of Policy, Planning and Development.

One is that while Californians still congregate in households as much as they ever did, their composition is changing with fewer traditional husband-and-wife-and-kids families and more headed by single parents or unmarried adults without children. In fact, just one third of California's 12.6 million households include children, which is one of the lowest ratios of any state.

The second finding, related to the household analysis, is that the number of children also declined in California during the last decade even as the state's population rose by 10 percent, which coincides with an aging trend in the population as a whole.

More than half of California's population is now over 35 years old and the median age of 35.2 is two years higher than it was in the 2000 census. The number of California children aged 5 to 9 declined by 220,041 from 2000 to 2010, and the drop in Los Angeles County alone was 260,195.

"We are ground zero of the 'missing children' of California," said Dowell Myers, a professor of urban planning and demography at USC and a co-author of both analyses.

Whether the decline of children is permanent or temporary, however, is open to question. Births dropped off sharply in California during the late 1990s and early 2000s, but picked up later in the decade. Also, many demographers suspect that the 2010 census missed hundreds of thousands of people in Los Angeles County, especially those in its very large population of illegal immigrants.

A synopsis of the USC study on aging is available here while the household analysis can be found here and the data tables that include county-by-county numbers are here.

California's unemployment rate declined in April to 11.9 percent. the first time in months that it had dropped below 12 percent. So that's good news, right?

It all depends on how you look at it.

While a lower unemployment rate is always welcome, it doesn't necessarily mean that more Californians have jobs because the rate is the percentage of the labor force that lacks jobs. So it depends not only on how many workers have jobs, but on how many are considered part of the labor force.

In California's case, according to the Employment Development Department, the calculation is this:

--The state's civilian labor force (seasonally adjusted) was 18.1 million in April, employment was just under 16 million and 2.1 million were unemployed for a jobless rate of 11.9 percent, down from 12 percent in March.

--April's rate was a half-percent lower than the 12.4 percent of April, 2010, but 41,000 fewer Californians were employed, so the lower rate was largely because the labor force declined by 173,000 during that 12-month period.

Unemployed workers are counted out of the labor force when they stop looking for work and rejoin the labor force when they sense that employment might be available. So even were employment to increase, the unemployment rate might be unchanged, or even increase, because of labor force growth.

Population growth is another factor. The state is gaining population by about 1 percent a year, and roughly half of the population is made up of potential workers. So California needs about 150,000 new jobs a year to keep pace with natural labor force growth, both immigrants from other states and nations and young men and women who reach working age - minus those who have retired or died.

It's time for some fun with numbers.

When Gov. Jerry Brown unveiled his revised state budget Monday, one of his talking points -- which he illustrated with a graph -- was that as proposed, "general fund spending drops to 1972-73 level" as measured by personal income.

The factoid is a piece of Brown's campaign to persuade Californians to raise taxes because he's being tight with the public buck.

But is it true? Close, but probably not quite good enough to win one of Arnold Schwarzenegger's leftover cigars.

Californians are feeling a little more positive about their current economic situations, according to a new poll from San Jose State University, but they're a little more negative about the future.

San Jose State's Survey and Policy Research Institute's April poll found that the overall "index of consumer sentiment," which combines attitudes about current conditions and future expectations, had dropped to 70.2 among Californians.

Any number below 100 is considered negative. The latest number is four points below the last survey in October and only slightly higher than the 68.8 score recorded a year earlier.

Even though the recession officially ended months ago, the state's unemployment rate remains high at more than 12 percent. Of those polled, 86 percent said the state is still in recession, with 48 percent believing it's a serious recession.

Click here to read the survey results.

Metaphysically, if not physically, California has often been depicted as two distinct states -- even sparking periodic efforts to divide it officially.

For many years, it was Northern California vs. Southern California. More recently, demographers, geographers and political pundits have seen it as coastal California vs. inland California.

To Sarah Burd-Sharps and Kristen Lewis, however, there are five distinct Californias that are defined more by quality of life than geography. They are co-directors of the American Human Development Project, which analyzes states (California is the third) on the basis of how well their residents are doing in income, health and education, using data from a variety of sources.

"A Portrait of California" is the latest version, following similar analyses of Mississippi and Louisiana. The 179-page report covers virtually every corner of the state, applying a 10-point scale of personal well-being.

Its five distinct clusters range from "Silicon Valley Shangri-La," which scores an almost perfect 9.35 on the three indices for just 1 percent of the state's population, to the "Forgotten Five Percent" of residents in inner city Los Angeles and small farm towns at 2.59.

In between are the "Metro-Coastal Enclave" (18 percent of Californians) at 7.92, "Main Street California" (38 percent) at 5.91 and "Struggling California" (38 percent) at 4.17.

Asian Californians sit atop the population in most measures while Latinos and African Americans are near the bottom, although the authors note the remarkable longevity of Latinos.

"The analysis reveals that some Californians are enjoying the highest levels of well-being and access to opportunity in the nation today, while others are experiencing levels of well-being that characterized the nation decades ago," the report declares.

The report will be unveiled today at noon in Sacramento at the California State Association of Counties conference center at 11th Street and K Street Mall. The event is open to the public.

Talk about a data dump.

The U.S. Census Bureau is releasing all the details of its 2010 census in California, slicing and dicing its 37.3 million residents by race and ethnicity, age, gender, marital status and housing.

Among the more salient points:

• The median age of all Californians is 35.2 years old, nearly two years younger than the nation as a whole.

• The state's males, with a median age of 34, are markedly younger than its females at 36.3.

• The largest single age group are those 15 to 19 years old, with 7.6 percent of the state's population, while the smallest are, not surprisingly, those in the 80-84 and 85-plus age categories at 1.6 percent each.

• Latinos, with 37.6 percent of the state's population, are very close to overtaking non-Latino whites at 40.1 percent. Most demographers expect Latinos to become the state's largest ethnic group by mid-decade.

• Asians are now 13 percent of California's residents, with African Americans at 6.2 percent. Chinese are the largest Asian ethnic group at 3.4 percent, with Filipinos a close second at 3.2 percent.

• The average California household is 2.9 persons and the average family size is 3.45 persons.

• Families make up 68.7 percent of the state's 12.6 million households. Traditional husband-and-wife families are half of those households and nearly half of households have children at home.

• Overall, 37.5 percent of California households have children under 18, while 24.7 percent include residents 65 years or older.

• Just 55.9 percent of Californians live in owner-occupied housing, which is higher than only the District of Columbia at 45.6 percent and New York at 54.5 percent. West Virginia has the nation's highest homeownership rate at 79 percent.

The new data are available here.

Airline passengers flying from Fresno paid the nation's third highest domestic air fares last year, while those leaving Long Beach paid the fifth lowest, according to a new report from the federal Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS).

Neither airport has an extensive array of airlines, but travel from Fresno often involves relatively expensive commuter airlines to make connections while Long Beach passengers benefit from discounter Jet Blue's extensive use of their airport.

The BTS report, available here, says that during the fourth quarter of 2010, the average ticket from Fresno cost $440, below just two other airports, Newark, N.J., and Charleston, S.C., among the nation's 100 busiest airports. Meanwhile, the average Long Beach ticket was $252, higher than just four other airports.

While Newark was the most expensive originating airport, nearby Atlantic City was the cheapest.

Notwithstanding the proliferation of movies, television channels, video games, smart phones and iPads, Californians still read a lot of books, a new University of Southern California Dornsife/ Los Angeles Times poll has found.

The poll discovered that two-thirds of Californians say they like reading "a lot" and a fourth read at least one book a week -- including the electronic versions. Nearly a fifth of those surveyed said they owned an iPad, Kindle or other electronic reading device.

The poll included reading in its array of mostly political questions because the USC campus was to play host this weekend to the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, which is expected to draw 150,000 book lovers.

It found that 61 percent of those surveyed spend at least three hours a week reading books, including 31 percent who spend at least seven hours and 17 percent who devote more than 10 hours a week to reading. Eighty percent said they have read at least one book in the past month and 40 percent at least three books in the last month.

"These results reinforce quantitatively what we experience anecdotally: that people continue eagerly turning to books, in all their forms, for wisdom, entertainment, and exploration," said Catherine Quinlan, dean of USC's libraries.

The poll found that more Californians said they buy books in brick-and-mortar bookstores than online, but the single most popular source of books is the library. More than a quarter of respondents said they get the majority of their books from local libraries.

State demographers, who once calculated California's population at more than 38 million, have downsized their estimates to align them with the 2010 census and now say California had 37.5 million people on Jan. 1.

The state gained 287,000 residents during 2010, the Department of Finance's demographic unit calculated, for a one-year growth rate of just 0.8 percent, one of the lowest rates in recent history. In the 1980s, for instance, the state was growing at a rate of about 2.5 percent per year.

The Department of Finance and the Census Bureau were at odds during the last decade over how many people resided in California, with the gap between their competing estimates reaching 1.5 million prior to the census. The official count last year pretty much confirmed the Census Bureau's view, although it's widely believed that the census missed many residents, particularly illegal immigrants, in Southern California cities.

Regardless, the census became the official base and the state felt compelled to adjust its own numbers to it, resulting in Friday's estimate of 37.5 million. The city-by-city and county-by-county detail indicates that even with slow overall growth, California's coastal cities are continuing to lag behind inland areas in growth rates.

Los Angeles, by far California's largest city at 3.8 million, grew by just 0.4 percent - half the state rate -- during 2010, for instance, while Riverside County's Desert Hot Springs was the state's fastest growing community at 5.9 percent.

The full report, including detail on cities and counties, can be found here.

All state public pension funds lost money in 2009 as their stock and property investments tanked, a new Census Bureau report says, but California's systems accounted for a huge share of the losses.

The state has three major pension systems - one covering state and many local workers, one for teachers and one for University of California employees - and collectively assets dropped from $476.2 billion during the 2007-08 fiscal year to $340.2 billion a year later.

That $136 billion loss of value represented 21.2 percent of all state pension fund value declines during the year, even though the state has about 12 percent of the nation's population and had less than 18 percent of the all state pension fund assets.

The new data add fuel to the already burning controversy over the long-term viability of public pensions in California, both state and local.

Republicans have demanded pension reforms as part of any state budget deal, while Democrats and their allies in public worker unions have resisted wholesale changes, contending that recent investment gains are restoring pension fund health. But recent polls also indicate that were major pension changes placed on the ballot, voters would approve them handily.

The Census Bureau's statistical report reveals that nationwide, state pension fund assets declined from $2.7 trillion in 2008 to $2 trillion in 2009. It includes a state-by-state breakdown of income, outgo, investment gains and losses and net value.

During 2009, California's funds distributed $23.6 billion to pensioners and those withdrawing from the systems. They took in $6.4 billion from employee payroll deductions and $10.7 billion from government employers while losing $105.2 billion on investments.

Most California voters still support Gov. Jerry Brown's special election to resolve the state deficit, but they send mixed messages when it comes to approving taxes on the ballot, the latest Public Policy Institute of California survey shows.

The Democratic governor is trying to convince lawmakers to place taxes on a statewide ballot at some point this year despite falling short in his initial pursuit of a June election. The PPIC poll found 56 percent of likely voters still think the special election is a good idea.

When presented with details of Brown's plan, including the fact that Brown's temporary tax increases would spare K-12 schools from cuts, 61 percent of likely voters said they favor his plan.

But when asked specifically about an increase in higher personal income taxes to pay for K-12 education, 62 percent of voters said they oppose the idea. And 61 percent said they oppose higher sales taxes for schools. Brown has proposed maintaining higher sales taxes and retroactively extending higher income taxes for five years as part of his budget solution.

"To me, it underscores generally the challenge of going to voters and asking them to raise their taxes," said PPIC President and CEO Mark Baldassare. "It would need to be very carefully placed in a package that involves a clear and consistent message about the balance between spending cuts and anything on the revenue side."

The only tax idea that won support in the PPIC poll was raising income taxes on the rich - which garnered 68 percent support. Brown and legislative leaders so far have not seriously considered that idea to solve the remaining $15.4 billion deficit, but the California Federation of Teachers is sponsoring a bill to raise taxes by 1 percent on income above $500,000 to raise an estimated $2.3 billion. That proposal is Assembly Bill 1130 by Assemblywoman Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley.

It is difficult to compare this poll's results to PPIC's previous surveys on special election taxes. Previous polls asked voters about tax extensions, a phrasing this poll did not use. Baldassare said this particular PPIC poll was an annual survey on education issues which asks each year specifically about tax increases, so its questions were not necessarily determinative of how taxes would be framed should there be a special election.

Elsewhere in the survey, likely voters gave Brown a 46 percent approval rating, higher than the 41 percent he received in March. They gave the Legislature a 14 percent approval mark, close to the 16 percent in March.

PPIC found that only 23 percent of Californians knew that both student test scores and per pupil spending ranked below the national average. More than eight in 10 (83 percent) prefer local rather than state control over schools, a preference made difficult by the fact that state government controls the purse strings in the wake of Proposition 13.

A majority of Californians (56 percent) said their local public schools do not get enough money, while 76 percent of public school parents said state budget cuts had affected their children's campus.

Most Californians said that teacher salaries should be closely (29 percent) or somewhat closely (40 percent) tied to student performance. Support for performance-based pay cut across ideologies, with 65 percent of Democrats and 68 percent of Republicans in support.

The number of criminal aliens incarcerated in California rose to 102,795 in 2009, a 17 percent increase since 2003, federal auditors reported Thursday.

This isn't cheap. Nationwide, the Government Accountability Office reports, it costs well over $1.1 billion a year for states to imprison criminal aliens -- those who committed a crime after entering the United States illegally. California, moreover, is more expensive than other states. GAO auditors estimated California spends $34,000 to incarcerate a criminal alien for one year; in Texas, it's only $12,000.

The audit, requested by Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose, will provide ammunition for states' perennial effort to secure more federal reimbursement dollars.

More than one in four of the illegal immigrants imprisoned in California are behind bars for drug offenses. Many are also repeat offenders. GAO auditors say that, based on a survey, criminal alien inmates have been arrested an average of seven different times.

The federal government gave California's state government $120.7 billion in the 2009-10 fiscal year to underwrite education, health services, welfare grants and dozens of other programs, a very detailed new report from the state auditor's office reveals.

More than a sixth of the money - $23 billion - may have been a one-time injection of funds, however, because it came from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, otherwise known as "stimulus." Those funds eased the state's budget crisis, especially in education finance, and their disappearance has exacerbated the current budget deficit.

Education was the largest single category of federal aid to the state during the year at $42 billion, followed by $38.7 billion for health and welfare services. One of the factors in the Capitol's current budget wrangle is how much the state can cut health and welfare spending without running afoul of federal requirements.

Overall, the federal payments to California involve more than 350 specific programs or "program clusters." The auditor's report, required by the federal government, not only lists the specific amounts for each but describes how the money is to be spent.

The report, however, does not delve into direct federal expenditures in California for Social Security, defense contracts, military bases, public works and other programs, which are roughly equal to the funds it sends to the state. California politicians have complained for years that the state receives a relatively small return of the tax payments that Californians and California corporations pay to Washington.

The audit report can be found here.

Support has dropped for Gov. Jerry Brown's plan for a June special election on taxes, according to a new poll released tonight by the Public Policy Institute of California.

Half of likely California voters now say a special election is a good idea, the poll found. Two-thirds of likely voters held the same view in the institute's January poll.

Support has also dipped for the proposed tax measure to avoid more budget cuts. Only 46 percent of likely voters now favor Brown's proposal, a drop of eight percentage points since January. Opinions are split along party lines, with 54 percent of Democrats backing the plan and 58 percent of Republicans opposing it. Independents are more likely to favor than oppose it, 52 percent to 36 percent.

"While many Californians still favor the approach the governor proposed in January, his plan to seek a budget solution through a June ballot has become a more difficult task to achieve," Mark Baldassare, PPIC president and CEO, said in a statement.

Likely voters are divided on how to deal with the budget gap -- 41 percent want a mix of cuts and taxes, 40 percent prefer mostly spending cuts, 11 percent want mostly tax increases, and 3 percent think it's OK to borrow and run a budget deficit.

When asked specifically about Brown's proposal, Californians are slightly more likely to favor it than oppose it.

Most of those surveyed think the budget deficit is a big problem for the state. Even so, more than half said that jobs and the economy are the state's biggest issues. The deficit came in a distant second.

PPIC surveyed 2,000 California adults March 8-15. Among the 935 likely voters in that group, the margin of sampling error is plus or minus 4.2 percentage points. Find the wide-ranging survey here.

As legislators prepare for a vote on a proposal to close a projected $26 billion deficit, one group is calling on the state to provide the public with more information about its spending.

California's efforts to provide transparency in government and spending received a grade of D-plus in a report released today by the California Public Interest Research Group. The state came in at No. 31 in the left-leaning public interest lobbying group's annual ranking of all 50 states.

"If Californians look hard enough at the budget voted on today they'll notice some serious holes in their ability to follow the money," CALPIRG's Pedro Morillas said in a statement. "Billions of dollars in tax breaks and economic development subsidies are spent every year with no disclosure to the public of who gets them or how much they get."

CALPIRG called on California to create a more vibrant website dedicated to transparency and government spending.

One upside for fans of sunlight in state government? California's 2011 grade -- 62 on a 100-point scale -- was nine points higher than last year's score.

Click here to read the full report.

Last week's release of detailed data on the 2010 census sets the stage for the new Citizens Redistricting Commission to draw new maps for 120 legislative districts, 53 congressional districts and four Board of Equalization districts to equalize their populations.

The biggest changes will come in districts with the greatest deviation from the ideal populations as calculated on the census total for California and political number-crunchers have already developed spreadsheets laying out the deviations.

In general, urban coastal districts are underpopulated and inland suburban and rural districts are overpopulated, which should lead to a shift of legislative and congressional districts from the coastal counties to inland counties.

One set of spreadsheets comes from the Rose Institute of State and Local Government at Claremont McKenna College. Find it here.

Both major political parties lost a bit of their voter registration shares as the ranks of California's political independents continued to expand, a new report from the secretary of state's office showed Friday.

The report says that 17.2 million Californians are registered to vote, down about 150,000 from the 2009 off-year report. The percentage of age- and citizenship-eligible Californians (23.7 million) who are registered also dropped to 72.8 percent.

Democrats' share of the electorate declined from 44.5 percent in 2009 to 44 percent, while Republicans dropped from 31.1 percent to 30.9 percent and declined-to-state independents continued to increase, from 20 percent in 2009 to 20.4 percent now.

The report also details registered voters by county and legislative and congressional district, but the latter two are almost meaningless because the districts will be altered by the state's new redistricting commission -- or perhaps the courts if the commission falters -- in time for the 2012 elections.

The office issues this biennial report in the early months of what has traditionally been a non-election year. With its spate of special elections, however, the state rarely has a non-election year anymore, with another one staged in June on tax extensions if Gov. Jerry Brown has his way.

The full report is available here.

California's "well-being index" is just about average in a new nationwide survey measuring levels of healthy and happy living by the Gallup polling organization - but residents of the San Francisco Peninsula score the highest of any region in the nation.

It was the third year in a row that residents of California's affluent and bucolic 14th Congressional District scored the highest in the survey, which measured levels of diabetes, obesity, consumption of fresh produce, physical exercise, optimism and health insurance coverage.

Gallup surveyed more than 350,000 people nationwide to create its index and rankings by state and locality. The 14th Congressional District includes Redwood City, Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Mountain View and Los Altos and is represented by Democrat Anna Eshoo.

The nation's overall well-being index is 66.8 while California's score - 18th highest - is 67. Hawaii scored the highest at 71 while West Virginia is the lowest at 61.7. The full Gallup report can be found here.

As California's annual political wrangle over the state budget heats up, state Controller John Chiang's office has created an easy-to-read Internet primer on the state's finances.

Graphs, charts and text explain the sources of the state's revenues and the ways they are spent, both currently and in the last decade.

"I believe that it is important for Californians to be able to easily find out where the state gets its money and how your tax dollars are spent," Chiang says in an introduction to State Finances 101, as his website is called. "I hope this information will help you better understand the basics of California's finances, where the bulk of taxes are spent, and the challenges we face during these difficult economic times."

The site can be found here. Anyone wanting details of Gov. Jerry Brown's budget can find them here. And true fiscal masochists can find the Democrats' current version of the budget here. After you do all that, you're ready to check out The Bee's budget balancer.

The U.S. Census Bureau today released detailed data on California that will be used by the state's new independent redistricting commission to draw new legislative, congressional and Board of Equalization districts for the 2012 elections.

The state's new official 2010 population, 37,263,308, was released in December and is a 10 percent gain over 2000. But details -- including census tract, city and county breakdowns, as well as those of income, ethnicity and other factors -- were not released until today.

The Citizens Redistricting Commission has until August to adopt new districts, replacing those that the Legislature drew in 2001. Widespread criticism of the legislative plan that it was a bipartisan gerrymander that ignored demographic changes, led to the ballot measure that shifted the responsibility to a 14-member commission that was chosen, partially by lot, from more than 30,000 applicants. The commission is composed of five Democrats, five Republicans and four independents. A majority of each group was agree to a final plan, which is subject to court challenges.

The new census data are available here.

Californians' median income, as reported on income tax returns, dropped sharply in 2009 as the recession continued to plague the state, it was reported Thursday.

The Franchise Tax Board said the statewide median income dropped 5.1 percent to $34,079 on 2009 returns while the median on joint returns dropped 5.7 percent to $65,025.

As usual, four Bay Area counties -- Contra Costa, Marin, San Mateo and Santa Clara -- reported the highest median incomes, with No. 1 Marin being the only county with a median that topped $100,000 for joint returns.

At the other end of the affluence scale, Imperial County, in the state's southeastern corner, had the lowest median of $22,841 for all returns. The lowest-income counties were, like Imperial, clustered in the state's agricultural and mountain regions. Tulare County was second lowest for all returns at $25,302.

Median income is the point at which one-half of the income reported on tax returns is above and one-half is below the midpoint of the range of values.

The FTB said California taxpayers filed 15.3 million 2009 state income tax returns reporting $1.08 trillion in adjusted gross income, a 2.9 percent decrease from 2008 figures.

California has the nation's largest unfunded public worker pension liability -- as much as $370 billion -- a new state-by-state comparison by a conservative state government think tank declares.

But in relative terms, the state's pension gap is by no means the nation's largest.

The new paper from Washington, D.C.-based State Budget Solutions adds more fuel to the already raging controversy over public worker pensions in California and other states. Republican legislators in California have hinted that pension reform may be the price for supporting Gov. Jerry Brown's budget plan, and just last week, the state's Little Hoover Commission called for a massive overhaul of the system for state and local government workers.

State Budget Solutions merged three academic studies of state pension funds to generate its comparison chart. They came from the Pew Center on the States, the American Enterprise Institute and the Journal of Finance.

California's economic image suffered another blow Wednesday when the U.S. Chamber of Commerce rated it in the bottom tier of states in the friendliness of its laws to business investment.

California was placed in the bottom of three tiers in a nationwide review of state business laws for the chamber by Seyfarth Shaw LLP, a prominent employment and labor law firm.

The chamber noted that California's and Massachusetts' laws are so unique that the law firm has published employers' handbooks just for those states.

"California has a large and diverse economy environment for new job creation," the chamber's report says. "The state is known for its persistent budget woes and debt, high taxes, and complex employment laws and regulations. The unemployment rate in California was 12.4 percent in late 2010, well above the national average."

The report listed specific factors in the state's "poor" ranking along with Massachusetts, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin. They include: "hostility towards non-competition agreements," complex and "elaborate" wage and hour laws, anti-discrimination laws that go beyond those of the federal government, tight privacy laws, personal leave laws that go beyond the feds and a ban on "use it or lose it" vacation rules.

California's 1,700-judge judicial system has accomplished something that appears, at least superficially, to be mathematically impossible -- increasing the representation of every ethnic and racial group wearing judicial robes.

The number that stands out the most in the Judicial Council's report for this year is that its judiciary appears to be getting whiter, even while California's white population has been declining and whites are now scarcely 40 percent of the state's residents.

The Judicial Council report reveals that white trial and appellate judges now account for 72.3 percent of the judiciary, down fractionally from 2010 but up from 70.1 percent in 2006. At the same time, however, the report shows gains by every other ethnic and racial group, as well as by women, who are now nearly 31 percent of judges, including a brand-new chief justice, Tani Cantil-Sakauye.

American Indian (or Alaska Native), African American, Latino, Asian and Pacific Islander percentages have also climbed since 2006, which would seem to defy mathematical logic. Court officials attributed it to changes in the number of judges responding to the survey or claiming more than one racial background.

The full report can be found here.

California, which is still mired in its worst recession since the Great Depression, has the nation's third-worst job market, according to a new nationwide survey by the Gallup polling organization.

Only Nevada and New Jersey are in worse shape when it comes to creating new jobs, Gallup said, adding, "Despite an overall improvement in job market conditions, five states in the bottom 10 during 2008 and 2009 were also on the list in 2010: Nevada, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and California. These states continue to suffer from the housing crash and financial debacle that was part of the recession."

Energy- and commodity-producing states such as North and South Dakota and Alaska, as well as Washington, D.C., have the best job creation climate these days, Gallup found, while perpetually depressed Michigan showed the most improvement in 2010, thanks to the revival of its auto industry. Other industry-heavy states also showed sharp improvements.

The results came from interviews with nearly 200,000 adults across the nation, asking them about whether their employers are expanding or contracting payrolls. Overall, positive job creation responses outweighed negative ones by 7 percentage points.

The Gallup report is another dose of bad economic news for California, which has shed well over a million jobs since the recession began, has a stubborn 12-plus percent unemployment rate, owes the federal government more than $10 billion for unemployment insurance loans, and faces a state budget deficit or more than $25 billion.

The full Gallup report is available here.

Californians' tax burden declined slightly in 2009, even though then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Legislature temporarily boosted income, sales and car taxes that year, according to a new compilation by the Washington-based Tax Foundation.

The state-local tax burden declined from 11 percent of personal income in 2008 to 10.6 percent in 2009, largely due to declining revenues from a recession-battered economy. But it was still high enough to maintain California's rank as having the nation's sixth highest level of taxation.

That ranking provides political ammunition to opponents of Gov. Jerry Brown's plan to ask voters to extend the taxes, more than $11 billion a year, for another five years. He says the money is needed to fill about half of the state's chronic budget deficit.

New Jersey had the highest tax burden at 12.2 percent, followed by New York at 12.1 percent. Connecticut, Wisconsin and Rhode Island also were higher than California. Alaska was lowest at 6.3 percent.

California's per capita personal income in 2009 was $46,366 and Californians' per capita tax bill was $4,910, which means state and local governments collected something in excess of $170 billion in taxes of all kinds.

The full Tax Foundation report on state and local taxation can be found here.

California has sharply increased the number of eighth-graders who take beginning algebra since 2003, but the results of that expansion are decidedly mixed, according to a new study by EdSource, a Mountain View-based educational policy think tank.

The number of eighth-graders taking Algebra I has jumped by 80 percent, with the increases especially high among low-income, African American and Latino youngsters.

"However, placing all eighth-graders into Algebra I, regardless of their preparation, sets up many students to fail," EdSource said in a summary of the study's findings. "In the EdSource study sample, almost one-third of students who scored at the two lowest levels on the state's 7th grade math test were placed into Algebra I in eighth grade - with almost no chance for success. Schools serving predominantly low-income students were more likely to make these types of placement decisions than schools serving predominantly middle-income students."

In the main, the study found, students who had received preparatory instruction fared the best, while those who hadn't tended to perform poorly on academic tests.

"California's gains in Algebra I course taking and success have raised expectations, particularly for low-income and minority students" said Matt Rosin, a senior research associate at EdSource and a member of the study team. "California's middle grades educators should continue to widen appropriate access to challenging mathematics coursework. But in doing so, they need to build on a strong math foundation for students in earlier grades and base their placement decisions on a careful understanding of students' preparedness."

The full study can be obtained from EdSource here.

California paid out a record $22.9 billion in unemployment insurance benefits to 1.7 million jobless workers in 2010, the Employment Development Department reported today.

The payout, four to fives times the normal yearly UI benefits, averaged $90 million every business day, 41.2 million checks in all, and reflected the severe recession that drove the state's unemployment rate to over 12 percent, the highest rate recorded since the early 1940s.

"The numbers are staggering and the need undeniable," said Pam Harris, EDD's chief deputy director. "Unemployment benefits are a lifeline that keeps these families and their communities afloat in these turbulent times. We have worked tirelessly to reach out to those in need, and to help them along the road to economic recovery."

The state's Unemployment Insurance Fund ran out of money many months ago and the payments, which go to about two-thirds of the state's jobless workers, have been supported ever since by billions of dollars in loans from the federal government.

The UI Fund is now nearly $10 billion in the red. President Barack Obama said recently he favors allowing states to repay the UI loans - California's is by far the largest - without interest. But eventually, UI taxes paid by employers would be increased to repay the principal.

Each member of the Los Angeles City Council costs the city's taxpayers more than those of any other major city governing body, according to a new study by the Pew Charitable Trusts.

The L.A. council's $1.7 million annual cost per member is nearly three times the median council cost in major cities. One reason is that the L.A. council's members are paid more than any others, $178,789 a year. San Antonio has the nation's lowest-paid big city council members, just $1,400 per year.

At the other extreme, Los Angeles has the smallest big city council, in comparison to population, with an average of 255,500 constituents per member. Pittsburgh, at the other hand, has one council member for every 34,600 residents. In absolute numbers, San Diego has the nation's smallest big city council with just eight members.

Los Angeles also has the lowest relative number of women on its council and is one of only three big city councils that supply members with cars.

The full study, called "City Councils in Philadelphia and Other Major Cities," can be found here.

PHOTO CREDIT: Traffic flows along the Pasadena Freeway, Friday, May 14, 2010, in Los Angeles, offering a view of the downtown skyline. AP Photo/ Kim Johnson Flodin

Gov. Jerry Brown's proposed 2011-12 budget has many controversial aspects, but one of the most contentious is his call for eliminating 425 local redevelopment agencies and redirecting about a third of their property tax revenues into other state and local services.

Last week, nine big city mayors called on Brown to abandon his proposal, claiming that redevelopment is central to economic development. But Brown insists that supporting schools and other public programs is a more important use of the funds.

Underlying the political exchanges is a phenomenal growth in redevelopment agency activity -- especially their diversion of property tax money into their own activities. By law redevelopment agencies can retain property taxes on increased development within redevelopment projects, although they must share some of it with other local governments and schools under reform legislation enacted in the 1990s.

Each year, the state controller's office publishes a thick report on the activities of redevelopment agencies, most of which are operated by city governments. And the latest report, covering the 2008-09 fiscal year, details the extent of their finances.

California has been given an "A-plus" grade for transparency -- giving its residents access to records and other aspects of state government -- but the state's counties earn only a "C," says Sunshine Review, an organization based in Alexandria, Va., that promotes open government.

Michael Barnhart, the organization's president, said, "California has one of the most transparent state governments in the country, offering an innovative government website and open meeting and record laws for its citizens, but no matter how good the grades, Sunshine Review will always be setting a new standard of transparency for governments to live up to."

Sunshine Review's state-by-state grades can be found here.

The American Lung Association praises California for its laws barring smoking in public places, but otherwise gives the state low marks in its annual state-by-state survey of anti-smoking efforts.

California - like all but a few other states - was given an "F" for its spending on anti-smoking campaigns. The Centers for Disease Control says California should be spending nearly $442 million a year, but it spends only $89.7 million, all of which comes from cigarette taxes and federal allocations.

It also gets a "D" for its relatively low level of cigarette taxes, 87 cents a pack, and another "F" for its laws and regulations compelling health insurers to cover smoking cessation treatment. Nationwide, cigarette taxes range from $4.35 a pack in New York to 17 cents in Missouri.

The lung association is one of the sponsors of a ballot measure -- which could face voters as early as June -- that would would raise the tobacco tax by $1 a pack to fund cancer research and smoking prevention programs.

Overall, the ALA says, California has 235 annual deaths per 100,000 population attributed to smoking, roughly in the middle of the states. The lowest rate of smoking deaths is in Utah, 138.3, and the highest is in adjacent Nevada, 343.7.

The full Lung Association report may be found here.

PHOTO CREDIT:Carmen Werle smokes a cigarette on her lunch break outside the Department of Justice in Sacramento on Wednesday, June 23, 2010. Kyle Grantham/Sacramento Bee.

Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn on Thursday signed a package of tax increases, including a 67 percent jump in the state's income tax rate, that will raise about $7 billion a year and close part of that state's whopping budget deficit.

Meanwhile, California Gov. Jerry Brown has proposed a package of tax increases, loophole closures and extensions that would raise approximately $11 billion a year and cover about half of the state's projected annual budget deficit.

So how do the two packages compare?

The Illinois tax package would cover less than half of that state's budget deficit and even with a two-thirds increase, the Illinois personal income tax rate will be just 5 percent, roughly half of California's top bracket rate.

In terms of impact, however, the Illinois tax hike is much larger. Overall, it amounts to roughly $2,000 per family of four (Illinois has 13 million residents), while Michael Cohen, California's deputy director of finance, told legislators this week that the Brown package would translate into about $1,000 per California family.

Gov. Jerry Brown and state legislators are struggling to close a hole in the state budget of $25-plus billion, but while it's a big number, it's just a fraction of the $254.3 billion that the state spent in the fiscal year that ended in mid-2009, according to a new Census Bureau report on state finances.

California, the nation's most populous state, was easily the highest-spending state that fiscal period, the report shows. Its $254.3 billion in spending was nearly 14 percent of the $1.8 trillion spent by all 50 states, nearly $100 billion more than No. 2 New York and more than twice as much as Texas.

The state general fund, which is the focus of the deficit debate, accounts for just a third of total state spending, which includes special funds such as those devoted to highways, and federal funds.

Federal funds accounted for about $60 billion of the state's spending while personal income taxes, at $44.4 billion, were the state's largest source of tax revenue. Education was the largest single category of state spending at $73.2 billion with welfare second at $63.6 billion.

The full report can be found here.

Editor's note: This post was changed to reflect that the report's numbers are based on the states' fiscal years that ended between July 1, 2008, and June 30, 2009.

The team over at the Legislative Analyst's Office has released a nifty "Cal Facts" pamphlet that sums up state government in 64 pages full of charts and data.

It's well worth reading for anyone interested in state policy. Or for anyone who has a role in shaping state policy, which, given the multitude of ballot measures these days, means any voter.

In two handy pages -- 12 and 13 -- the Analyst's Office sums up all of the state ballot measures since Proposition 13 that have imposed new restrictions on state and local budgeting. Page 28 shows the cost per government program participant -- $46,700 per adult inmate and $208,766 per person in youth corrections.

California's relatively small and slow-growing black population is experiencing far less residential segregation that it did in years past, but its rapidly growing Latino and Asian American populations are experiencing more, a new nationwide study of housing patterns indicates.

The study, "Racial and Ethnic Separation in the Neighborhoods: Progress at a Standstill," was written by John R. Logan of Brown University and Brian J. Stults of Florida State University, was based on data from decennial censuses and other surveys by the Census Bureau.

The authors devised a scale of zero to 100 to rate segregation, based on several factors found in the census data, and applied it to virtually every community of 10,000 population or more, but concentrating on the larger metropolitan areas. They took readings for 1980, 1990, 2000 and 2010.

Among metropolitan areas with the largest black populations, for example, the Los Angeles-Long Beach region had a black-white segregation index of 81.2 in 1980, but it's fallen steadily to a current 69.4, 12th highest in the nation (New York City is highest at 81.8, slightly higher than it was in 1980).

Oakland, another California city with a relatively high black population, saw its index drop from 74.3 in 1980 to a current 61.1. Riverside-San Bernardino, 53.6 in 1980, is 46.2 now, one of the lowest levels of segregation in the nation.

The Legislature's sharp ideological division is reflected in a scorecard on 14 key issues in the last legislative session from the Consumer Federation of California.

While 11 of 25 Democratic senators and 19 of the Assembly's 50 Democrats scored 100 percent in the organization's rankings, 23 of 29 Assembly Republicans scored under 11 percent, 16 of them zero, and nine of 15 Republican senators were under 15 percent, four at zero. The scorecard ranks lawmakers from last session, including members who are no longer in elected office.

"Not all Democratic lawmakers received high marks," the federation's spokesman, Zack Kaldveer, said. "An informal caucus of corporate-friendly Democrats often joined their Republican colleagues to kill consumer protection bills - particularly those targeted by corporate interests and their armies of lobbyists."

The Consumer Federation's 14 issues include a number of bills that the state Chamber of Commerce labels as "job killers" and the business group's rankings are a reverse mirror image, giving Republicans and a few Democrats high marks for killing business-opposed measures.

The full Consumer Federation scorecard can be found here.

As recession continues to grip the state, the number of Californians without health insurance, especially coverage provided by employers, has continued to climb, according to a new study by the California Healthcare Foundation.

Over the last two decades, the foundation says, Californians under 65 with employer-provided health insurance have dropped from 65 percent to 52 percent and "while increases in Medicaid (Medi-Cal) coverage partially offset this decline, more than 20 percent of Californians remained uninsured."

The state has the nation's highest number of uninsured, 6.8 million and one of its highest rates. The foundation, in its annual California Health Care Almanac, says 60 percent of Californians without health coverage are Latinos, and more than half of uninsured children are in families headed by full-time workers.

The complete report is available here.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says that emissions of toxic chemicals from facilities in California dropped 14 percent in 2009, but it was an uneven decline.

While releases of toxics into the air and water dropped sharply, those into underground strata jumped nearly three-fold.

In 2009, the EPA said, 1,286 California facilities emitted 38 million pounds of toxic chemicals and nearly 40 percent of them came from Chemical Waste Management's toxic waste disposal site just off Interstate 5 near Kettleman City in Kings County, which just last month was fined by the EPA for improper management of PCBs.

Residents of the area have long complained about pollution from the facility and studies have been conducted about alleged high rates of birth defects in the rural agricultural area, but nothing conclusive has been demonstrated.

The data on toxic releases come from EPA's Toxic Release Inventory, which is based on mandatory reports to the agency from disposal sites, factories and other facilities.

"These annual reports arm citizens and local governments with information about toxics that could pose potential hazards in their area," said Jared Blumenfeld, EPA regional administrator. "Federal law ensures that all communities have a right-to-know so they can make informed decisions to reduce chemical use and plan for emergency responses."

The full EPA report on California, which includes a list of the largest sites of toxic emissions and details on what kind of toxics are being released, can be found here.

California -- particularly two of its counties, Los Angeles and Humboldt -- has been declared the nation's second worst "judicial hellhole" by the American Tort Reform Association, a business-backed group that campaigns against what it says are excesses of the civil court system.

The ATRA labeled Philadelphia as having the worst climate for personal injury lawsuits and California second, saying, "California courts are known for wacky consumer class actions, extortionate disability access claims against small businesses, and expansive liability.

"Awards in Los Angeles are particularly generous. This year's $208.8 million verdict for a single asbestos claimant, the largest such award in California history, is a prime example. Humboldt County, receiving its first mention in the report, hosted a $677 million class action verdict against a nursing home provider for occasionally falling below the staffing levels required by state regulations.

"Unfair practices during the trial led Forbes to call the case 'a tort reform advocate's dream -- meaning a defendant's worst nightmare.' And a California Supreme Court ruling that permits private personal injury lawyers to bring enforcement actions on behalf of the state, even though the lawyers' interest in maximizing their fees may not serve justice in the public interest, also bodes poorly for the future."

The report was issued just as California's version of tort wars may be heating up after years of inactivity. Consumer Attorneys of California, which lobbies for plaintiffs' attorneys, and the California Civil Justice Association, the state version of the ATRA, have battled for years over rules governing personal injury lawsuits but for the past two decades the war has been mostly verbal.

California's state and local governments provide billions of dollars in subsidies to corporations, both directly and through tax loopholes, but does a poor job of revealing recipients, according to Good Jobs First, a Washington-based coalition of liberal organizations.

The group gives California a D-minus grade on disclosure of corporate subsidies, saying that not knowing who gets them makes it unduly difficult to judge how effective they have been in meeting their stated goals of improving economic activity and job creation.

"California can't afford spending big dollars on subsidies without tracking where they go and whether they deliver bang for the buck," said Emily Rusch, director of the California Public Interest Research Group, an affiliate of Good Jobs First. "When public dollars go to private businesses, we need the highest level of transparency."

Corruption-prone Illinois unexpectedly tops all other states in subsidy transparency with a B grade, while California's D-minus rates 29th place, tied with Maine.

Intense partisan battles for the governorship and a U.S. Senate seat and several high-profile ballot measures drove California's voter turnout last month to its highest level for such an election since 1994, Secretary of State Debra Bowen says.

Bowen said 10.3 million Californians cast ballots in the Nov. 2 election, 59.6 percent of those registered to vote, the highest for a non-presidential election since 1994, when 60.5 percent voted. But even though relatively high, this year's turnout was scarcely 43 percent of the 23.6 million Californians who are citizens over 18 years old and therefore could have registered and voted.

The turnout was about five percentage points, or 800,000 voters, higher than the pre-election estimate made by the Field Institute, the state's leading polling organization. The secretary of state's office used to make pre-election predictions, but Bowen stopped the practice when she took office.

"The race for governor and some controversial propositions drew the highest number of people to the polls in five gubernatorial elections," said Bowen. "I applaud the work of each county elections official and the more than 100,000 elections workers and volunteers who helped to make voting as easy as possible for every eligible Californian."

In affluent, mostly white Marin County, about one-fourth of one percent of its adult population will be sentenced to prison each year, 261.1 felons per 100,000 population.

In relatively poor, largely Latino Kings County, the imprisonment rate is six times as high, about 1.5 percent of its adult population, 1,546.4 per 100,000. The statewide rate is 684.1.

Marin and Kings represent the extremes of incarceration rates among the state's 58 counties, as revealed in a massive compilation of statistics by the San Francisco-based Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice.

CJCJ has established an interactive map of California that allows access to a wide variety of recent data, including crime rates, imprisonment rates and breakdowns by ethnicity.

Kings and other poor, rural counties tend to have much higher incarceration rates than more affluent suburban counties, and while some of the wide variation can be explained by crime rates, CJCJ maintains that local prosecution and sentencing policies have a major influence.

Marin's reported crime rate, 1,384.6 per 100,000 population, is actually a bit higher than Kings' rate, 1,327.7.

The interactive map can be found here.

California will end the decade with nearly 39 million residents, up nearly five million from the 2000 census, the state Department of Finance said Thursday.

As of July 1, the state had 38.8 million in population, which is 350,000 more than it had a year earlier, but less than a 1 percent growth rate, the department said.

The state's demographers, however, don't have the last word on the subject. Their estimate, based on births, deaths and other data, is about 1.5 million more than the Census Bureau's last pre-census projection, and the 2010 census numbers will be released soon.

The census will settle the dispute - which centers on different estimates of migration from California to other states during the decade - and if California's number is closer to the Census Bureau estimate, it could cost the state one or even two of its 53 congressional seats.

The Department of Finance report says that during the 2009-10 period, there were 525,000 births and 241,000 deaths, which accounted for 81 percent of the growth, and net migration of 66,000 made up the other 19 percent.

While overall growth was just under 1 percent, there were wide county-to-county variations. Generally, the state's inland counties grew markedly faster than those along the coast, with Riverside and Placer the fastest growing at over 1.5 percent. Tiny Sierra and Plumas counties actually lost population. Twenty-four counties grew faster than the state as a whole and 34 grew more slowly. Huge Los Angeles County, however, had the largest numerical gain of 64,125.

The complete report can be accessed here.

Despite its severe recession, California's economy is still the eighth largest in the world, the Center for the Continuing Study of the California Economy reported Thursday in an analysis of new national data.

The data came from the U.S. Department of Commerce, pegging California's economic output in 2009 at $1.9 trillion, somewhat higher than previous estimates. The Palo Alto-based CCSCE merged the Commerce Department data with the World Bank's global economic output estimates to conclude that California remains in eighth place, which it has occupied for several years after briefly moving up in the global economic rankings to fifth or sixth place.

California generated almost as much economic output as the No. 2 and No. 3 states, Texas ($1.1 trillion) and New York ($1.1 trillion), combined. And were it a nation, the state's economy would be surpassed only by the United States ($14.1 trillion), Japan ($5.1 trillion), China ($5 trillion), Germany ($3.3 trillion), France ($2.6 trillion), Great Britain ($2.2 trillion), and Italy ($2.1 trillion).

California is a very diverse state, but members of every demographic, geographic and ideological subgroup in the state agree on one thing: They don't approve of outgoing Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's performance.

That's one of the results of an extensive post-election survey of voters by the Public Policy Institute of California.

The PPIC survey found that overall, Schwarzenegger leaves office with a 32 percent approval rating among November's voters, and results were remarkably consistent among all subgroups. For instance, 68 percent of Democrats disapproved of Schwarzenegger's performance, along with 55 percent of the governor's fellow Republicans and 55 percent of independents. His approval didn't hit 40 percent in any subgroup.

Among other results of PPIC's survey, which involved 2,003 voters:

--Proposition 19, which would have legalized marijuana, drew the most voter interest. The measure lost narrowly and PPIC found that Republicans, Latinos, whites, women and older voters were most opposed.

--The second most-important ballot measure to voters was Proposition 23, which would have suspended the state's anti-greenhouse gas program - a major Schwarzenegger initiative - until unemployment dropped sharply and lost by a landslide vote. PPIC found a sharp partisan divide with more than half of Republicans supporting the measure but huge majorities of Democrats and independents opposing it.

--The nine measures on the November ballot continued a decades-long trend of placing major issues before voters and while past surveys have indicated voters like having that power, the new PPIC poll found that two-thirds of them say the 2010 initiatives were too confusing. And for the first time in the history of the organization's polling, fewer than half of those polled said they had confidence in the ability of voters to make public policy decisions on the ballot.

--Schwarzenegger is not the only political figure to get low marks from voters. Just 13 percent of those polled approve of how he and the Legislature have dealt with issues and just 12 percent approve of the Legislature. Even President Barack Obama, who won by a large margin in California two years ago, is feeling the heat with just a 53 percent approval rating. Congress, like the Legislature, is less popular at 21 percent. And despite the state's Democratic bent, 43 percent of California voters say it's a good thing that Republicans have recaptured control of the House.

--Strong margins among independent voters helped Democrat Jerry Brown win the governorship and Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer win re-election against well-financed Republican rivals, along with big margins among Latinos and women.

The full PPIC poll results can be found here.

Nearly a half-million unemployed Californians would be affected if Congress fails to extend unemployment benefits of up to 99 weeks, the state Department of Employment said Tuesday.

The more precise number is 454,000, about a fifth of California's estimated 2.4 million unemployed workers, who could see benefits return to a maximum of 26 weeks unless Congress doesn't act soon.

The issue is now before Congress in its post-election, lame-duck session but Republicans, who soon will take over the House, blocked the extension, saying they want other spending cuts to offset the cost. Democrats have accused Republicans of playing politics with the lives of jobless workers.

"We at EDD understand how critical unemployment benefits can be to unemployed
workers, their families, and the businesses in their communities. New limits on benefits,
especially just before the holidays, can be very difficult," said EDD's chief deputy,director, Pam Harris. "That's why we are working to keep our customers informed
of developments concerning federal unemployment extension benefits."

EDD said, based on historical data, that up to 150,000 of the 454,000 total are
currently certifying for benefits as part of the separate extension of benefits known as the
FED-ED extension.

The department will soon send notices to those 150,000 that their benefits may need if the federally financed extension lapses.

The Stanford University research team that shocked Sacramento this year by declaring that the state's three pension systems are more than $400 billion underfunded has struck again, saying local government pension systems are nearly $200 billion short.

The Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research team, headed by former Democratic Assemblyman Joe Nation, applied the same standard to the local funds as it did to the state's three large systems - a risk-free "discount rate" of about 4 percent on future pension fund earnings.

All public funds now use rates that are nearly twice as large, but that understates future liability, say critics, who include outgoing Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. By using unrealistically high assumptions of future earnings, Schwarzenegger and other critics say, the funds are misleading employees and government policy makers about the future costs of pensions. The most recent contracts negotiated with state employee unions by the Schwarzenegger administration included lowering pension guarantees to future employees.

Defenders of the current discount rates counter that they reflect past earnings and therefore are reasonable assumptions of what will happen in the future.

"This report confirms that all levels of government have been understating the pension debts owed by taxpayers to government workers, and that the pension reforms we achieved at the state level must be extended to all pension systems throughout the state," Schwarzenegger said in a statement. "Taxpayers are already suffering the consequences of billions of dollars in undisclosed pension debt, which is crowding out vital programs and services, and they are entitled to an honest accounting of the pension promises made by their elected officials. As the parties who bear all the consequences of undisclosed and unfunded pension debt, they deserve the truth. I encourage local elected officials and leaders to demand pension reform and full disclosure."

The latest Stanford study delved into the independent systems that are typically used by the most populous cities, counties and special districts. Smaller governments typically use the California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS), which covers state employees, for their pension programs.

While the local systems officially contend that their liabilities are 75 percent-plus covered by current assets and assumptions of future contributions and earnings, the Stanford team, using a 4 percent discount rate, drops those numbers by roughly half - some into the 35 percent range and only a couple over 50 percent.

In dollar terms, the unfunded liabilities in the report range as high as $39.8 billion in the case of the Los Angeles County Employees' Retirement Association and $34.4 billion for the City of Los Angeles' systems. In percentage terms, the East Bay Municipal Utility District has the highest unfunded liability, nearly 65 percent of obligations.

The Stanford report also lists a mid-line range, based on a 6 percent discount rate, and that drops total unfunded liability of the local systems from $195.2 billion to $89 billion, still five times as high as their official unfunded gap of $17.5 billion.

The full Stanford pension report is available here.

California's four-decade-long crackdown on smog-causing automotive emissions has paid off in sharp reductions in air pollution, a new report by the Environment California Research and Policy Center concludes.

Since 1980, the Los Angeles-based center says, peak smog levels have dropped by 70 percent in the Los Angeles area, 50 per cent in the San Diego area and in the Sacramento Valley, 40 percent in the San Francisco Bay Area, and 33 percent in the San Joaquin Valley.

"California's efforts to reduce air pollution from cars and trucks have made the state's air cleaner than it has been in decades - and Californians are healthier as a result," said Bernadette Del Chiaro, co-author of the report. "The technologies found on new car lots today were practically unimaginable even 20 years ago, much less 40 years ago. Yet thanks to strong policies, California has pushed the auto industry to innovate and engineer a greener, cleaner car."

The report says that emissions of smog-forming pollutants from cars and trucks have dropped by 85 percent since 1975, even though the number of vehicles and the amount of vehicular travel are much higher. Current automobile models emit just one percent of the pollution that vehicles of the earlier era generated.

The full report, "Clean Cars in California: Four Decades of Progress in the Unfinished Battle to Clean Up Our Air," can be found here.

Although the highly controversial overhaul of workers' compensation in 2004 sharply cut employers' costs in California, the state still has the nation's fifth most costly system of support and medical care for employees with job-related illnesses and injuries, according to a new survey.

The workers' compensation overhaul, which tightened eligibility for benefits and imposed new cost controls on medical care, is one of outgoing Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's most prized achievements, but unions, medical care providers and attorneys who specialize in workers' comp cases have tried to undo it for years.

More recently, workers' comp insurers have joined the demand for change, saying they are losing money because Schwarzenegger and outgoing Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner have sidelined major increases in premiums recommended by the Workers' Compensation Insurance Rating Bureau, saying they would raise employers' overhead and retard recovery from recession. The quasi-public State Compensation Insurance Fund, however, has raised its premiums sharply.

Critics of the system are gearing up for a major drive to modify it after Republican Schwarzenegger gives way to Democrat Jerry Brown in January. But the new cost survey, conducted by the Oregon Department of Consumer and Business Services, gives employers some ammunition to resist change.

The Oregon agency surveys workers' comp costs in all states and develops an index of insurance costs. The newest one, issued last month, finds that California, with the ninth highest costs in 2009, has jumped to No. 5 with an average of $2.68 per $100 of payroll, 31 percent above the national average. Only Montana, Alaska, Illinois and Oklahoma are higher. North Dakota has the lowest cost, just $1.02 per $100, half the national average of $2.04.

The full Oregon report can be found here.

Last month, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed a $6.8 million appropriation to continue the state's conversion of public school data to an electronic system called the California Longitudinal Pupil Achievement Data System (CALPADS), drawing the ire of state schools Supt. Jack O'Connell.

Schwarzenegger cited delays and costs in CALPADS and urged that its implementation be shifted from O'Connell's department to another agency. O'Connell, in turn, released an evaluation by Sabot Technologies, the CALPADS outside overseer, saying that the "places all CALPADS expenditures to date at risk by fundamentally risking the success of the system" and that shifting it to another agency is "highly problematic and will likely be paramount to setting that agency up for failure."

O'Connell fired another salvo Friday in the dispute between two officials who will leave office in January, releasing 2009-10 enrollment data that, he said, was collected for the first time using CALPADS.

"California districts are successfully using CALPADS to submit information that is vital in helping us develop effective policies and programs that serve the needs of our students," said O'Connell. "The student-level enrollment data in CALPADS will help districts keep track of students who otherwise might have fallen through the cracks and dropped out. Using CALPADS will also ensure that students in our highly mobile state will get access to courses and services they need when they change schools or districts."

The new data, accessible through the Internet, indicate that California's K-12 public schools continued to see a slight year-to-year enrollment decline with 6.2 million students enrolled during the last school year. Also, the data show that more than half of those students are Latino.

"The governor's veto of funding for CALPADS is a travesty," O'Connell continued. "CALPADS is an important tool for improving student achievement and our public education system. I am working with state leaders on a proposal to restore funding for CALPADS as soon as the Legislature reconvenes so that years of work and millions invested in developing this data system won't be wasted."

Information on a variety of student-related matters, including achievement scores, can be found here while a county-by-county breakdown of enrollment by ethnicity is available here.

While other indices of California's economy continue to be weak, the state's exports are continuing to recover, Beacon Economics reported Wednesday.

The private economic consulting firm, in an analysis of new trade data from the Department of Commerce, said that the $12.32 billion in goods that California businesses shipped to other countries in September was 19 percent higher than in September, 2009. And it was the 11th straight month of year-to-year increases.

"To be sure, September 2009 did not set a very high bar for comparison purposes, but the year-to-year increase was still remarkably robust," Beacon's international trade adviser, Jock O'Connell, said.

O'Connell added that after adjustment for inflation, September's exports matched those of September, 2008, when recession began driving trade downwards.

"All indications are that the sustained growth in September's exports was led by airborne shipments of high-value items such as electronics components, medical and scientific instruments, and pharmaceuticals," here.

A record 3.5 million of the state's registered voters decline to join a political party, according to updated figures released today by Secretary of State Debra Bowen.

The figure is a record both in terms of the raw number and the percentage of the voters registered decline to state, which increased from 20.18 percent (the previous record set in January) to 20.25 percent.

The state added more than 300,000 new voters between Sept. 3 and Oct. 18.

Here is the full breakdown, reflecting figures as of Oct. 18:

Total registered voters: 17,285,883 (73.4 percent of the eligible population)
Democrats: 7,620,240 (44.08 percent of registered voters)
Republicans 5,361,875 (31.02 percent of voting population)
Decline-to-state: 3,500,696 (20.25 percent of registered voters)
American Independent 413,032 (2.39 percent of registered voters)
Green: 113,835 (0.66 percent of registered voters)
Libertarian: 91,111 (0.53 percent of registered voters)
Peace and Freedom: 57,776 (0.33 percent of registered voters)
Miscellaneous: 127,318 (0.74 percent of registered voters)

Click here to read the full registration report.

Ten state Assembly members and four senators -- all Republicans -- voted 100 percent with the state Chamber of Commerce on 17 key bills this year, earning them the title of "best business votes."

At the other end of the scale, only one Democratic legislator - Stockton's Cathleen Galgiani - scored 80 percent or better in the chamber's ranking, thus illustrating the Capitol's stark ideological division.

The lowest-ranking Democrats in the chamber's tally were Sens. Jenny Oropeza of Long Beach and Patricia Wiggins of Santa Rosa, but both missed almost all of the session due to illness. Oropeza died last week.

Among active Democratic legislators, San Francisco Sen. Leland Yee scored the lowest in the chamber's rankings, voting with the business group just twice, followed by Assemblywoman Noreen Evans of Santa Rosa, the Democratic candidate to succeed Wiggins this year, with three pro-chamber votes.

The full list of bills and votes can be found here.

Curious about how much your local government officials and employees are being paid?

In the wake of the City of Bell scandal, state Controller John Chiang, whose office monitors local government finances, ordered cities and counties to submit detailed data on how much they're paying their employees, including elected officials.

Chiang now has posted preliminary results on a website along with lists of local governments that either didn't respond or didn't provide all the information demanded.

"The absence of transparency and accountability invites corruption, self-dealing, and the abuse of public funds," said Chiang. "This website will help taxpayers scrutinize local government compensation and force public officials to account for how they spend public resources."

With his actions on the final flurry of budget-related bills, Arnold Schwarzenegger goes down in political history as the modern governor most likely to veto legislation.

Peter Detwiler, chief consultant to the Senate Local Government Committee, has compiled statistics on legislation dating back to Ronald Reagan's first year as governor in 1967 and updates them annually.

This year - Schwarzenegger's last as governor - he rejected 28.77 percent of the 1,029 regular session bills that reached his desk. He set the record for vetoes in 2008 by rejecting 35.17 percent of bills passed by the Legislature.

Schwarzenegger has the three highest veto percentages of any recent governor while one of the candidates to succeed him, Democrat Jerry Brown has the three lowest veto ratios, including his last year as governor in 1982, when he rejected just 1.79 percent of bills.

Detwiler's data also prove that over the years, the Legislature's output, in terms of the number of bills passed, has declined sharply.

During the Reagan, Brown and George Deukmejian governorships, the Legislature routinely passed 1,500 to 2,000 bills each year, topped in 1990 at 2,143.Since then, output has dropped steadily, hitting bottom at 893 last year before rising a bit to 1,029 this year. But with Schwarzenegger's vetoes, only 733 became law, the second lowest total in modern history.

PHOTO: Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, left, with Sen. Elaine Alquist, D-Santa Clara, is shown during a ceremonial bill signing, Friday, Oct. 1, 2010, in Los Angeles.

With both the labor force and jobs declining, California's unemployment rate remained unchanged at 12.4 percent in September.

While 23 states and the District of Columbia reported higher employment and lower unemployment rates in the monthly federal jobs report, California shed 63,600 jobs between August and September, the largest job loss of any state.

September's unemployment rate was a bit higher than in September 2009, with employment about 43,000 lower than a year earlier. Construction jobs took the biggest hit between August and September, the Employment Development Department said, with an 8.8 percent drop. The biggest gain, 2.9 percent, was in professional and business services.

Unemployment rates ranged from a low of 8.4 percent in Marin County to a high of 30.4 percent in Imperial County, and only seven of the state's 58 counties had jobless rates below 10 percent. The full report, including breakdowns by job category and county, is available here.

Californians' purchases of new cars and light trucks, which had plummeted to just over a million vehicles in 2009, are on the rise, the California New Car Dealers Association says in its quarterly report.

As recession gripped the state, new vehicle registrations, once over two million a year, barely made it past one million in 2009, the lowest level in more than three decades, but are projected to be 100,000-plus more in 2010.

New car registrations increased by 19.8 percent in the first quarter of 2010 and 26 percent in the second quarter, but were flat in the third quarter - which the organization said reflected a short-term surge in the third quarter of 2009 due to the federal "Cash for Clunkers" rebate plan. The association expects a 5 percent gain in the fourth quarter.

The slowly increasing sales of new cars are important not only to auto dealers, but to state and local governments they are a major source of sales taxes. Each new car generates about $2,000 in taxes.

As sales have improved, Honda's Civic and Accord models have become the state's most popular new cars, replacing Toyota's long-time leader, the Camry, which has dropped to third. The full report, including a model-by-model breakdown of sales, is available here.

The Legislature's budget analyst's report on growing deficits in the state Unemployment Insurance Fund is based on outdated information and too pessimistic, the state Employment Development Department says in releasing its own UIF update.

The Legislative Analyst's Office based its report, projecting a $20-plus billion UIF deficit by the end 2011, on EDD's May semi-annual projection. And as soon as the LAO report was released, EDD released its own update projecting that unemployment in California, now approaching 2.5 million workers, will begin to decrease next year.

Instead of a $20-plus billion UIF deficit by the end of 2011, EDD now says it will be $13.4 billion. It also has revised, downward, its 2010 year-end deficit from $15.3 billion to $10.3 billion, largely because the federal government is directly financing extensions of unemployment insurance as part of the "economic stimulus" package

As Capitol politicians struggle with the state budget crisis, they've largely ignored the state's other big deficit that in another year will be as large as the gap in the state budget.

The Legislature's budget analyst, Mac Taylor, said in a report today that the deficit in the recession-battered Unemployment Insurance Fund "is projected to increase to approximately $20 billion at the end of 2011."

With nearly 2.5 million California workers jobless, the UIF is paying out more than $11 billion a year in benefits while collecting just $4.5 billion in payroll taxes paid by employers. It dropped into deficit mode in January 2009 and has been sustained since by loans from the federal government, Taylor noted.

The loans have been interest-free but the state, under current federal law, must begin paying interest next year - $500 million in September 2011 and "growing interest obligations in the out years."

Taylor said the Legislature faces "difficult choices" to return the UIF to solvency, such as reducing benefits and raising payroll taxes, either of which could also have adverse effects on the state's fragile economy. "At a minimum," Taylor recommends, the state should "take prompt action to bring (unemployment) benefits and tax revenues into line so that the accumulated deficit and associated interest obligation stops growing."

Taylor's full report can be found here.

California has the second highest bond debt burden among the nation's largest states, a new report by state Treasurer Bill Lockyer says.

The "2010 Debt Affordability Report" says that California voters have authorized $130.1 billion in general obligation bonds, of which $68.8 billion have been issued, and servicing those bonds consumes 6.89 percent of the state's general fund revenues.

Whether measured by ratio of debt to personal income, debt per capita or debt as a percentage of the state's economic output, California's debt burden is second only to New York's among the 10 most populous states. By all of those measures, California's bonded debt is more than twice as high as the average among the 10 states. Texas has the lowest debt load.

Accordingly, California has the nation's lowest state credit rating and states with low debt loads, such as Texas, have relatively high credit ratings.

The full report can be found here.

California has 1.2 million mentally ill residents and a quarter of its prison inmates suffer from mental illness, the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) says in a new nationwide survey.

Overall, NAMI gives California a "C" grade on how it deals with mental illness, just above the national "D." No state earned an "A" and just seven a "B" in the NAMI survey.

California has by far the largest number of mentally ill residents of any state and, with 12 percent of the nation's population, about 11 percent of its mentally ill. California's estimated 41,400 mentally ill state prison inmates, roughly 25 percent of the prison population, mirrors the national percentage, NAMI found.

The full NAMI report is available here.

When Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger pared nearly a billion dollars from the state budget, Democratic politicians and liberal groups cried foul and said they'd attempt to undo the cuts in health and social services when the Legislature returns to Sacramento in December.

Whether the cuts will be restored, however, depends largely on whether Democrat Jerry Brown or Republican Meg Whitman wins the governorship. Brown has been studiously nonspecific on what he'd do about the persistent state budget crisis while Whitman says she wants to cut more and reduce taxes to spur economic recovery.

A new study on state and local government financed by the Pacific Research Institute -- a conservative, San Francisco-based think tank -- implies that Whitman's position is the correct one, without specifically endorsing her approach.

California's median household income dropped nearly 3 percent in 2009 as recession gripped the state, the U.S. Census Bureau reported today.

The drop of 2.9 percent in Californians' household income mirrored almost exactly that of the nation as a whole. While the state's 2009 median income of $58,921 is still nearly $8,000 above the national level, its ranking vis-à-vis other states also declined.

In 2008, the Census Bureau calculated, California's median income of $60,625 was ninth highest among the 50 states, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia. But in 2009 it dropped to 10th behind Washington, D.C., at $59,290. Marylanders had the highest median incomes in 2009 at $69,272. Puerto Ricans had the lowest, just $18,314. Among the states, Mississippi was lowest at $36,646.

Most states saw declines in median incomes last year, with the 5.7 percent drop in Florida the worst. A few had gains, led by the 5.1 percent increase in North Dakota.

The income survey is part of a topic-by-topic release of Census Bureau data from its annual American Community Survey. Another nugget from the data: California and Arizona are the only two states west of the Mississippi whose residents' disability rates are lower than the national average.

Data from the 2010 Census will be released late this year. The newest data dump, which covers several topics, can be found here.

California's state and local governments collected $33.6 billion in taxes during the second quarter of this year, according to the Census Bureau's latest report on governmental finances.

California's tax collections were 16.6 percent of the national state and local government total of $202.2 billion, a 1.65 percent gain over the second quarter of 2009. It was the third straight quarter of year-to-year gains.

California's sales and personal income tax collections during the quarter were nearly 10 percent higher than the second quarter of 2009, the Census Bureau said, while its corporate income taxes were down nearly 43 percent. The sharp increases in sales and income taxes reflect temporary tax rate increases enacted last year.

With the April 15 income tax filing deadline falling in the quarter, nearly half of California's state-local tax collections were personal income taxes, $15.6 billion, nearly 22 percent of all the state income tax revenues in the nation.

Number-crunchers can find the complete report here.

Gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman and other Republicans contend that California's poor business climate is driving employers and their jobs out of the state, but an updated study by the Public Policy Institute of California found otherwise.

Relocations account for a tiny percentage of the state's job losses, the PPIC study found - just 1.7 percent from 1992 to 2006 and never more than 2.3 percent in any one year.

"Few businesses move into or out of California," says the report, written by PPIC's Jed Kolko. "From 1992 through 2006, about 16,000 jobs annually moved into California and about 25,000 jobs annually moved out of California. The annual net employment change in California due to relocation - a loss of about 9,000 jobs - represents only .05 percent of California's 18 million jobs."

Furthermore, Kolko's research found, California's losses from employer movement are well below the national average of the states. Washington, D.C., suffers the biggest such loss, 6.9 percent of its total employment decrease.

"In California," Kolko continues, "74 percent of job gains and 68 percent of job losses are homegrown. Most job gains are due to the births and expansions of locally owned businesses; most job losses are due to the contractions and deaths of locally owned businesses.

"Businesses headquartered outside a county contribute much less to local employment fluctuations. The homegrown shares of job gains and losses are even higher in smaller cities and towns and in rural areas. Among the non-metropolitan counties in California, 79 percent of job gains and 74 percent of job losses are homegrown. Thus, although luring businesses from elsewhere or convincing them to open or expand locally is a common economic development strategy, and preventing businesses from leaving the state is a political refrain, 4 most job gains and losses are homegrown."

What Kolko's research does not - and cannot - show, however, is whether the state's business climate is a significant deterrent to new job-creating investment. There's no objective way to determine why investments are made inside or outside the state, since investors don't reveal their reasons for such decisions.

The full PPIC study can be found here.

Californians are driving on some of the nation's roughest roads, streets and highways, the annual road condition survey by a national highway construction advocacy group says.

The Road Information Program (TRIP) says that eight major California urban areas are on the list of 20 regions with the nation's worst roadway conditions, topped by No. 1 San Jose and No. 2 Los Angeles, with 64 percent and 63 percent substandard roads respectively.

Other California regions on the top 20 list are Concord (4), San Francisco-Oakland (5), San Diego (8), Indio-Palm Springs (9), Riverside-San Bernardino (12), and Sacramento (14). California's smaller communities also are prominent on a separate TRIP list, topped by Antioch at No. 1 and Santa Rosa at No. 2.

"Roads are battered and shattered in every urban area of California, and they are costing the state's motorists hundreds of dollars a year at a time when they can ill afford it," Bert Sandman, executive director of Transportation California, a TRIP affiliate, said in a statement. "Despite the best efforts of Caltrans and local transportation agencies, it's difficult to keep up with maintenance and rehabilitation, much less accommodate relentless traffic and population growth given tight federal, state and local funding."

California's poverty rate rose in 2009 for the third straight year to 15.3 percent, according to a new Census Bureau report issued Thursday, although it's still well below the state's modern poverty high point of 18-plus percent in 1992, during last major recession.

The state's rate is one percentage point above the national poverty rate but roughly in line with the rate in Western states as a whole. It's also nearly three percentage points higher than it was in 2007.

"This is proof of just how hard the recession has hit Californians, and low-income Californians in particular," said Jean Ross, executive director of the liberal California Budget Project. "It's critical that we make smart policy choices to get the economy working for all of us."

The California Teachers Association and other advocates of higher spending on public schools often complain that California is at or near the bottom in per-pupil spending, compared to other states.

Conservatives on the other side of the school finance issue complain that too much of the state's school money is wasted, often citing the assertion that California's teachers are the highest paid in the nation.

The CTA et al. then counter that California's high salaries are not so high when the state's notoriously high cost of living is factored into the equation.

And so the debate goes, year after year, especially as the state struggles to balance its budget. But what are the facts?

EdSource, a Mountain View-based think tank on California education issues, has weighed in with a report called "How California Ranks," aimed at providing a factual basis for the debate. But it also warns that its data, like all numbers on schools, are at least a couple of years old while the overall financial picture for schools is changing constantly.

Among the report's points:

The federal government spends more money in California than any other state, thanks to its having nearly 12 percent of the nation's population, but California's per capita federal spending is one of the nation's lowest, according to an exhaustive new Census Bureau report.

The report, covering federal spending for the 2009 fiscal year, says that Californians received $346 billion in federal funds during the year from dozens of specific programs, including Social Security, 10.7 percent of the $3.2 trillion in federal outlays. California's per capita spending, however, was 36th among the states - in part because with a relatively young population, the state was 48th in retirement and disability payments.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and other California political figures have complained about the relative low return of federal funds to the state, but if Social Security is a major factor in such low ranking, there may be little or nothing that politicians can do about the situation.

That's especially true when California once was the recipient of 20 percent of national defense spending but that has since fallen to 11 percent. Virginia - home of the Pentagon - now is the largest destination of defense spending.

California's $346 billion in federal spending in 2009 was actually a sharp increase from the $300 billion in 2008 and the $260 million in 2007. One reason for the increase is the state's high unemployment rate. The feds spent $12.1 billion on unemployment insurance payments in 2009.

Within California, Los Angeles County - home of more than a quarter of the state's population - was also the state's largest recipient of federal funds in 2009, $80.2 billion or 23 percent of the state's total.

The complete report, with dozens of detailed charts that break down federal spending by state, county, program and department, is available here.

California's stubborn recession -- the worst since the Great Depression -- began with the crash of a high-flying housing industry that had been fueled with billions of dollars in speculative mortgage money.

The extent of that crash has been charted in a very detailed examination of housing economic impacts in California by the California Homebuilding Foundation and the Center for Strategic Economic Research.

At its apex in 2005, the study found, housing accounted for $67.7 billion in direct economic activity and nearly a half-million jobs but by 2009, the numbers had dropped to $13.8 billion and 77,000 jobs -- and overall decline of about 80 percent.

The industry's rise and fall had immense ripple effects. Sharply rising home prices, for example, sparked an explosion of equity-based borrowing by homeowners that fueled spending on remodeling, landscaping, auto and recreational vehicle sales and other retail activities. But with the crash, home prices dropped sharply and consumers throttled back their spending, with major effects on other sectors.

The full study can be found here.

PHOTO CREDIT: A worker applies grout to stone veneer on a house under construction in Elk Grove. Autumn Cruz/ Sacramento Bee file photo, Nov. 13, 2009.

Facing reduced revenues and state aid, California's cities, counties and school districts have loaded the November ballot with more than 100 bond issue and tax increase measures, according to a compilation by the California Taxpayers Association.

They include six cities that want to impose taxes on local marijuana dispenseries.

Nearly a third of the ballot measures would impose what are called "parcel taxes," a form of property tax that does not reflect value and thus is outside Proposition 13's limit on value-related property taxes.Oakland Unified School District, for example, wants to collect $195 per year per parcel of property, if voters allow.

There are 29 school bond issues and two local government bonds, seven proposed increases in hotel taxes, 12 city or county sales tax hikes, 16 utility tax boosts, six increases in vehicle registration fees, and one new business tax.

The liberal San Francisco Bay area appears to be the vortex of local tax and bond proposals. San Francisco itself wants a $46.15 million bond issue for seismic refits, an increase in the hotel tax and a $10 per year increase in vehicle fees.

One of the most controversial proposals, however, is in San Diego, where leaders want a half-cent boost in sales taxes for five years to ease the city's budget woes, caused in part by deficits in its pension fund. The pension fund scandal has wracked the city for years and forced one mayor out of office.

Most of the proposed sales tax hikes are, like San Diego's, a half-cent and if approved would push the total state-local sales tax rate to nearly 10 cents on the dollar in some locales, including a temporary one-cent increase in the state's share of the sales tax due to expire next year.

Illegal immigrants constitute just over 4 percent of the nation's adult population but are producing 8 percent of the nation's babies, a new study by the Pew Hispanic Center has revealed.

Why? Immigrants, the study report says, are younger than the population as a whole and have relatively high birthrates.

The study, based on both Census Bureau data and the Pew center's own research, was released as the "anchor baby" controversy heats up in national politics. Some Republicans have called for changing the U.S. Constitution's provision that grants citizenship to babies born in the country regardless of their parents' immigration status. The 14th Amendment was enacted in 1868 to legalize children of former slaves.

While the Pew study was national in scope, its proportions would be higher in states with high levels of illegal immigration, particularly California. There are an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the country, about a quarter of whom are in California, past studies have indicated. That's roughly 8 percent of the state's population, twice the national proportion.

The Pew study would imply, therefore, that perhaps 16 percent of the 500,000-plus babies born each year in California have illegal immigrant parents. That's roughly in line with other calculations.

State Department of Health Services birth statistics don't delve into the legal status of parents, but they do reveal that nearly half of the state's babies are born to immigrant mothers. Overall, the foreign-born population of California is estimated at some 13 million, or more than a third of the state's population. Legal immigrants outnumber illegal immigrants in the state by 3 to 1.

The full Pew report is available here.

California's export trade is continuing its sharp recovery with shipments during June up by nearly 23 percent over the same month of 2009, an analysis by Beacon Economics of monthly Commerce Department data shows.

It was the eighth straight month of year-over-year increases, Beacon's trade advisor, Jock O'Connell, said, adding that during the first six months of 2010, California's merchandise exports totaled $68.46 billion, a 21.5 percent increase over the first half of 2009.

"This is good news,"O'Connell said. "We continue to dig ourselves out of a deep trough. A year ago now, we were plumbing the depths of a global recession in international trade. Today, while we have not returned to 2008 levels, our exports are just about even with where they were in 2007."

However, O'Connell said the rate of export growth may decline later in the year due to sluggish levels fo global trade. "Somewhere there may be a mystic soothsayer forecasting a robust expansion in world trade, but no one else is," O'Connell said. "Instead, there is a general sense that the air is about to go out of the balloon as governments worldwide implement harsh deficit-reduction policies even though private sector demand remains fairly tepid."

Imports through California were also up in June, 29.9 percent over June 2009. O'Connell's full report, including detailed breakdowns of exports by country and commodity type, can be found here.

Hammered by recession, Californians' personal incomes dropped by nearly $40 billion in 2009, according to a new report from the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis. It was California's first year-to-year decline in personal income since World War II.

The decline, 2.4 percent, was a third more than the national 1.8 percent personal income drop, reflecting the relative intensity of the state's recession, which has driven unemployment beyond 12 percent. With less money to spend, Californians have sharply reduced their retail spending and state and local governments have felt the effects in lower income and sales tax revenues.

Californians' personal income had risen to $1.6 trillion in 2008, two percent higher than 2007, but dropped to $1.56 trillion last year, falling back to just below the 2007 level.

A map showing California in relation to other states is available here.

California's white male high school graduates are the least likely societal subgroup to immediately continue their educations in public colleges and universities, the California Postsecondary Education Commission has found in a compilation of 2008-vintage data.

Overall, 48.3 percent of 2008's high school graduates enrolled in the University of California, the California State University system or one of the state's 110 community colleges, a rate that's been drifting downward over the past couple of decades.

Asian/Pacific Islander graduates of both genders are the most likely to move quickly into post-secondary education at 64.7 percent, down five points from the high a year earlier. Filipino Americans are next at 63.9 percent, followed by African Americans at 48.7 percent, Native Americans at 48.3 percent, Latinos at 47.1 percent and whites at 41.8 percent.

White males, at 41.2 percent, are the lowest enrolling subgroup. However, the data don't measure private college enrollments or college attendance later.

The data also show a large gap in the type of higher education sought with 23.1 percent Asian/Pacific Islander graduates entering the UC system, more than twice the percentage of any other group. At the other end of the scale, just 4 percent of Latino graduates and 5.7 percent of white graduates attend a UC school.

The full report, which can be drilled in depth for other data, is available here.

PHOTO CREDIT: A UC Davis Visitor Services tour guide addresses a group of potential incoming freshmen and others during a walking tour of the campus on April 14, 2008. Sacramento Bee / Randall Benton

Democrats Jerry Brown and Barbara Boxer hold narrow leads over their Republican challengers with more than three months of campaigning to come before the November election, a new Public Policy Institute of California poll has found.

The poll, conducted during the first weeks of July, found that Attorney General Brown, the Democratic candidate for governor, is virtually tied with Republican Meg Whitman, leading 37 percent to 34 percent among likely voters with 23 percent still undecided.

PPIC also found Boxer, a three-term U.S. senator, leading Republican Carly Fiorina 39 percent to 34 percent with 22 percent undecided.

The margins are similar to those in other recent polls, but PPIC's survey found substantially more undecided voters than the others.

The PPIC poll was geared to environmental concerns and found that Brown and Boxer both hold large leads among voters who consider environmental issues "very important."

The pro-immigrant Immigration Policy Center today released a massive state-by-state survey of immigrants' economic and political impact, clearly aimed at boosting prospects of immigration reform in Congress, and California, not surprisingly, is a major feature of the report.

"Immigrants, Latinos, and Asians account for large and growing shares of the U.S. economy and electorate," the Washington-based organization said. "Overall, immigrants made up more than 12 percent of the U.S. population (or nearly 38 million people) in 2008, and more than 43 percent of them are naturalized U.S. citizens meaning they are eligible to vote."

"Immigrant, Latino, and Asian workers and entrepreneurs are integral to the U.S. economy and tax base - and they are an electoral force with which every politician must reckon," the center continued.

The compilation of data from various sources included a profile of immigrants in California, concluding that foreign-born Californians are now more than a quarter of the state's population, nearly that proportion of its registered voters and more than a third of its labor force.

The data cited for Latino and Asian voting in California, drawn from the 2008 presidential election, however, don't compute.

Film-making, California's most famous industry, has been shedding jobs in the state and is in danger of going the way of the once-powerful aerospace industry, the Milken Institute says in a study released Thursday.

"California has lost 36,000 total jobs, $2.4 billion in wages and $4.2 billion in total economic output," Milken said.

"Those benefits would still be here boosting the economy if the state had been able to maintain the share of industry employment it enjoyed in 1997. Instead, these jobs have been going to places like New York, Vancouver, and even New Mexico, Louisiana and Georgia."

The study found that the number of movies wholly or partially filmed in California has dropped from 272 in 2000 to 160 in 2008. The state's share of North American film-making has declined from 40 percent in 1997 to 37.4 percent.

At the behest of one-time action movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger, the state has enacted a tax credit for in-state movie production. The governor says it's beginning to bear fruit.

But Milken says more steps are needed to restore the industry's prominence in the state, including more tax incentives to match those of other states and Canada.

The full report, called "Film Flight," can be found here.

PHOTO CREDIT: An extra in the DreamWorks' production of "The Soloist" walks past movie lights during a location shoot at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles on March 20, 2008. (AP File Photo/ Damian Dovarganes)

After several years of sharp declines, California's new car sales appear to be headed upward in 2010, a new report from the California New Car Dealers Association says.

Sales of cars and light trucks, which had been running more than two million units a year prior to the recession, dropped to scarcely one million in 2009, the lowest level in some 35 years, and dozens of new car dealerships went out of business.

The association forecast a 15.3 percent increase to 1.2 million vehicles this year and through the first half of the year, sales are up by 23 percent over 2009. That's 44,000 more units, each of which generates about $2,000 in state and local sales taxes.

"We have seen the bottom and folks are returning to the showroom" said Tom Hoffman, owner of Puente Hills Chevrolet and CNCDA chairman.

The report, which includes a model-by-model breakdown, can be found here.

PHOTO CREDIT: Assemblyline robots weld the new 2005 Ford Mustang at the AutoAlliance International plant in Flat Rock, Mich., on Sept. 27, 2005. (AP File Photo/ Carlos Osorio)

Hate crimes reported to police declined by more than one-fifth in 2009, the Department of Justice said Thursday in its annual report on such offenses, and the drop in violent hate crimes was slightly larger.

Overall, the department said, hate crimes have declined by half since peaking in 2001, from 2,261 to last year's 1,100. Of last year's reports, 479 were referred to prosecutors, 363 criminal cases were filed, 283 of them as hate crimes, and there were 223 convictions, 131 for hate crimes.

"While the drop in these crimes is encouraging," Attorney General Jerry Brown said in a statement, "hate has certainly not been banished from California. The sheer total of incidents motivated by hate is a reminder of how much harder we need to work to overcome prejudice, bigotry and ignorance."

The full report may be read here.

A major overhaul in California's system of compensating workers for job-related illnesses and injuries took effect in mid-decade, dramatically cutting costs for medical care and direct payments, and profits of workers' compensation insurers soared.

In 2006, according to the Workers' Compensation Insurance Rating Bureau, insurers earned nearly 27 percent on employer-paid premiums of $17.3 billion. The rising profits fueled demands by labor unions, medical care providers and workers' comp attorneys that the overhaul, pushed through the Legislature by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, be modified.

Since then, however, premiums have plummeted to $9.1 billion in 2009 and costs, especially medical costs, have increased sharply. And the result, the rating bureau says, is that insurers lost $1.5 billion on workers' compensation policies last year after breaking even in 2008.

Local assessors and the state Board of Equalization are still compiling final data, but it appears that local governments will see another decline in property tax revenues this year.

The sharp decline in the state's residential and commercial property market resulted in a 2.3 percent decrease in taxable property values last year to $4.4 trillion and preliminary reports from counties indicate another drop in the same neighborhood, or perhaps even more. One county, Calaveras, has already recorded a 12 percent decline, according to the California Taxpayers' Association.

A 2 percent decline translates into a nearly $1 billion drop in property tax revenues to counties, cities, school districts and other local government agencies. Shortfalls to schools must be made up by additional state aid. Property tax rates are fixed at 1 percent of assessed value under Proposition 13, enacted in 1978, plus the amount needed for debt service, about a tenth of 1 percent.

A county-by-county compilation of 2009-2010 property tax data is available here. Numbers for 2010-2011 are due to be finalized within a few weeks.

PHOTO CREDIT: In this July 24, 2009 file photo, a pending home sale in Palo Alto is shown. (AP Photo/ Paul Sakuma)

As California's tax revenues and state spending have dropped in recent years, the amount of money the state must spend to service bond debt has remained fixed.

The result, according to a new analysis of state debt by the Legislative Analyst's Office, is that the percentage of state spending devoted to repayment has been climbing and is likely to keep growing as more bonds are issued.

Debt service is now about 6 percent of the state's $86 billion general fund budget, more than twice what it was a decade ago, thanks both to more borrowing and either stagnant or declining spending during the decade. Since 2000, voters have authorized nearly $97 billion in new bond issues, although not all of them have been sold.

Borrowing, coupled with stagnation in spending due to a stubborn recession, could push the portion of the budget devoted to bond service past 8 percent by mid-decade, the analysis says.

The analysis was prepared by the Legislative Analyst's Office to accompany its voter guide explanation of a new $11.1 billion water bond issue, Proposition 18, on the November ballot. But it may be moot: Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and legislative leaders, fearing its rejection, want to delay placing the bond before voters until 2012.

The full bond debt overview can be accessed here.

PHOTO CREDIT: Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger speaks at a rally in support of his water bond proposal at the state Capitol on Aug. 13, 2008. Sacramento Bee file photo/ Brian Baer.

For many years, the secretary of state's office would issue pre-election forecasts of voter turnout, but when Debra Bowen won the office, she stopped the practice.

In her stead, the Field Institute, the state's most venerable polling organization, has been issuing its own turnout forecasts, based on its surveys of registered voters. Before the June primary, Field predicted that a third of the state's registered voters would cast ballots.

Bowen has confirmed Field's turnout prediction was right on the money. Exactly 33.3 percent of California's registered voters -- 5.65 million in all -- cast ballots, either in person or by mail.

Despite Field's prediction, Bowen labeled the turnout "somewhat surprising given some of the high-profile primary and initiative contests on the ballot."

Turnout was five percentage points higher than the 2008 primary election, but there were no statewide contests then at issue and the presidential vote was a foregone conclusion. This year's turnout was almost identical, however, to that of the 2006 primary.

Tiny Sierra County had the state's highest turnout, 73.3 percent, and gigantic Los Angeles County, with more than a quarter of the state's population, had the lowest, 23.5 percent. Nearly 58 percent of June's votes were via vote-by-mail ballot, continuing a years-long trend of lower in-person voting.

The full election results may be found here -- with the caveat that a recount is under way in the 40th Senate District, where two Democrats are separated by just a handful of votes.

PHOTO CREDIT: Juliet Shah, 4 1/ 2 months old, looks up at her father, Cyril Shah, as he votes in Sacramento during the primary election on June 3, 2008. Sacramento Bee file photo/ Bryan Patrick

Virtually all of California faces the prospect of serious water shortages by mid-century due to climate change, the National Resources Defense Council declared today in a national report on water supply.

The NRDC report, prepared by Tetra Tech, says that water shortages loom for more than 1,100 counties, a third of all those in the 48 adjacent states. California is one of 14 states that face extreme or high risk of water shortages.

Dan Lashof, director of the NRDC climate center, said, "This analysis shows climate change will take a serious toll on water supplies throughout the country in the coming decades, with over one out of three U.S. counties facing greater risks of water shortages. Water shortages can strangle economic development and agricultural production and affected communities. As a result, cities and states will bear real and significant costs if Congress fails to take the steps necessary to slow down and reverse the warming trend."

A new state water plan, enacted last year, is aimed in part at offsetting changes in water supply from climate change, but the centerpiece of the plan, an $11.1 billion bond issue, may be removed from the November ballot. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and legislative leaders are concerned that it may be rejected due to significant opposition, especially from environmental groups, and voter angst as the state's recession continues.

The full NRDC report, which includes access to a map of California counties at risk, may be found here.

PHOTO CREDIT: Dust billows as a farmer plows a dry field April 16, 2009, near Buttonwillow. (Photo by David McNew/ Getty Images)

California's supply of physicians has been growing faster than its population in recent years and now matches the national ratio. While specialists abound, however, primary care physicians are in relatively short supply and the squeeze could increase as older doctors retire and demand for care increases under the new federal health plan.

So concludes a statistical report by the California Healthcare Foundation. "With large numbers of physicians nearing retirement," the foundation says, "and not all doctors taking patients with private or public insurance, those seeking care, especially in some regions, could have difficulty finding a provider."

Nearly 30 percent of California's physicians are 60 years or older, a higher percentage than any other state, the study found, and the state is increasingly dependent on foreign-trained physicians.

The full report can be found here.

PHOTO CREDIT: Dr. Nathan Hitzeman, a primary care physician, discusses a patient's symptoms with third-year resident Laura Applebaum at Sutter's Alhambra Family Practice on May 20, 2010. Sacramento Bee / Manny Crisostomo

California is home to 26 percent of an estimated 2.1 million young illegal immigrants who could earn legal status with the proposed federal DREAM Act, according to a new study by the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.

The study released this month by the nonpartisan research center uses data from the 2006 and 2008 federal Current Population Survey, along with 2000 Census information to estimate the size of this population of children and young adults.

California is home to by far the greatest number - 553,000 - of potential beneficiaries of the proposal, the study found. The study puts Texas in second place, with 258,000, or 12 percent, followed by Florida, with 192,000 or 9 percent; New York with 146,000 or 7 percent; and Arizona with 114,000 or 5 percent.

The Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors, or DREAM, Act, was first introduced in 2001 by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill.

Durbin and Rep. Howard Berman, D-North Hollywood, reintroduced the proposal last year and interest in it was rekindled recently with President Obama's speech calling for immigration reform.

Nearly a quarter of California's children have never seen a dentist, with black and Latino children and those whose families lack public or private dental insurance having the lowest rates of dental care, according to a new study from the California Health Care Foundation and UCLA's Center for Health Policy Research.

The biggest disparity appears to be keyed to dental insurance coverage. Fifty-four percent of privately insured children and 27 percent of publicly insured children had seen a dentist in the six months before the survey interviews, but just 12 percent of uninsured children had done so.

The study is published in the July issue of Health Affairs. It covers children 11 and under and is based on data from the 2005 California Health Interview Survey.

Interestingly, while researchers found that Latino and black children were less likely than Asian American or white children to have dental care, that disparity held true even among children of all races covered by Medi-Cal and the Children's Health Insurance Program.

The co-authors of the study, Nadereh Pourat, director of research planning at the UCLA center, and Len Finocchio, senior program officer at the health care foundation, said their findings raise concerns about the ability of public dental care programs and suggest that raising reimbursement rates to dentists and expanding the pool of providers might be needed.

The full report is available here.

PHOTO CREDIT: Children at Bates Elementary School in Courtland receive free dental care in a traveling dental van through the Healthy Families insurance program for low income children, Tuesday, July 12, 2005. Sacramento Bee file photo / Lezlie Sterling

Is California stressed or what?

Each month, the Associated Press generates a county-by-county index of economic stress for the entire nation and 13 of the 20 most stressed U.S. counties are in California, topped by poverty-wracked Imperial County in the state's southeastern corner.

The AP index is based on unemployment, home foreclosure and bankruptcy rates and any number over 11 is considered to indicate stress. Imperial, a mostly Latino, agricultural county, tops the nation with an index of 31.74 and adjacent Yuma County, Ariz., has the second highest rate, 29.14.

California counties on the high-stress list include No. 4 Merced, 24.55; Sutter, 23.93; Stanislaus, 23.6; Yuba, 23.59; San Benito, 23.12; San Joaquin, 22.65; Lake, 21.59; Riverside, 21.23; Kern, 21.14; Madera, 20.53; San Bernardino, 20.45; and Fresno, 20.01.

No California county is found on the AP's least-stressed list, whose leader is Ward County, S.D., at 3.35. Most others on the least-stressed list are in the upper Midwest.

The full AP account can be found here. The most- and least-stressed counties are listed here.

PHOTO CREDIT: Vacant storefronts are seen on Main Street March 12, 2009, in El Centro, the largest city in Imperial County. (David McNew/ Getty Images)

High-technology may become the dominant sector of California's diverse economy someday, but today it's still relatively small potatoes in terms of employment, a new study by the Public Policy Institute of California has found, even if it's higher in California than in other states.

High-tech industries employ 4.3 percent of California's workers, a proportion that has remained constant even as overall employment in the state has declined sharply due to recession, PPIC found. But that's markedly lower than the 5.6 percent level recorded in 2000, just before the much-heralded bust of the dot-com industry.

About half of the state's high-tech workers are employed in the manufacturing end of the industry, with another third in computer systems design, but the trend is toward more employment in high-tech services as manufacturing shifts to other states or nations. At one point, two decades ago, manufacturing employed two-thirds of high-tech workers.

The full PPIC report is available here.

Tulare County's three biggest cities collectively have the lowest quality of life in the 109 mid-sized American metropolitan areas in new survey by Portfolio.com, a website of local business newspapers -- and the main reason are their lack of college-trained professional workers.

The Visalia-Tulare-Porterville area "has the lowest percentage of management and professional workers in the study, 23.9 percent, which is less than half of Boulder's 50.1 percent," the report says, adding that it "is also dead last in the share of adults with college degrees, 12.7 percent."

Boulder, Colo., was rated tops in the Portfolio.com evaluation, which is based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau. And like Boulder, the other top-rated communities are all college towns.

Santa Cruz, another college town, was the highest ranking California community in the survey, taking 31st place, with still another college town, San Luis Obispo at 33rd. Other California cities on the list are Santa Rosa (61st), Vallejo (81st), Salinas (92nd), Stockton (102nd) and Modesto (103rd).

The Portfolio. Com article can be found here while the complete rankings are available here.

The state auditor's office received nearly 5,000 complaints of improper activities by state employees on its whistleblower line in 2009 and nearly 900 of them warranted more detailed investigation, the office said in its annual report today.

The reports and investigations were winnowed down to 11 "particularly significant" cases, including that of a Department of Industrial Relations investigator who misused $70,105 in state resources for her private safety instruction career for six years. She resigned during an internal followup investigation, and the department is determining whether to seek restitution.

Other problems outlined in the report include:

A supervisor in a Department of Water Resources field office improperly took $1,840 in stock car race tickets -- including a three-day trip to Florida for the Daytona 500 -- from a vendor that he had signed up as a department supplier.

A supervisor at the Herman G. Stark Correctional Facility made two psychiatric technicians perform clerical work for two and half years, wasting $110,797 in state funds by underusing the workers.

The full report is available here.

A record 174 of California's school districts have been identified as financially troubled by the state Department of Education, 38 percent more than appeared on a January list.

State schools Supt. Jack O'Connell said today the increasing number of distressed districts, including 14 receiving "negative certification" that could come under state supervision, reflects their declining state and local tax revenues. He termed it "a period of unprecedented fiscal crisis."

O'Connell, who is leaving office at the end of this year, released the list as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and legislators wrangle over how to close a $19-plus billion state budget deficit with education finance, roughly 40 percent of the budget, a major issue.

The 174 troubled districts are about 16 percent of all school districts in the state, but include many of the larger urban districts, including Los Angeles Unified, the nation's second largest school system with a $6 billion annual budget.

The full list can be found here.

California's crime rate declined in 2009, including a 6.6 percent drop in violent crime, Attorney General Jerry Brown reported today.

It's not only good news for the state, but good news for Brown, who is the Democratic candidate for governor.

"This latest drop in crime," Brown said in a statement, "is good news for Californians and reflects well on the dedicated and courageous efforts of peace officers throughout the state. Yet it is no cause for complacency. Crime remains a serious problem in California, and law enforcement officials at every level must redouble their efforts to ensure public safety."

The drop in crime rates was pretty much across the board, from homicide, down 8.9 percent, to auto theft, 15.8 percent lower. And it continues a years-long trend of lower crime rates that began after criminal activity hit a high point nearly two decades ago.

Crime rates in 1992 and have since dropped by 50 percent overall, a trend also seen in arrest statistics. There were 1.9 million arrests in 1992, when the state's population was about 30 million, but just 1.4 million last year, with a population about 25 percent higher than in 1992.

Brown said lower crime rates were recorded in all five of the state's largest counties. The full set of crime reports can be found here.

PHOTO CREDIT: Attorney General Jerry Brown, Sacramento Bee file photo, May 6, 2010. Hector Amezcua / hamezcua@sacbee.com

California's budget deficit is estimated at just under $20 billion, but it could be overshadowed next year by the rapidly increasing gap between income and outgo in the state fund that pays unemployment insurance benefits.

A new forecast of the Unemployment Insurance Fund's long-term condition, published by the Employment Development Department, says the UIF's deficit, which was $6.2 billion at the end of 2009, is expected to hit $15.3 billion by the end of this year and $20.9 billion by the end of 2011.

That forecast, believe it or not, contains a nugget of good news. The 2011 year-end deficit had been projected to be even higher, but a slow recovery from recession, the department says, should increase employment over the next year and a half and therefore reduce the outflow of unemployment checks.

A California family with two working parents needs an annual income of $75,500 to meet its basic needs, the California Budget Project, a left-leaning economic analysis organization, said today in a detailed report on costs of living -- aimed at influencing state budget deliberations now underway.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed deep cuts in welfare, health care and other social safety net services to close the state's whopping budget deficit.

"Our report strives to paint an accurate picture of what it costs for working families to pay the bills. We found that making ends meet remains out of reach for millions of Californians," said Jean Ross, executive director of the CBP. "As state policymakers craft a spending plan this summer, it's important that they support the public systems and structures that working families rely on, such as state-supported child care."

The CBP's estimate of a $75,500 income to meet basic needs would mean that both parents would have to be working with the equivalent wages of $18.15 per hour each. With adjustment for child care and other expenses, the study found, a two-parent family with a single working parent would need $54,039 per year, a single parent would need $64,239 and a single adult without a family would need $30,445.

The report, which includes county-by-county estimates of living expenses, is available here.

PHOTO: Jean Ross, California Budget Project.

Los Angeles County has one of the nation's lowest rates of smoking. But after years of sharp decline, the rate has remained static for the past eight years, according to a new study by the county's health department.

L.A. County's 10-plus million residents are more than a quarter of the state's population and the new study says 14 percent of its non-children - more than a million persons - are smoking, including 12 percent of teenagers.

The county's smoking rate is virtually identical to California's statewide rate, which is the second lowest of any state. Utah is by far the lowest at less than 10 percent, while Kentucky, a tobacco-growing state, is highest at 28-plus percent. California has spent tens of millions of dollars, much of it raised from cigarette taxes, to persuade Californians to quit smoking.

The Los Angeles study found wide disparities in smoking rates among the county's geographic areas and ethnic groups.

Wealthy, mostly white and Asian-American San Marino had the county's lowest rate of smoking, 5.3 percent, while in Quartz Hill, due north of San Marino on the other side of the San Gabriel Mountains, it was 21.9 percent.

L.A.'s men are more likely to smoke (19 percent) than women (10 percent) and black Angelenos, at 25 percent, are heavier smokers than whites (15 percent), Latinos (12 percent) or Asian Americans (11 percent).

"Targeted efforts are needed to further reduce cigarette smoking, especially among high-risk groups," the county's public health director, Dr. Jonathon Fielding, said in a cover letter.

The full report is available here.

California's utilities, under state order to sharply increase their portfolios of "renewable" power generation -- i.e. solar, wind and geothermal -- are showing major movement, the Public Utilities Commission said today.

The commission, in a quarterly report on reaching the goal of 20 percent renewables by 2010 and 33 percent by 2020, said that during the first three months of this year, the utilities hit 15.4 percent, up from 13 percent in 2008. They are on track to reach 18 percent by the end of this year and 21 percent next year, the PUC report said.

State laws passed in 2002 and 2006 set the 20 percent mark for 2010. Two years ago, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger established the 33 percent goal by executive order.

Southern California Edison has the highest percentage of renewable sources, 17.4 percent, followed by Pacific Gas and Electric, 14.4 percent, and San Diego Gas and Electric, 10.5 percent. Those three utilities provide about two-thirds of the state's electric power. The remaining third comes mostly through municipal utilities and irrigation districts.

The full PUC report is available here.

UPDATED at 3:00 p.m. to add information about auditor's analysis of data.

The 620 remaining applicants for seats on the state's new redistricting commission are mostly affluent white male Democrats, according to a new statistical study by one of those on the list.

Vladimir Kogan, a refugee from the Soviet Union who later became a journalist and political science scholar, reviewed the on-line profiles of all 620 to create his demographic and political profile. He is a researcher on governance issues for the Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University and a doctoral candidate at the University of California, San Diego.

Kogan found that 67.6 percent of those on the list are non-Latino whites -- roughly comparable to the proportion of the electorate that's white but more than 25 percentage points higher than the white non-Latino proportion of the overall population.

His analysis also determined that 53.3 percent are Democrats -- about nine percentage points higher than Democratic voter registration statewide -- and just 28.9 percent are Republicans, about two points below GOP registration.

California's chronic economic, fiscal and political woes have been drawing global media attention, including more than a few comparisons to hapless Greece.

The Atlantic magazine is the latest media outlet to take a potshot at California. Its July/August 2010 issue is devoted to big ideas, such as the concept that women are replacing men in economic, cultural and political prominence - and it does mention Republican candidates for governor and senator, Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina, in that context.

The Atlantic's shot at California, however, is found on its snarky list of "ideas we're having second thoughts about." It places California on the list, without explanation, along with Elizabeth Edwards, special envoys, "quants" (a.k.a. quantitative analysts), capitalism, e-mail, the Senate and the euro.

Exports from California continued to increase in April, partially offsetting deep reductions in the past few years, but they still remain well below their peaks and the European economic crisis makes the export future cloudy, Beacon Economics said today.

The private economic organization's trade adviser, Jock O'Connell, based his analysis on the newest data from the Department of Commerce, released this morning. Exports through California rose 21.8 percent in April over April 2009 to $11.26 billion. It was the sixth straight month of year-to-year gains.

"Impressive as these numbers certainly are, it's worth keeping in mind that we are still exporting less in real dollar terms than we were in April 2008," O'Connell said, adding concerns about the future.

"Since January 1st, the euro has lost between 16 percent and 18 percent of its value against the dollar and most other major currencies," O'Connell continued. "So it's not simply that our goods have become more expensive for Europeans to buy, it also means that European goods have become cheaper for importers in countries like Canada, Mexico, Japan, China, and South Korea - which represent California's top five export markets.

"We compete intensively against European exporters in all of those markets, and they've just cut their prices."

April's export rise was concentrated in Southern California ports with the number of loaded shipping containers leaving Los Angeles and Long Beach up 10.1 percent. Exports through the Port of Oakland were virtually unchanged in April from a year earlier.

The full Beacon Economics report is available here.

California's venerable Field Poll is the nation's most reliable political poll in terms of reflecting outcomes, according to FiveThirtyEight, a Chicago-based website that specializes in political data.

The website -- named for the number of votes in the presidential electoral college -- is the handiwork of Nate Silver, who runs a sports media company called Baseball Prospectus and says, "baseball and politics are data-driven industries. But a lot of the time, that data might be used badly. In baseball, that may mean looking at a statistic like batting average when things like on-base percentage and slugging percentage are far more correlated with winning ballgames. In politics, that might mean cherry-picking a certain polling result or weaving together a narrative that isn't supported by the demographic evidence."

To rate the reliability of political polls, Silver collected 4,700 polls in races for president, U.S. Senate, Congress and governorships since 1998, plus the outcomes of the contests, and devised a reliability index that he applied both to polls with 10 or more surveys and those with any number.

The Field Poll, founded by Mervin Field more than 60 years ago and based in San Francisco, came out on top of both listings, bettering even the Gallup Poll and those conducted by national news organizations. The Public Policy Institute of California's poll ranked 31st in the latter group but the state's third major poll, conducted by the Los Angeles Times, ranked near the bottom.

The Field Poll appears in the Sacramento Bee and other newspapers. The full FiveThirtyEight rankings are available here.

Los Angeles is one of the nation's most fiscally troubled big cities, according to a study by the Pew Charitable Trusts.

While all of the 13 cities in Pew's ongoing examination are feeling the budgetary pinch of recession, Los Angeles' deficit, about 11 percent of its projected budget, is the fourth highest, behind Chicago, Kansas City and Phoenix. Pittsburgh was found to be the least troubled of the 13.

"Like Detroit, Los Angeles was confronting a big shortfall, talk of municipal bankruptcy and distrust between City Council and the mayor about the extent of the problems, much less the solutions," Pew says in its report, "Not Out of the Woods."

California may be leading the nation in a variety of negative categories, from the size of its budget deficit to traffic congestion, but it's also first in reducing pregnancy among teenage girls, according to a new study by the Guttmacher Institute.

California's population growth fell below 1 percent a year in 2009, but it will pick up so markedly that the state will have nearly 41 million residents by 2015, according to the state Department of Finance's demographic unit.

The new projection, based on births, deaths and domestic and foreign in- and out-migration, is that growth, calculated at 0.87 percent in 2009 and 2010, will reach 1.26 percent a year by 2015. California has seen higher growth rates in the past, topping 2 percent in 2000. But with its ever-increasing base, even a 1 percent rate means about 400,000 more Californians every year.

The 2000 census pegged the state's population at 34.1 million. The state's demographers say it's now 38.8 million, but the U.S. Census Bureau has consistently calculated a lower number, based largely on its estimate that far more people have moved out of California during this decade than the state believes. The discrepancy is now about 1.5 million people; the 2010 census presumably will settle the argument.

The full Department of Finance projection is available here.

Californians' personal incomes dropped in 2008 as recession began to grip the state, according to a new data compilation by the Franchise Tax Board.

While the median income on all 2008 personal income tax returns rose slightly over 2007 to $35,923, total adjusted gross income on all 15.5 million returns dropped by 7.2 percent to $1.11 trillion. For joint returns, the median was $58,981, also a slight gain from 2007.

While 2008 is the last year for which data are available, it's widely believed that Californians' personal income dropped again in 2009 as the recession deepened.

As usual, Bay Area counties reported the highest median incomes for 2008 with Marin County the highest (for joint returns) at $118,704, but that was a 3.85 percent drop from 2007. San Mateo County ranked second with $100,165,Santa Clara County third with $100,077, Contra Costa County fourth with $90,956, and Alameda County fifth with $88,138.

Rural Imperial County, in the state's southeastern corner, had the lowest median income on all returns, $24,035, and also the lowest on joint returns, $39,218, one-third of Marin's level.

"Median income" is the point where one-half of the tax returns are above and one-half are below the midpoint of the range of values.

Los Angeles County taxpayers filed 25.5 percent of all 2008 income tax returns in California and the county had a $31,679 median income or all returns, and $59,950 for joint returns, The county's residents paid $11.1 billion in personal income taxes for 2008, 25.4 percent of total collections ($43.6 billion) and 21/2 times as much as No. 2 Orange County.

California added nearly 400,000 bodies to its population in 2009, reaching 38.6 million, the state's demography office reported today.

The new state estimate, however, is more than a million persons higher than the Census Bureau's pre-census calculation of California's population. The census, now underway, will officially settle the conflict - which largely centers on differing estimates of movement out of the state during the last decade.

The state Department of Finance's demographic research unit says that Colfax, northeast of Sacramento in Placer County, was the state's fastest growing city in 2009, jumping 5.7 percent or nearly six times the state's overall growth rate.

Among the state's largest cities, Anaheim recorded the highest percentage growth, 1.6 percent, while Fresno passed the 500,000 mark for the first time, remaining the state's fifth largest. Los Angeles, the state's most populous city, added the most people, 44,037.

Six rural counties - Alpine, Calaveras, Lake, Plumas, Sierra and Mariposa - lost population during the year, the state says. Alpine's loss of nine residents dropped it to 1,189, the state's smallest county. But another rural county, Sutter, was the state's fastest-growing with a 2.7 percent gain.

The full report is available here.

Democratic voter registration in California is up nearly two percentage points from four years ago, and Republican registration is down nearly four points while the ranks of independents have crossed the 20 percent threshold, according to a new report by the secretary of state's office.

The report covers registration 60 days before the June 8 primary election. Another report will be prepared for registration 15 days from the election.

Four years ago, 60 days prior to the last non-presidential primary, Democrats had 42.68 percent of the state's registered voters and Republicans 34.57 percent. Today, the numbers are 44.57 percent and 30.79 percent. Independents, 18.29 percent four years ago, are now 20.14 percent.

Numerically, total voter registration is up from 15.6 million to 16.9 million, Democrats are up from, 6.6 million to 7.5 million and Republicans are down from 5.4 million to 5.2 million. Independents have increased from 2.8 million to 3.4 million.

Minor parties also suffered relative losses during the period, especially the Green Party, which saw its share decline from just under 1 percent to just two-thirds of one percent.

The full report, including district-by-district and county-by-county data, is available here.

Although consumer spending and personal incomes have picked up a bit in California, the state's consumer confidence level has dropped to a record low, according to a new poll by San Jose State University's Survey and Policy Research Institute.

New car sales dropped to scarcely a million vehicles in California last year, less than half their peak level a few years earlier, but showed a sharp uptick in the first quarter of this year, the California New Car Dealers Association reported Thursday.

New car and truck registrations jumped 19.8 percent in the first three months of the year, over the same period of 2009, four percentage points more than the national car sales increase, and March sales were up more than 30 percent.

"Pent up demand and manufacturer incentives have returned new car buyers to the market. The sales increase is good news for our employees and has started to generate much need sales tax revenue for our local governments and the state." said Tom Hoffman, CNCDA chairman and a Puente Hills Chevrolet dealer.. "Sales incentives, such as 0% financing and cash back, is good news for consumers who are enjoying the benefits of a buyer's market."

The sharp decline in auto sales had resulted in closure of hundreds of California dealerships and had a sharp downward effect on state and local sales tax revenues. The full quarterly report can be found here.

California has one of the nation's highest levels of government spending and taxes, and it adversely affects the state's economic competitiveness, according to a new report by the conservative, San Francisco-based Pacific Research Institute.

Employer-paid costs of insuring against work-related injuries and illnesses continued to decline in California last year, but payouts to disabled workers and medical care providers flattened out, thus proving new grist for the perpetual political machinations over the huge workers' compensation system.

The data are contained in an annual report by the authoritative Workers' Compensation Insurance Rating Bureau, indicating that the major overhaul of the system pushed through the Legislature in 2004 by employers and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is still having a big effect on its finances.

California could see a 27 percent increase in those receiving medical care under Medi-Cal, the federal-state program that serves low-income residents, under a major provision of the newly adopted overhaul of national health care, a new study has found.

But UnitedHealth Group also says that California could offset the higher costs and much more by upgrading its medical care delivery system. In fact, it could save 10 times as much as those extra costs, the Minneapolis-based managed care firm says.

As the largest state, California is expected to see the largest numerical growth in Medi-Cal enrollment, some 2 million, over the next nine years. But the 27 percent growth is actually below the national average of 32 percent, largely because California has a relatively large recipient base already, due to its relatively low threshold of qualifying for benefits. The program is called Medicaid in most states.

California's exports continued to climb out of recession in February, trade analyst Jock O'Connell said today after crunching the latest numbers from the Department of Commerce.

Export shipments from California rose 13.7 percent in February over those of a year earlier, as measured by value, hitting $10.38 billion, the fourth straight month of year-to-year gains.

"Even so, we are only now getting back to the level of exporting we were at three years ago, before the global financial and economic crisis sent international trade spiraling downward," O'Connell said. A long-time analyst for the University of California's Sacramento center, O'Connell now is affiliated with Beacon Economics International.

Imports through California rose even faster in February, jumping 38.3 percent to $22.53 billion. And February's export rise was reflected in traffic at California's ports, with the number of loaded shipping containers leaving Los Angeles, Long Beach and Oakland up by 27.5 percent over from last year. A similar boost was seen in outbound air freight tonnage.

O'Connell said the state should see sustained growth in exports, "if only because the economies of most of our top trading partners are expanding." He also noted that if China, as rumored, allows its currency to rise against the dollar, it would make American goods cheaper to Chinese importers.

"The most worrisome prospect on the current horizon involves the sovereign debt crisis gripping the European Union and especially those countries in the euro zone," he warned. Eight European nations, not all of whom use the euro as their currency, rank among California's top 25 export markets.

A new report has given California a "D" on its efforts to post information about government spending online.

The report, released today by the left-leaning Public Interest Research Group, gave California props for being one of 29 states to have a Web site that includes searchable databases of "checkbook-level" data on government spending. The state's site lost points for lacking information on tax subsidies, economic development incentives and past contracts.

A "D" might be a poor grade on most scales, but it was good enough to land California a spot on among the "emerging states" identified in the report.

"The good news is that state governments have become far more transparent about where the money goes, but California still has lots of room for improvement" CALPIRG spokesman Pedro Morillas said in a statement. "Given the current severity of our budget problems, Californians need to be confident that they can follow the money."

Click here to view the full report.

California's per-pupil spending on its more than 6 million elementary and high school students is the nation's sixth-lowest, but its teachers have the nation's second highest salaries, according to a new compendium of educational data by the National Education Association.

The data add fuel to California's wide-ranging debate over school finance, a major part of the deficit-ridden state budget. California education groups complain constantly about the state's relatively low per-pupil spending, while critics complain with equal frequency about the state's relatively high teacher salaries.

The NEA is an umbrella organization for state teacher unions, such as the California Teachers Association. It compiled national and state data on revenues, spending, enrollment and other indices, entitled "Rankings and Estimates," that runs 130 densely packed pages.

Among the revelations to be gleaned from those pages:

Amnesty or some other form of legalization of America's 12 million illegal immigrants -- about a quarter of whom are in California -- is one of the nation's hottest political issues, especially in this election year.

As President Barack Obama contemplates how to make good on his campaign pledge to pursue immigration reform, a sour economy has given new life to the fervidly debated question of whether legalization would have a positive or negative effect.

Across the nation, including California, Republican politicians are playing the immigration card. In California, GOP gubernatorial candidate Steve Poizner has made immigration his chief issue as he tries to catch Meg Whitman in their primary race. But recent polls have indicated that Californians are substantially less inflamed about immigration than they were in the 1990s, when voters passed a ballot measure, later overturned by the courts, that would have barred illegal immigrants from receiving public services.

Against that background, the Public Policy Institute of California has issued a study concluding that legalization would have very little economic impact, despite widespread belief that it would.

"Our research suggests ... that legalizing most currently unauthorized immigrants would not lead to dramatic changes in the labor market, either for unauthorized immigrants or for native workers," the PPIC report concludes, "We also find little evidence to support the view that such a step would have significant effects on the broader economy, particularly on tax revenues or public assistance programs."

With illegal immigrants constituting about 10 percent of California's workforce, jobs skills are a more important factor in their economic progression than their immigration status, PPIC says. And it's also not likely that legalization would have a major impact, positive or negative, on local and state government finances, it says.

The full report, which advocates that California begin planning for legalization, is available here.

California, which has lost 1.4 million jobs in the last two years, continued the trend in February, shedding another 20,400 jobs, the Employment Development Department announced today.

It meant that California's unemployment rate remained unchanged at 12.5 percent, more than two percentage points higher than it was a year earlier. It also meant that the state lost 586,400 jobs during the previous 12 months.

The number of officially unemployed rose 5,000 during the month to 2,274,000, EDD said, with the highest jobless rate, 27.6 percent, recorded in Colusa County and the lowest, 7.8 percent, in Mono County. Just five of California's 58 counties had unemployement rates below 10 percent.

California may have extraordinarily high housing costs, vis-à-vis those in other states, but when it comes to non-housing consumer spending, Californians are relatively thrifty, a new national study by Bundle, a website devoted to economic data, shows.

The average American household spends $37,782 a year on non-housing expenses, with Connecticut ranking first among the states at $57,332, Bundle says. In fact, Connecticut residents spend as much on dining out as West Virginia families spend on everything.

California ranks fourth in consumer spending at $42,962, behind the District of Columbia and Hawaii.

Austin, the capital of Texas, is the No. 1 spending city, with its families shelling out an average of $67,076 a year on non-housing expenses, perhaps lured by the city's proliferation of restaurants and live music venues. The highest-spending California city is San Jose, whose $59,022 is third highest in the nation. Irvine is ninth at $51,286 and San Francisco 19th at $45,291.

The full Bundle report can be found here.

California's state and local public employee pension funds suffered $27.3 billion in investment losses during 2008, the Census Bureau says, and that was more than two-thirds of all such losses in the nation.

San Franciscans are among the most vulnerable Americans to various forms of cybercrime, according to a new study by Symantec, a Mountain View-based maker of computer security programs.

San Francisco ranks fourth in the survey of larger communities, with Seattle rated as the riskiest city, followed by Boston and Washington, DC. "The rankings," Symantec said, "were determined through a combination of Symantec Security Response's data on cyberattacks and potential malware infections, as well as third-party data about online behavior, such as accessing wifi hotspots and online shopping."

Among California cities, San Diego was No. 14, Sacramento No. 16, Oakland No. 18, San Jose No. 20, Los Angeles No. 30, Long Beach No. 45 and Fresno No. 47. Recession-wracked Detroit, by the way, is the least riskiest cybercrime city.

The full list can be found here.

California wasn't alone when it boosted state taxes last year to cope with its budget deficit; nearly half of the 50 states also increased taxes, according to a new survey by the National Conference of State Legislatures.

However, California's increase in income, sales and auto taxes was the largest in state history, pegged at the time at $12-plus billion and accounted for nearly half of the $28.6 billion in new taxes levied by 24 states.

Voters reacted sharply to the increase, which was adopted in early 2009 after weeks of political infighting, and rejected a series of ballot measures that would, among other things, have extended the taxes. Without the extension, the added levies will begin phasing out at the end of this year, worsening the chronic gap between income and outgo.

The NCSL report, which may be purchased here, found that in the 24 states that did boost their taxes by more than 1 percent, the average was 3.7 percent of the previous year's tax collections. California's boost was more than 10 percent.

Increased personal income taxes accounted for nearly half of the additional revenues, followed by sales and corporate income taxes. Motor vehicle taxes accounted for $1.9 billion of the total "with much of the net increase coming from vehicle tax changes in California."

Support for same-sex marriage appears to be increasing in California and has hit 50 percent for the first time in polling by the Public Policy Institute of California.

The new survey indicates that gay marriage advocates who want to repeal California's Proposition 8 might have a fighting chance of prevailing, if they can qualify their measure for the November ballot.

Proposition 8, passed in 2008, places a prohibition on same-sex marriage in the state constitution and is being litigated in federal court. While one faction of gay marriage supporters is backing the repeal initiative, another group has contended that the climate for repeal must change more before trying to undo Proposition 8.

The PPIC poll found that support for gay marriage has reached 50 percent for the first time since the San Francisco-based think tank began polling on the issue in 2000. A sharp partisan division remains, with 64 percent of Democrats supporting same-sex marriage rights, while 67 percent of Republicans are opposed. However, 55 percent of independents are in favor.

The PPIC poll covered a wide range of political and social topics, and its findings largely mirrored those of a recent series of polls by the Field Research Corp. Among them:

• Businesswoman Meg Whitman has a very wide lead over Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner, 61 percent to 11 percent, in their contest for the Republican gubernatorial nomination, and she's slightly ahead of the sole Democratic candidate, Attorney General Jerry Brown, 44 percent to 39 percent.

• Like the Field Poll, PPIC found that the economy, by a wide margin, is the political policy issue uppermost in the minds of voters.

• Another Republican business executive, Carly Fiorina, and former U.S. Rep. Tom Campbell are virtually tied for the U.S. Senate nomination, with Assemblyman Chuck DeVore far behind both. With the leaders in the mid-20 percent range, nearly half of Republicans say they are undecided. Either Campbell or Fiorina is virtually tied with Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer.

• By a 2-1 margin, California voters are inclined to vote for Proposition 14, which would create a new kind of primary election for political offices in which all candidates, regardless of party, would appear on the same ballot and the top two primary vote-getters would face each other in the November general election.

• Nearly 70 percent of Californians support immigration reform, including creating a pathway to citizenship for those in the country illegally.

• While 77 percent believe that the state budget crisis is a big problem, they divide evenly on whether the deficit should be mostly by spending cuts (39 percent) or a combination of cuts and new taxes (38 percent), but just 6 percent say it should be taxes alone.

• Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's approval rating among voters has plummeted to 25 percent, virtually identical to the Field Poll number, while the Legislature's performance wins approval of just 9 percent, the first time that figure has dropped into the single digits. Field had it at 13 percent.

• President Barack Obama's standing in California also has slipped, with approval now at 52 percent among voters, down 13 percentage points from a year ago. Congressional approval has also declined to 14 percent, half of what it was in January. But, oddly, 44 percent of voters like the job their own congressional members are doing.

Complete poll results on these and other issues may be found here.

The newest national academic test results once again find California's fourth- and eighth-graders stuck near the bottom in reading ability, outperforming only Washington, D.C., according to the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP).

While the reading achievement was the most dramatic outcome, California's kids also performed poorly in other measures of learning, drawing a scathing reaction from The Education Trust-West, an Oakland-based organization that analyzes public school data in California.

"Our state leaders insist that we have some of the highest standards in the nation," said Arun Ramanathan, the group's executive director. "What good are high standards if we fail to ensure that our students can master them?"

Los Angeles has the nation's most energy-efficient buildings among large cities for the second straight year and consequently the most floor space earning the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's "Energy Star" award, it was announced today.

San Francisco placed third on the 25-city EPA list while Sacramento was 16th and San Diego 17th. In addition to releasing the city-by-city rankings, available here, the EPA also announced a compilation of specific buildings meeting its Energy Star criteria, which can be found here.

The state's own Environmental Protection Agency building in Sacramento is one of those cited.

The once-soaring California housing market, whose collapse triggered the state's severe recession, appears to be undergoing another change.

The California Association of Realtors revealed today that home sales dropped 11.7 percent in February from a year earlier, but the median price jumped 14.1 percent. Meanwhile, the inventory of unsold homes on the market has also declined sharply, especially those of lower-price houses.

These trends may indicate that the burst of low-priced homes that were in foreclosure or otherwise distressed may be running its course and the market is returning to a more normal pattern.

Cutbacks in state school finance have generated a sharp uptick in the number of California school districts in financial distress, state schools Superintendent Jack O'Connell said today.

"Massive state budget cuts are crippling our public school system's ability to operate," O'Connell said as he released a list of 126 school districts that the state is watching closely, up 17 percent from a year earlier. "Public education in California received $17 billion less in state funding than anticipated over the last two budget years."

The California Taxpayers' Association contends in a new report that state government has wasted nearly $19 billion since 2000, contributing to its chronic budget crisis.

The report is based on official audits and investigations and media reports, citing 127 "quantifiable" instances of waste "from Caltrans' $3.2 billion Bay Bridge fiasco, to a $1 billion fine for failing to track child support payments, to welfare fraud estimated at $1.5 billion per year..."

Cal-Tax, an 84-year-old, Sacramento-based and business-backed organization, says that eliminating waste would not unto itself have balanced the budget, but "each case represents one example of California's inability to control spending during budget booms and busts.

"Had state officials engaged in more responsible spending oversight, the state budget would be billions closer to balance, and the people of California would benefit from more efficient, quality services."

The report, which adds more fuel to the partisan wrangles in the Capitol over how the deficits should be closed, can be found here.

California has the nation's fifth worst lawsuit climate, making it a less attractive venue for job-creating investment, an annual appraisal by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has found.

California was ranked 46th, ahead of only Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and No. 50 West Virginia, the chamber-sponsored Institute for Legal Reform declares, based on its survey of corporate lawyers.

"California needs more jobs, not more lawsuits," the institute's president, Lisa Rickard, said. "With one of the highest unemployment rates in the country, California's legal climate is discouraging new businesses and new jobs at a time when the state needs them most."

The report echoes positions by California business and legal reform groups in their perennial battles with Consumer Attorneys of California over the rules governing class action and personal injury suits, which are largely set in the Legislature but occasionally spill into ballot measure battles.

Not surprisingly, the California planitiffs' attorneys denounced the rankng. "We think, given the chamber's interest in limiting citizens' access to the justice system and the fact that the survey is conducted exclusively among attorneys who represent big business, this report is just another call for less oversight and accountability for the companies that fund this group," Consumer Attorneys of California said in a statement. "The American people have seen what happens when the Chamber's largest clients - like AIG, insurance and drug companies - are not held accountable."

California's low ranking included such factors as judicial rules that the organization said tend to favor plaintiffs in class-action suits and other disputes.

The full report is available here.

More than a third of California's adults and a nearly a sixth of its children suffer from chronic health conditions such as asthma, diabetes, high blood pressure, congestive heart failure or psychological distress, according to a new report from the California Healthcare Foundation.

The lengthy report, prepared by researchers at UCLA's Center for Health Policy Research, follows on another recent study indicating that California's ranks of the medically uninsured have grown sharply to more than 8 million persons. And both were issued as Congress considers President Barack Obama's historic overhaul of health coverage.

The percentage of female candidates elected to federal, state and local offices in California continues to fall significantly short of mirroring the gender split of the general population, according to a report released yesterday by the nonprofit California Women Lead.

California Women Lead, which supports female candidates running for and serving in office, found that though women make up 51 percent of the state population, they fill slightly more than a third of California's congressional seats and 27 percent of state legislative seats.

California's severe economic recession has sharply expanded the ranks of its medically uninsured residents, a new statistical study by UCLA's Center for Health Policy Research has found.

The study, based on enrollee data from private and public medical care programs, found that the uninsured under age 65 increased from 6.4 million in 2007 to 8.2 million last year, largely because of higher unemployment and cutbacks in employer-underwritten coverage. That's nearly a quarter of the under-65 population of the state.

"These estimates help us understand the scale of the damage inflicted on California over the last two years," Shana Alex Lavarreda, a co-author of the study, said in a statement. California has one of the nation's highest uninsured rates - a factor attributed to its seasonal and diverse economy - and because of its size has more uninsured residents than any other state

The study was released as Congress wrests with President Barack Obama's effort to expand coverage for the uninsured. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger attempted several years ago to win legislative approval of a similar expansion of health coverage, but his measure died in the state Senate after approval by the Assembly. It was opposed by conservatives who disliked more government expansion and liberals who wanted a single-payer, government-operated program.

The full study may be found here.

Exports through California ports continued their recent rebound in January, according to an analysis of new federal data by University of California trade analyst Jock O'Connell.

The value of exports through the state, $10.3 billion, was an 18.5 percent increase over the previous January and the third month of year-over-year increases. It was nearly identical to the nationwide increase in exports.

."Even so, we are now just getting back to the level of exporting we were at in early 2007, before the global financial and economic crisis sent international trade spiraling down," O'Connell said..

O'Connell said he anticipated continued export increases "if only because the economies of most of our major trading partners continue to expand," but added, "The most worrisome prospect involves the risk of fall-out from the financial turmoil now gripping the European Union and especially those countries in the euro zone."

Imports through California also showed a sharp increase, up 14.6 over the previous January to $23 billion.

The California Teachers Association has spent more than $200 million on campaign contributions and lobbying efforts in the last decade, leading what the Fair Political Practices Commission calls a "billion-dollar club" of moneyed political interests.

The FPPC's report, entitled "Big Money Talks," delves into the 25 biggest - at least in financial terms - political players in the state, which have collectively spent $1.3 billion on political action in the last 10 years.

"This tsunami of special interest spending drowns out the voices of average voters," FPPC chairman Ross Johnson said in a statement, "and intimidates political opponents and elected officials alike."

The $211.9 million spent by the CTA is nearly twice as much as the $107.5 million committed by the second-highest spender, the California State Council of Service Employees, but after those two union groups, the remaining 13 on the Top 15 list are all either business groups, such as No. 3 Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America ($104.9 million), individual corporations or casino-owning Indian tribes, which have three of the 15 top spots.

Collectively, the top 15 spent just over $1 billion during the decade, while the next 10 spent $271 million. They are also a mixture of unions, businesses and Indian tribes.

The report provides details on each big spender's campaign contributions and lobbying expenses, and identifies their spending on ballot measures, which generally consumed far more of the total than contributions to politicians or lobbying expenses. The CTA, for example, directed $144.1 million into ballot measures, including more than $50 million to defeat a series of 2005 measures sponsored by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The full report can be found at the FPPC's website here.

California has the nation's worst state tax administration practices, the Council on State Taxation, a corporate-backed and Washington-based tax study organization, says in a new report.

California scored a D-minus, the lowest score of any state, on an eight-criterion assessment, a notch lower than seven other "D" states. Alaska, at A-minus, scored the highest.

"It is a common truth that taxpayers will more fully and willingly comply with a tax system they perceive to be balanced, fair, and effective," the organization said. "Taxpayers operating in a system they perceive as oppressive, unfair, or otherwise biased are less likely to voluntarily comply. The clear message to state legislatures is that they must be sensitive to the compliance implications and competitiveness concerns created by poor tax administrative rules and ineffective tax appeal systems."

California was rated especially poorly on the independence of its tax dispute resolution process. A three-member board composed of politicians or their surrogates, the Franchise Tax Board, oversees personal and corporate tax collection. A five-member board of elected officials, the Board of Equalization, handles appeals from the Franchise Tax Board, directly collects sales taxes and oversees property tax administration.

The full COST report may be found here.

California's public colleges and universities will face enrollment demand of nearly 400,000 more students by the end of this decade and will need another $1.5 billion in operating revenue to handle the growth, a new report from the California Postsecondary Education Commission estimates.

"If this additional funding is not forthcoming, and if the systems implement enrollment cuts as they propose, as many as 278,000 students might lose the opportunity to attend college between 2009 and 2011 alone," says the report's cover letter.

The state's community colleges and state universities and the University of California now handle some 2.36 million undergraduate students and demand is expected to increase to 2.75 million by 2019, the report said.

It was presented to a commission meeting today in the midst of political angst in the Capitol over a deficit-riddled state budget and student protests against sharp increases in student fees. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed a constitutional amendment aimed at reversing the current proportion of state spending devoted to colleges and prisons. The ratio is now about 7 percent for colleges and 10 percent for prisons.

The commission's forecast did not include costs of building classrooms and other physical facilities, which would add more billions to the cost of handling the projected student load. The full report, entitled "Ready or Not, Here They Come," is available here.

California's non-agricultural payrolls increased by 32,500 workers in January, but the state's unemployment rate also increased, according to the monthly employment report from the state Employment Development Department.

The overall unemployment rate, seasonally adjusted, increased from 12.3 percent in December to 12.5 percent in January despite the uptick of employment, largely due to a commensurate increase in the labor force.

The January rate was nearly three percentage points higher than in January, 2009, while the number of jobless workers, 2.3 million, was a half-million higher than a year earlier, and employment, 15.9 million, was 700,000 lower than a year earlier.

The full report is available here.

Former eBay boss Meg Whitman holds a commanding lead over Steve Poizner, her rival for the Republican gubernatorial nomination, and runs ahead of Democrat Jerry Brown, a new poll of "high-propensity" voters by Datamar, an El Cajon survey firm, has found.

Datamar took an unusual polling approach by tossing all three candidates for governor into the same polling pot. Whitman came out on top at 29.1 percent, followed by Brown, a former governor who is now attorney general, at 25.1 percent and Poizner, the state insurance commissioner, at 20.5 percent. The found 25.4 percent of voters undecided.

Datamar's partisan breakout found that Whitman enjoys support from 62.5 percent of Republicans and Poizner just 8.5 percent. Interestingly, Brown - who likely to formally announce his candidacy next week - drew backing from just 37.2 percent of Democrats while Poizner was favored by 31 percent of Democrats.

Datamar suggested that Poizner's strong Democratic support stemmed from Brown's not being a formal candidate and an anybody-but-Whitman sentiment among Democrats. She got just 8.2 percent of the Democratic support responses.

And what about independents, who are roughly 20 percent of the electorate and whose votes are critical in any close election?

Datamar found that independents are all over the map, with 25.7 percent favoring Whitman, 20.7 percent opting for Brown and 15 percent preferring Poizner.

California's Democrat-dominated congressional delegation is markedly more inclined to support immigration reform than Congress as a whole, a scorecard developed by the pro-reform Immigrants' List political action committee indicates.

Immigrants' List, based in Washington, was formed four years ago by a group of immigration attorneys and describes itself as "a bipartisan political action committee dedicated to promoting the fair and just immigration laws Americans desire." It uses campaign funds to support pro-reform congressional members and candidates, seeking to establish a congressional majority.

According to its scorecard, based on lawmakers' positions on a variety of immigration-related bills, nearly 35 percent of House members (150) support immigration reform, while more than 25 percent (112) are opposed and the remainder are classified as "may or may not support immigration reform."

The scorecard says that 29 of California's 53 congressional members, all Democrats, are supportive while 10, all Republicans, are opposed and the remaining 14, nine Republicans and five Democrats, are somewhere in the middle.

The full scorecard, including ratings in other states, is available here.

Two-thirds of California home sales last year resulted from homeowners' difficulty in making their mortgage payments or other financial problems, such as job losses, according to a new survey released by the California Association of Realtors.

"Tighter underwriting standards and a decline in equity continued to impact the market in 2009," CAR president Steve Goddard said in a statement accompanying the survey. "Many homeowners chose to sell last year because their adjustable-rate mortgage reset at the same time home prices were experiencing an unprecedented decline, leaving them with little equity and difficulty in qualifying for a refinance."

The CAR survey of homeowners found that, on average, homes sold for $20,958 less than the original asking price in 2009 and 44 percent of all sellers were first-time homeowners, a one-third jump from the previous year.

Difficulty in finding financing also hurt home sales, with 63 percent of houses with initial sales deals falling out of escrow prior to closing, with 70 percent of sellers in those circumstances citing "buyer could not get an acceptable mortgage" as the reason for sales falling through.

The full survey may be purchased here.

Three Central Valley cities rank high on Forbes magazine's new list of "America's most miserable cities," joining a host of Midwestern industrial cities hard hit by the recession.

Stockton, which topped Forbes' list of miserable cities in 2009, dropped to No. 2 behind Cleveland this year, while Modesto was No. 11 and Sacramento No. 17.

The survey covered the nation's 200 most populous metropolitan areas and covered a number of specific topics.

California voters are angry, worried about the economy, and distrust their state politicians so much that they strongly believe that all incumbents should be voted out of office as soon as possible, a new poll indicates.

Conducted by El Cajon-based Datamar early this month, the new survey is right in line of others that take the civic pulse of California and confirm anew that this year's elections could be a giant comeuppance for the political establishment.

"Still mired in the deepest recession in 70 years, a collapsed housing bubble, a higher than the national average unemployment rate, and seemingly endless budget battles and impasses in Sacramento, voters
are disenchanted with the state's political process and are searching for answers," Datamar said.

Those responding to the Datamar poll rate the economy as the state's most important issue, and show massive support, just under 90 percent, for governmental reform, especially overhauling the initiative system and removing impediments to action by the Legislature, whose approval rating barely makes it into double digits.

Click here to read the full poll.

Silicon Valley, like the rest of California, is still reeling from the housing meltdown and the subsequent recession, but a "well-being index" developed by the Gallup polling and research organization says it's the best large metropolitan area in which to live.

That said, the San Jose area's index rating, 69.2, still is far from a 100 perfect score in an evaluation that includes six subcategories - emotional health, work environment, physical health, healthy behaviors, and access to basic necessities.

Las Vegas ranked last in the survey of major metro areas. The San Francisco-Oakland area was 7th best and San Diego was 13th.

Among medium-sized areas, Boulder, CO, came in first and California's best showing was the Santa Rosa-Petaluma region at 5th with the Santa Barbara-Santa Maria area 6th. At the other end of the scale, Modesto had the nation's 5th worst ranking (Ft. Smith, AR, was dead-last) while Bakersfield was the 14th worst.

The full report is available here.

After months of decline and stagnation, trade through California ports ticked upward in December, according to an analysis of Department of Commerce data by the University of California's trade adviser.

Adviser Jock O'Connell said that exports increased by 12 percent over December 2008, reaching $11.6 billion. It was also a 6.1 percent increase from November.

"As encouraging as these new numbers may appear, they only mark the start of a recovery from two years of sharp decline," said O'Connell."We are now essentially where we were with exports at the end of 2006.

Calfiornia ranks third only to Nevada and Michigan in a new Associated Press calculation of economic stress and seven California counties are on the Top 10 list of the nation's most economically stressed counties.

The average American county had an economic stress level of 10.8 on a 0-100 scale in December, based on such factors as unemployment, home foreclosure and bankruptcy rates, but the most nation's stressed county was Imperial in California's southeastern corner.

Imperial, much of which sits below sea level, is dominated by large-scale agriculture and has the state's highest Latino population. Its economic stress level by the AP's calculation was 31.57, followed my Merced County at 26.44. Lyon Conty, NV, placed third, followed by five California coutnies: San Benito, Sutter, Yuba, Stanislaus and San Joaquin. Lake County was No. 14 and Riverside County No. 18.

California's economic stress level of 16.5 was third only to Nevada at 21.08 and Michigan at 17.43.

At the other end of the scale, North Dakota was the nation's least stressed state at 4.99, with neighboring South Dakota second least at 5.47 and Nebraska at 5.63. The nation's least stressed county is Nebraska's Lancaster at just 5.2. Every other county on the 20 least stressed list were in the Midwest, Virginia, or Wyoming.

When it comes to charitable giving via the Internet, Berkeley appears to be California's most generous larger city and has the nation's seventh highest per capita donation level, according to Convio, a Texas firm that organizes Internet-based charity drives.

Fittingly, perhaps, Convio maintains its West Coast headquarters in Berkeley, whose residents contributed $10.64 per person via the Internet in 2009.

Convio assembled data for all 273 of the nation's cities above 100,000 in population, many of which are in California. Alexandria, Va., ranked first at $20.24 per capita. Berkeley was the only California city in the top 10, but San Francisco was 12th at $9.24, Pasadena was 26th, Santa Clara 31st and San Diego 40th.

Remaining California cities varied widely in their Internet giving with El Monte at 269th, just four places from the bottom, at 24 cents per capita. Among the largest California cities, Sacramento was 63rd, San Jose 76th, Long Beach 154th, Los Angeles 184th ($1.72), Fresno 232nd, Santa Ana 239th and San Bernardino 268th, just ahead of El Monte.

The full list and a detail-filled spreadsheet are available here.

The New York Times posted a chart today listing the credit ratings of several dozen countries as well as all 50 states, as determined by Standard & Poor's.

At A-, California still has the worst credit rating of all 50 states. Illinois comes closest to California with an A+ rating.

Countries in the Times' chart with the same A- rating as California include Estonia, Libya and Poland. That's better than Thailand and Greece (BBB+) but not as strong as Botswana, the Czech Republic and Israel (A).

California officials are often quick to point out that the state has never defaulted on repaying its bond debt. An A rating is assigned to entities with a "strong capacity to meet debts but somewhat more susceptible to adverse changes in economic conditions."

The James Madison Institute is a libertarian think tank in Florida, and the cover of its latest Journal is a mock Central Intelligence Agency report on "the world's top 10 failed states."

It lists Somalia as the No. 1 failed state and adds eight other Third World nations before it gets to No. 10 - the Golden State of California - and asks "Will Florida join the list of failed states?"

It's the latest in a recent string of out-of-state publications riffing on California's social, political economic and budgetary woes and warning that its civic disease could spread.

J. Robert McClure, the institute's president, writes that "the jury is still out as to whether Florida - at the end of the decade ahead - will be prospering like Texas or foundering like California, Wisconsin, New York, and other states where government evidently exists primarily for the benefit of the governing, and onerous taxes and regulations consistently drive away the most productive citizens, harming the economy and eroding the quality of life."

New car sales plummeted in California during 2009, dropping 28.3 percent from 2008, and barely topping 1 million, a level not seen in more than three decades.

Although new car sales declined nationally last year, California's drop was markedly larger than the national trend, according to a year-end report from the California New Car Dealers Association.

Hundreds of auto dealerships have closed in California in the last few years as sales dropped to less than half the levels of mid-decade, and the impact on both state and local coffers has been heavy. A $25,000 car generates about $2,000 in state and local sales taxes, so a million-unit drop in sales means a $2 billion loss in sales tax revenues.

Sales of "Big 3" domestic brands declined even faster last year, down 36.4 percent, and both General Motors and Chrysler lost market share while Ford's increased slightly.

Despite the bad sales news, the association sees a brighter future. It notes that while new car sales slid 39.6 percent in the first half of the year, the decline was just 13.7 percent in the second half and it projects a slight uptick in total sales this year, from 1,040,000 vehicles in 2009 to 1,145,000 in 2010, as the economy improves.

The full report, include a model-by-model breakdown of sales, is available here.

Republicans Tom Campbell and Meg Whitman fare well in a new poll by the Public Policy Institute of California.

Campbell, a former Silicon Valley congressman who shifted his political ambition this month from governor to U.S. senator, already enjoys a strong lead over GOP rivals Carly Fiorina and Chuck DeVore, the poll found, and is locked in a near-tie with Democratic U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer.

Whitman, former CEO of eBay, has increased her lead over Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner among Republicans with Campbell out of the contest, PPIC's survey found, and trails the sole Democratic candidate, Attorney General Jerry Brown, by only a few points.

PPIC's results generally reflect those of another new statewide poll by the Field Research Corp., but came up with closer results in the theoretical gubernatorial and senatorial matchups.

"PawPac," which describes itself as "California's political action committee for animals," wanted to enact seven bills during the 2009 legislative session, including a highly controversial measure that would require spaying and neutering of pets.

PawPac had just one success, a bill to curb "tail docking"of cows. The other six were either stalled or, if passed, vetoed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. But the seven generated voting records from which PawPac created a scorecard to rate politicians on their support levels.

Schwarzenegger, who vetoed four PawPac bills, not surprisingly was given an "F" grade, and Sen. Dean Florez, D-Shafter, who carried both the "tail docking" bill and the neutering measure, got a "A-plus."

Forty-eight other legislators, all Democrats, also received "A" or "A-plus" grades, while 26, all Republicans, were given "Fs." The other 45 had mixed records on the seven bills.

The full PawPac scorecard may be found here.