New America in California: Latest Articles

Newly revised economic data vividly illustrate the difficulty of the choices confronting California legislators as they try to close the state's $35-billion budget deficit. Not only has the current recession claimed many more jobs than previously estimated, but the state's private sector, the major source of tax revenue, is shrinking at an alarming rate.

Since March 2001, when the downturn began, California has lost a net 370,000 private-sector jobs. That's 75% of the loss in the early 1990s recession, regarded… more

Few Californians seem aware of the state's disturbing economic circumstances. The economy is losing well-paying blue-collar and middle-class jobs at an astounding rate, especially in the Bay Area. Meanwhile, growth is increasingly concentrated in a handful of outlying counties. As a result, California's economy is fragmenting as never before between slow-growth, politically powerful population centers and pro-growth, politically marginal counties that surround urban cores. And California's leaders seem indifferent.

Since January 2001, the state has officially lost a… more

On a bright California day last April, Arnold Schwarzenegger was out of character. Instead of shooting up bad guys on a movie set, he was driving to the Los Angeles county clerk's office in a truck loaded with petitions bearing 750,000 signatures in support of a ballot initiative to fund California after-school programs, known as the After School Education and Safety Act. The proposal, spearheaded by Schwarzenegger, would offer a matching grant to every public elementary, middle, and junior high… more

Los Angeles is the only big city built on the promise of the suburban dream. Unlike New York, where migrants move to be part of a continuing civic enterprise, the genius and fundamental weakness of Los Angeles is that you rarely feel obliged to be part of anything. Nothing short of cataclysmic events like riots, earthquakes or a Lakers championship can ignite a strong sense of civic unity.

Southern California's appeal has always been its temperate weather and the allure… more

Even as the Enron and Global Crossing bankruptcies further expose the spectacular waste fostered by the 1990s' Information Age bubble, an army of lobbyists in Washington is fighting to secure government support for broadband communications, the "next wave" of the "new economy." Subsidizing an ultra-fast Internet, it's said, will energize everything, from the stock market to our democracy itself. But if the unbalanced, profligate economy of the '90s has taught us anything, it should be the danger of granting any… more