“Firm entry” means new startup companies. “Firm exit” means the companies are gone. The two lines crossed about 2008, during the time of Republican President George W. Bush. Then “firm exits” kept going upward under Democratic President Obama, outpacing “firm entries,” meaning more businesses were being killed than created.

Partisan control of the U.S. House and Senate also flipped a couple times during this period.

So it’s a bipartisan disaster.

The Brookings study also looked at states. There’s an interactive map here.

California performed among the worst, with a 50 percent decline in new firm creation during the 30 years. This used to be the state of Intel and Apple, of HP and Fairchild Semiconductor.  Sure, we still enjoy such recent startups as Google and Twitter (Facebook started in Massachusetts). But the overall number of startups has gone down.

Yet other states have done but little better. Arch-rival Texas had 36 percent fewer startups. So they can say, “We were terrible, but not as bad as California.”

The “best” state was New York, a high-tax and high-regulation state like California. But its startups dropped “only” 18 percent.

California could lead the way back to leadership in startups by slashing taxes and regulations, by getting rid of zoning to make housing and business property more affordable, by putting a welcoming mat down to business and jobs creation — by all around being friendly toward business instead of clubbing business on the head.

Will it?

Naaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah.

“When you set aside the class-warfare rhetoric that Democrats so enjoy, the drivers of income inequality are plain. The first is rarely acknowledged. It’s the increasing tendency of highly educated professionals to marry each other. Doctors used to marry nurses. Now they marry other doctors, concentrating family wealth.

“The second is that the modern economy places an ever-higher premium on job skills, and yet we don’t have a public education system that responds to this fact. In 2013, how is it possible that a year or more of computer science isn’t a universal high school graduation requirement?

“It’s not just information-technology jobs going unfilled because of a mismatch between what schools teach and what employers need. In many skilled-job categories — welders, critical-care nurses, electrical linemen, special-education teachers, geotechnical engineers, respiratory therapists — unemployment is practically zero.

“So long as we have an absurdly complex tax code in which the amount that the very wealthy pay depends on the skill of their tax attorneys, the Occupy argument that the U.S. is rigged to help the rich will resonate with some. But this doesn’t address the disconnect between what our schools teach and what our economy needs.”

Liberal think tank: Higher job skills more rewarded than ever

Now the most venerable liberal think tank of all — the Brookings Institution, the one a Nixon aide wanted to firebomb — has released a study of big-city income inequality that makes some of the same points. This is from the L.A. Times’ write-up of the study:

“Los Angeles has one of the highest levels of income inequality in the nation, but that’s due in part to a relatively strong local economy that’s stoking the fortunes of higher-income people, according to a new study.

“Of the 50 largest U.S. cities, L.A. has the ninth-highest level of income disparity, according to the analysis by Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. …

“Inequality has become a flash point nationwide as the wealth of top earners surges while the middle and lower classes grapple with stubborn income stagnation. Politicians have clashed loudly on what’s driving the dichotomy, and what steps, if any, should be taken to reverse it.

“The study found, however, that rising inequality may simply be an unavoidable byproduct of robust local economies that plump the incomes of coveted workers.

“Fast-growing industries with highly paid employees — such as technology, finance and entertainment — tend to cluster in large metropolitan areas, said Alan Berube, a Brookings researcher who specializes in inequality. And the ongoing gentrification of many cities, such as in downtown Los Angeles, is drawing wealthier people.

“At the same time, big cities also draw large numbers of low-income people seeking lower-skilled jobs.”

Needed: a much smarter and more focused education system

Joel Kotkin, the shrewd Los Angeles Democratic futurist, points to the best approach to income inequality in his piece last week in New Geography:

“A pro-growth program today could take several forms that defy the narrow logic of both left and right. We can encourage the growth of high-wage, blue-collar industries such as construction, energy and manufacturing. We can also reform taxes so that the burdens fall less on employers and employees, as opposed to those who simply profit from asset inflation. And rather than impose huge tuitions on students who might not  finish with a degree that offers employment opportunities, let’s place new emphasis on practical skills training for both the new generation and those being left behind in this ‘recovery.'”

The problem facing this approach in California, alas, is that the state’s education status quo has fierce guardians. They don’t want sweeping change because it would cost many CTA and CFT members their jobs.

And given that the CTA and CFT are by far the most powerful forces in the state, this is an immense problem for those who want to do something more constructive about income inequality than tampering at the margins with pseudo-solutions like raising the minimum wage.

By CHRIS REED

Just as red and blue have become associated with Republicans and Democrats, respectively, because of Election Night maps, will green someday become a synonym for fraud and dishonesty? After listening to Gov. Jerry Brown’s two years of lies, prevarications and fantasies about “green jobs,” I hope so. It would be semantic justice.

What brings this to mind is the latest fusillade of flapdoodle from Gov. Brown and his aides. On Friday, speaking in Goleta at The Wall Street Journal’s annual ECO:nomics conference, Brown offered warm words for himself. The governor praised the governor for the governor’s determination to revive California’s rotten economy by creating vast numbers of green jobs.

It was all a recycling of the rhetoric Brown has offered since securing the Democratic nomination for governor in early 2010: A commitment to renewable energy will create more than 500,000 jobs and get Californians working again! Message: Jerry cares! But in an environmentally responsible way!

But two years later, there is simply no evidence of a green economic revolution in the Golden State. Unemployment remains among the worst in the nation. Meanwhile, a new U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics report waterboards the assumption that California is a green jobs powerhouse, saying the state is about average in green employment.

‘Clean Tech’

Yes, “clean tech,” as it’s known in San Diego, has proven to be a modest economic engine, and in fact it’s quite plausible that revolutionary energy technologies could emerge from a lab somewhere in California. But serious economists and business analysts, as opposed to Brown, predecessor Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, acknowledge that green energy will never be a mass employer akin to the auto, steel or aviation industries.

A 2010 study by the respected McKinsey consulting group warned governments not to assume “green” jobs would ever be more than a niche in the economy akin to semiconductor manufacturing. Even the leftist Brookings Institution, in a 2011 study, warned of unrealistic expectations and said “green” jobs grew more slowly than general employment from 2003 to 2010.

These studies and basic data on jobs and growth prompted a remarkable news analysis last summer in The New York Times that said Brown’s green jobs forecast and President Barack Obama’s promise of 5 million new green jobs nationally appeared to be a “pipe dream.”

Alas, the cuts in the newsroom budgets of the Sacramento Bee and Los Angeles Times appear to have included their subscriptions to The New York Times. Even as reporters for both of the state’s most powerful newspapers finally have figured out that another putatively green initiative — the bullet train — is a fiasco, they continue to enthusiastically print the governor’s green balderdash.

You’d think coverage of an “ECO:nomics” conference that featured a governor congratulating himself on green job creation might bother to include some relevant facts, such as the Brookings Institution’s discovery that there were actually fewer green jobs in Silicon Valley in 2010 than 2003. But no. L.A. Times reporter Ricardo Garcia didn’t think it was relevant in his Friday account.

The Real World

Meanwhile, the Sacramento Bee’s David Siders did manage to allow some real-world events to flavor his Saturday story about Brown’s grand plans for solar power, noting the vast problems facing a proposed solar plant in Blythe that the governor just last year predicted would be a “really big” boost to jobs and growth.

But Siders — a naif who wrote a puff piece about the bullet train CEO just two weeks before the incompetent rail official was forced to resign — also included in his March 24 article a paragraph of spin from a Brown official that had me roaring with laughter.

“In theory, the fact that we’re having failures is actually a sign that the market’s working — that we have some comfort because there’s a lot of people out there, and out of this the best projects will probably emerge,” said Michael Picker, a senior adviser to Brown on renewable energy.

The bad news? Hey, it’s actually good news.

What the market is saying, of course, is that it’s still got profound doubts about the practicality and cost of renewable energy — even with the billions of dollars thrown at it by the Obama administration, even with promises of future subsidies, even with regulatory relief not granted to less sainted industries.

Did Siders bother to cite the McKinsey or Brookings reports? Did he look at all the various factors The New York Times cited in pronouncing green jobs a “pipe dream”? Did he note that there is in fact an energy jobs boom going on right now — but, as The New York Times reports, it’s in fossil fuels?

Nope. He let Brown’s aide depict green failure as green success.

Only in California, global headquarters for the cult that is environmentalism, could coverage of green energy be so half-assed that I would yearn for it to be outsourced to The New York Times.