California Apart, the US Economy is Pretty Blah

♠ Posted by Emmanuel in , at 10/17/2018 06:10:00 PM
I was watching Bloomberg TV when they brought on one of their journalists to expound on the condition of the American economy. If you were to listen to Trump, the reason why the United States economy is doing better is because of ridding of all sorts of regulations, permitting unlimited pollution, detaching from the rest of the world via trade wars, deporting en masse people willing to work, embracing Stone Age technologies like coal, etc. That is, making America great again is a distinctly backward-looking activity from Trump's point of view.

Actually, the fact of the matter is this: If you separate supremely performing, high-technology, forward-looking California from the rest of the United States, the latter's economic performance is rather mediocre. The Golden State, which Trump hates with a passion (a sentiment California returns back), is buoying the rest of the US:
Trump attributes the prosperity of the U.S. economy during his 17 months as president to his evisceration of environmental regulations and other consumer protections, abandoning the Paris climate accord, aggressively deporting undocumented immigrants, prohibiting people from certain nations (mostly majority Muslim) from emigrating to the U.S., prosecuting sanctuary cities for protecting immigrants, cutting taxes most for corporations and the rich, and appointing a Supreme Court justice who just wrote the 5-4 decision limiting the rights of tens of millions of workers.
Evergreen California Governor Jerry Brown has taken the opposite tack to nearly everything Trump does. So, is California the American laggard? On the contrary, it's doing better than every other state:
Jerry Brown, California's longest-serving governor, takes the opposite approach, and his state thrives. California is the global leader among governments committed to safeguarding the planet from climate change. Corporate California's revenues from clean energy companies dwarf those of the other 49 states or any country. The state's auto emissions law, now contested by the Trump administration, is the nation's most stringent. The legislature voted to become a sanctuary state, preventing police from participating in federal enforcement or asking people about their immigration status. The same assembly also made California the first state to declare a $15-an-hour minimum wage and to require solar panels on new homes. Its citizens approved Proposition 30, temporarily raising personal income and sales taxes to fund education.
The implications are clear. Wouldn't gains be more evenly distributed Stateside if other states acted like California? By not following Trump, maybe everyone else in the US would be doing better too. It's not my place to tell Americans what to do, but weighing the votes of Trump-suopprting primitives instead of those actually driving progress does not seem to be the way forward:
Remove California from the job market and U.S. employment rose only 2.62 percent, a little better than Japan's 2.48 percent and less than Austria's 2.82 percent. The 19 countries that use the euro showed an increase of 2.41 percent. Subtract California's big and small companies from the rest of the nation's and something similar happens. During the same 22-month period, the market capitalization of the companies in the Russell 3000 Index of large, medium and small companies increased at an average rate of 46 percent. California's Russell 3000 companies appreciated 64 percent, according to data compiled by Bloomberg...  
What do California and Illinois have in common aside from voting decisively against Trump? Their companies are committed to global trade. Among companies reporting sales in the Russell 3000, California firms received at least 48 percent and as much as 66 percent of revenues from their exports (accounting for disparities in corporate reporting) while Illinois-based companies got between 44 percent and 53 percent, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
For reasons inherent in their political (electoral) system, the danger is that the Trump-voting primitives drag down California instead of California being allowed to pull up the rest of the laggards. Here California is showing an example of forward thinking...and the Trumpian cave-dwellers not only ignore it but try to bring it down to their level of barbarism.

10/18 UPDATE: Thinking about it more, on the balance, Trump's policies have likely hurt than help the United States. If the country is doing reasonably well, look at parts of it that are faring the best--like California. It's doing so despite rather than because of what Trump is doing.