How’s California Doing?

This from Dr. Krugman's blog - please follow link to original.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/

The states, said Louis Brandeis, are the laboratories of democracy — although that may not work as well as it used to now that the “I’m not a scientist” wing has taken complete control of the GOP. Still, state experiences can tell the rest of us something. There’s been a lot of talk lately about how the great Kansas tax-cut experiment is doing, namely very badly. But what about the anti-Kansas — California? It’s a state with a Democratic supermajority. Its policies aren’t left-wing in the way Kansas’s are right-wing, but it’s enough of a liberal agenda to have the right frothing at the mouth. So how is it going?

I wrote about the California comeback more than a year ago, to much vitriolic scorn from the usual suspects. But how’s it going now?

Well, David Cay Johnston tells us that job growth remains fast despite predictions of doom from tax hikes. I found myself wondering, however, whether this was just bounceback from an especially severe slump — after all, California was a major housing bubble state, suffered for it, and you would expect a period of relatively fast growth thereafter even if overall performance was lagging the nation.

If you look at the numbers, however, what you see is that while fast job growth has indeed largely reflected recovery from an especially deep slump, at this point California’s performance (blue) since the Great Recession began has fully matched that of the nation (red); that is, there is no sign of growth being hurt by liberal policies or whatever:

Meanwhile, the budget is in good shape, with room for some much-needed spending increases.

Oh, and California — which enthusiastically went about implementing health reform — appears to have cut the number of uninsured by half in the first year of Obamacare.

Is it a miracle? No — or at any rate not unless you consider any deviation from supply-side predictions miraculous. But it’s looking like a pretty solid record.