Overregulation: The problem we can’t outproduce (with some words from Reagan)

In the period between 1950 and about 2005, Americans continuously sustained a hefty downpayment on our federal, state, and local governments’ spiraling debt, by upping our productivity, our economic output, and the scope of opportunity for everyone.

Overregulation and implied state ownership of what we produce has been a problem for us since Woodrow Wilson’s terms in office.  But until the last half-decade, the American people shouldered and outproduced greater and greater burdens of regulation and/or taxation, costly credit and inflation, and victim politics and litigation.  Operating in the conditions of relative economic and political freedom – more than most of the world, if not more than in our own past – the American people were a productivity engine unmatched in the history of man.  Spend more?  We’ll produce more. 

California by the numbers

The weekend produced a spate of dang-this-is-bad articles on the economic situation in California.  Steven Greenhut’s for the Orange County Register is entitled “California to middle class: drop dead.”  At The Daily Beast, Joel Kotkin laments that “As California Collapses, Obama Follows its Lead.”  (H/t – and a “Read it, people!” shout-out – to Ed Driscoll at PJM.)

But what does all this look like in terms of numbers?  What’s the how much and where and whom of the Golden State collapse?  Perhaps the most interesting and telling thing is that it really is as bad as it looks.  And the reasons are pretty much what you’d expect.  Here’s the California story, in numbers.

Slim Pickins 4 February 10

Just So You Know

An arcane but easily-understood artifact of the way the Bureau of Labor Statistics analyzes unemployment will produce a major revision of job-loss figures when they are released on Friday (5 Feb).

Check it out at Bloomberg.  Basically, the job losses for the period April 2008 to March 2009 are being revised upward by 824,000 jobs, the largest such revision ever.  (A historical revision is made each year in February to ensure an accurate long-term baseline.)

The reason for earlier underestimates of job losses for that period is that the BLS methodology assumes a rough equality between business failures (“death”) and business start-ups (“birth”).  But that rough equality didn’t obtain after April 2008.  Businesses weren’t starting up at a rough replacement rate.