The California Center for Jobs & the Economy noted these stats on Monday. The first:

“California’s Labor Force Participation Rate (not seasonally adjusted) in April 2014 was 61.8%, the lowest rate since April 1976.  While the significant drop from March 2014 suggests there are also statistical or sampling issues in play, this milestone is a stark reminder that California’s participation rate remains below the US average (62.6%), and like the US rate is currently on a decline.

“This sustained decline in the labor force participation rate has been a statistical factor behind the improving unemployment numbers, but also reflects the perception of many potential job seekers on the opportunities available through the current economic mix.”

20.6% of those classified as CA employed work part-time

If less people seek work, that may help the unemployment rate improve, but it hardly bolsters the narrative of a state on the economic rebound. The Bay Area, Silicon Valley and the tech centers in Orange County, L.A. suburbs and San Diego are doing from pretty well to great, but the rest of the state never left the Great Recession.

The second stat cited by the jobs center also reflects the state’s overall economic weakness:

“While the US percentage of employed who work part-time has continued to slowly decline to 18.0% in April 2014 (12-month moving average), the comparable number for California has remained at 20.6% for the past quarter, reflecting the fact that this factor remained level at a somewhat higher rate throughout 2013 as well.  The number of workers employed part-time for economic reasons also remains higher in California —7.2% for California vs. 5.2% for the US in April 2014.”

And this stat explains why California does badly in most revealing of official federal unemployment stats. It’s the U-6 category, which reflects how many people want to work full-time but can’t find such jobs.

The latest unemployment report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics came out in late April. It shows California to have the second-worst U-6 rate in the nation at 16.7 percent. Only Nevada is worse.

The newsroom version of sportswriters’ resistance to ‘Moneyball’

The L.A. Times’ coverage did note that by the conventional measure of unemployment, California had the fourth-worst rate. But it and most other newspapers rarely talk about the state’s even worse U-6 rate. Dan Walters deserves credit for breaking with the crowd by doing so.

And few journos outside of the Sacramento Bee and U-T San Diego cite how poorly California does in the alternative federal measure of poverty that is adjusted for cost of living.

When that is factored in, the Golden State has by far the highest poverty rate in the U.S. at around 23 percent. When we pretend the cost of housing is the same in California as it is in Indiana, CA’s poverty rate is about 16 percent, only 1 percent higher than the national average. So why is the former, misleading rate the one that’s most reported?

Inertia is the likely answer, not bias. But it’s not a good answer.

Hey, journalists of California: In covering the economy, why would you rely on the equivalent of batting average and ignore the equivalent of OPS and Wins Above Replacement?

When better statistical measurements come along, are veteran news reporters going to be like veteran sports reporters and resist them for no good reason?

When it comes to California’s poverty and unemployment rates, it sure seems that way.

By Laer Pearce

Gov. Jerry Brown is no Billy Beane.

Coaching a bottom-dwelling state, Brown is continuing to dole out big money for policies that are past their prime and failing to perform. California remains at the bottom of the education, business-friendliness and government efficiency rankings — and at the top of taxation, regulation and fleeing residents rankings.

Beane, whose Oakland A’s are once again in the Major League playoffs, realized in 2002 he didn’t have enough money to put a team together the old fashioned way. So, as recounted in Michael Lewis’s best-seller, “Moneyball,” he signed undervalued players other teams overlooked. Each was smartly chosen for on-base percentage, scoring runs, or less measurable qualities like stepping up when the chips are down. Other managers thought Beane was either desperate, insane or both, but the rag-tag team of forgotten players he assembled became winners.

The book was made into a 2011 movie starring Brad Pitt.

Beane had the ability to see in baseball’s raft of statistics what other managers didn’t. Brown is surrounded by statistics on how California’s various players — agriculture, business, local government, state bureaucracies, pension funds — are performing compared to other states, but he can’t seem to read them. Instead of pursuing government policies that are the parallel of Beane’s brilliant recruiting, he’s doing the governmental counterpart of the Yankees shelling out $18.7 million (prorated down from a contracted $28 million) to get pitcher Roger Clemens back from the Houston Astros in 2007. Clemens made $1 million a start that year, and came to define “worst trade ever” to many baseball buffs by turning in a lackluster 6-6 season.

Proposition 30 is Brown’s Clemens, a high-cost, past-its-prime approach to government that he hopes will lift California out of the cellar. Like Clemens, it costs a lot, with sales and income tax increases of as much as $50 billion over the next seven years. Like Clemens, it too has a strong arm, in this case strong-arming Californians with its threat that if they don’t pay up, the teacher dies. And just like Clemens showed the Yankees, there’s no guarantee it will work as promised.

Moneyball for California

Should Prop 30 fail in November, Brown will have a chance to start playing Moneyball.  Here are some ideas for the manager of the major league Sacramento Spenders. 

Schools. Schools are the state’s single biggest expense, receiving 43 percent of the General Fund. Half of this largess goes to administrative overhead, because it takes a lot of administrators and $400 million a year to fulfill all the mandates, reports and busy work imposed on school districts by Sacramento.  In contrast, just 20 percent of Connecticut’s education budget goes to administrative overhead.  California ranks No. 46 in the most recent “best-educated state” rankings, while Connecticut comes in second.

Then there’s the problem that our teachers are the highest paid in the nation, despite California’s tragically poor education outcomes. The California Teachers Association, which gave almost $50 million to Brown’s 2010 gubernatorial campaign and has paid out $6.3 million to support Prop 30, does all it can to keep salaries high and performance-based pay a nonstarter.

Moneyball in education would see the elimination of most of state-imposed mandates on public schools, so we could stop paying for thousands of high-priced school administrators. Then, Brown could support a ballot initiative requiring performance-based pay for teachers, and rail against the devious CTA advertising that would attack it. Brown would never do this, of course, but a Governor Billy Beane would. 

Pensions. The real reason Brown needs Proposition 30 is to shovel money into the $250 billion to $500 billion hole of unfunded state employee pension liabilities. Brown needs to start managing this problem Moneyball-style. He will get nowhere as long as he dodges dealing with the contracts of existing employees, as he has to date.  That’s where the real liability is, so he has to force the rewriting of those contracts, especially when retroactive increases were given, or unions won increases that were completely out of the norm of private sector increases. Costly add-ons, like life-time health insurance for agency directors, need to be prohibited retroactively.

This won’t be easy, but in “Crazifornia,” I make the case that many public employee contracts can be voided because management negotiators were city administrative employees who would benefit from rank-and-file salary and benefit increases when their own contracts were renewed. Brown should seek to have thousands of these sorts of contracts across the state declared null and void by claiming they are the fruit of criminal racketeering under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corruption Act. Brown would never do this, of course, but a Gov. Billy Beane would. 

Taxes. William Voegeli of Claremont University found that California’s per-capita outlays increased 21.7 percent from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s, compared to an 18.2 percent average increase for the other 49 states. Just cutting back to average, which can hardly be categorized as heartless conservatism, would save California $10.6 billion a year, or enough to close most of the current budget gap — without new taxes. If California’s spending over those years had increased only with inflation and population growth, Voegeli writes in Failed State, “the resulting levels of per-capita government outlays … would have equaled neither Somalia’s nor Mississippi’s, but … Oregon’s, which is rarely considered a hellish paradigm of Social Darwinism.”

Brown would never attack spending in this way, nor would he do many other smart Moneyball approaches to fixing our lumbering disaster of a state. Which is why his governorship will ultimately fail.

Laer Pearce, a veteran of three decades of California public affairs, is the author of the new book, “Crazifornia: Tales from the Tarnished State.”

By Wayne Lusvardi

When did the California Dream begin?

Peter Huck, a refugee journalist from Los Angeles to New Zealand, has an answer. He writes in the July 20 issue of the New Zealand Herald newspaper “Sustainability Reinventing California Dream” that the California Dream began when Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s William Mulholland said at the 1913 opening of the California Aqueduct: “There it is, take it.”

Huck believes that “sustainability” will lead to an economic recovery in California.

But the California Dream may have ended with California’s Anti-Sprawl Law, Senate Bill 375, which Huck champions in his article as an economic stimulus to get the state out of a managed depression.

More recently, the County of San Bernardino in California has proposed to use eminent domain to condemn mortgages on “over-mortgaged” homes.  The county would do this by spreading about 30,000 over-mortgaged loans to all 699,000-property owners in the county by way of additional property taxes.

If there is a new slogan for California nearly 100 years after Mulholland’s epic statement, it is: “Socialize losses and privatize gains.”  Which is another way of saying: “Everyone wants out of bubble-created debts, but no one wants to pay for them except through more bubbles.”

Yet no one in San Bernardino has apparently realized that reducing the over-mortgaged portion of home loans will just lower assessed property values and drastically reduce property tax revenues.  Mass delusion is starting to spread across desperate California just as the Tulip Bulb Mania, the South Seas Bubble and the Mississippi Bubble followed the debt bubbles of the 1700’s in Europe and early America.

“Sustainable” Transit Will Result in Unsustainable Water

Having handled land use for a regional water agency in California for 20 years, I find that Huck has focused on the ideological level of explanation, rather than the empirical.

Contrary to Huck, steering population and housing into coastal cities in California will result in an unsustainable use of water resources.  Infill housing near urban job centers may result in fewer auto emissions from auto commuting.  But diverting population growth to dense urban cities will also force greater reliance on imported water supplies from the Sacramento Delta and the Colorado River.  California’s cities depend on groundwater for about one third of their water during dry years.

What has historically made water valuable in California has been the relative cheapness of water from urban groundwater basins compared to expensive imported water.

The anti-sprawl law will require that cities adopt sustainable growth plans to shift new development from the urban fringe, where groundwater resources are more abundant, to highly dense urban areas, where local water supplies are patchy and often polluted from war time industrial toxic wastes.  It would take decades, if ever, to clean up polluted urban groundwater basins.

Viewing a map of groundwater basins and a map of housing density for California indicates that water and populations are not geographically proximate. The densest populated areas are mostly along the coast while most groundwater resources are inland.

Moreover, by virtue of shifting to reliance on imported water supplies, California will need to buy more imported electricity to pump that water to urban centers located far from the sources of water.  Will expensive Green Power mostly be used to pump water long distances?  Or will Green Power be dedicated to powering the proposed California High-Speed Rail Authority?

Solar power can only be used in mid-to-late daytime; while wind power mostly peaks at night.  But neither can be relied on for non-peak load power uses — homes, industries, hospitals, and public transit — because they are unreliable and thus unsustainable.

How Cal Energy Crisis Resulted in “Sustained” Drought

In 2001, this writer was a member of an Energy Crisis Task Force for a large regional government water utility.  The original cause of the California Energy Crisis of 2001 was the 1996 Federal Environmental Protection Agency “mandate” to California to clean up urban smog by 2001 or face a cut off of highway and education funds.

The only way to comply with the federal mandate was to shut down old polluting fossil-fuel power plants along the California coast owned by Pacific Gas & Electric, San Diego Gas & Electric, and Southern California Edison companies.  Then these obsolescent power plants had to be divested to private operators and converted to cleaner natural gas fuel power plants.

California was not running out of energy in 2001; it was running out of clear sky.  The real crisis was not energy, but how to pay off the old stranded or “underwater” mortgages — called corporate bonds — on the mothballed power plants. Everybody wanted smog eliminated, but no one wanted to pay for it.  Federal environmental policy became “clean air at any cost.”

The initial energy crisis solution in 2001 was to give a quasi-monopoly to natural gas suppliers, mainly in Texas, to try to pay off the bonds on the old power plants. This policy was erroneously called “deregulation,” which failed. The plug was pulled on deregulation by the Democratic legislature and governor and replaced with a system of energy price caps.

Retail electricity prices were eventually capped; but wholesale energy prices were not resulting in an induced energy pricing fever. This bubble in energy prices was intentionally created to pay off the unpaid mortgages on the mothballed power plants.  But it also failed miserably and even resulted in some fatalities.

Finally, some $42 billion in mortgages were paid off by energy price premiums loaded into long-term energy contracts mainly to run the pumps for the California State Water Project.  Smog reduction was paid for by inflated water rates.

By 2007, a man-made drought resulted from an environmental lawsuit to protect the purportedly endangered Delta Smelt fish in the Sacramento Delta. In 2010, an appeals court ruled that the allegation that the Smelt was endangered was bogus.

By manufacturing a drought, California not only protected a bubble in water rates that securitized the pay off of long-term bonds to reduce smog, but also brought about even higher water rates. These higher local water rates have not been repealed anywhere in California after the court-ordered drought was ended in 2010.

California Politician’s Dream Come True: “Taxation without Representation and Limitation”

Loading the cost to clean up the air into water contracts avoided having to go to the California Public Utilities Commission for an electric rate increase, to the Legislature for a tax increase, or to the voters for the approval of a tax increase, as required under Proposition 13.  To politicians, it was a California Dream come true: ”taxation without representation and limitation.” But it led to economic stagnation.

Long-term water contracts expire in 2013, when AB 32, the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, kicks in.  In other words, in 2013 California will no longer pay premiums loaded into the price of water to pay off the cost to reduce smog.

But a replacement premium will be added to electricity rates to pay for the mandatory shift to expensive Green Power.  Solar and wind power located in remote areas is supposed to reduce urban air pollution but will add transmission costs.

This will prevent the building of new conventional power plants in urban areas where smog is trapped in urban air basins.  It isn’t solely pollutants that cause smog, but the trapping of pollutants in air basins.  The solution to pollution is dilution and dispersion — not anti-sprawl legislation that will concentrate more people in dense urban air basins who will travel to work in bullet trains subsidized by Cap and Trade taxes disguised as a pollution emissions market.

Moreover, back up conventional power plants will have to cycle up and down as the sun shines or clouds cover the sun and the wind gusts. Power-plant “cycling” will cause more air pollution as surely as pushing your gas pedal up and down constantly in your car or frequently moving your home thermostat will do the same.

The California Energy Crisis of 2001 ended up loading the huge cost to reduce smog into premiums in water rates.  That, in turn, resulted in the necessity of an artificial drought.  Instead of building more dams, reservoirs and pipelines, the only way left to manage water supplies was by conservation. California had to protect its water-rate bubble, and thus had to squelch any new water development or water markets for over a decade.  It needed a “sustainability” ideology to legitimate its conservation policy.  “Sustainability” is just public “hucksterism” if you will forgive the pun.

California may finally put an $11 billion water bond on the election ballot in 2014, coincidentally after the bonds on the California Energy Crisis of 2001 are paid off.

The Solution to Bubbles is Not More Bubbles

In Michael Lewis’ pop economics book, “Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World,” he describes the blowback from Greece’s debt-created bubble.  All Greeks wanted the national debt reduced, but nobody wanted to pay for it.

Greece tried to load its unpaid national debt into electric power rates.  This only resulted in ratepayers refusing to pay their electricity bills and falling revenues for the state utility agency.  The result was power blackouts, disinvestment by the bond market and social and political destabilization.  Should we expect anything less from California’s loading of the cost to reduce air pollution in water rates securitized by water conservation and legitimated by a “sustainability” ideology?

Contrary to Peter Huck, a “sustainability” ideology will not result in an economic recovery for California. The future of California’s economy is more likely to be slow growth due to having to pay down the private sector mortgage-debt bubble and the public sector’s pension, redevelopment and air quality-water rate bubbles.

Creating new tax bubbles by condemning “underwater” mortgages, by Cap and Trade “tax farming,” and by inflating Green Power rates, will only assure the older bubbles will be replaced with new ones.  California band musician Lawrence Welk famously invented “the Bubble Machine.” But perhaps comedian Stan Freberg was prophetically right when he recorded his spoof of the Lawrence Welk Show by saying it was time to “turn off the bubble machine?”