Poverty and Inequality in California

A press release from the  Southern California Association of Governments:

Poverty levels in the six-county Southern California Association of Governments region have jumped 69 percent since 1990, with one in four children now living in poverty, according to
research to research being presented tomorrow (Thursday, Dec. 5) at SCAG’s 4th Annual Economic Recovery & Job Creation Summit.

The numbers, from U.S. Census Bureau data, show 3.2 million people in the SCAG region living in poverty in 2012, up from 1.9 million in 1990. That 69 percent increase is nearly three times the  population growth rate (26 percent) during that period. Overall, the share of SCAG-region residents living in poverty is now 18 percent, led by Imperial County (23 percent) and San Bernardino County (20 percent).

A press release from the UCLA Anderson Forecast:

The California forecast report, authored by Senior Economist Jerry Nickelsburg, examines the recovery in employment in California, both by geography and sector. The economic news coming out of California is relatively bright when compared to the rest of the United States, but the state is not participating in the recovery equally. Rather, the California economy is divided both by geography and skill class.

In a report titled, “Where are the Jobs, California,” Nickelsburg notes that the coastal economies in California that are driven by investment, technology, and trade have outperformed the U.S. Conversely, the inland economies driven by migration, construction and government have stagnated. The data from the past 12 months reveals a similar pattern to that of the previous three years. Employment in the Bay Area, Orange County, San Diego and Ventura has consistently grown at a faster rate than the U.S. Los Angeles and the Mid-Coast, after a slower start, have seen employment growth at about the anemic national rates. But the Sacramento Delta, San Joaquin Valley and Inland Empire, absent the primary drivers of economic growth, continue to fall further behind the rest of the state. 

At The Weekly Standard, Charlotte Allen writes of Silicon Valley:

The big names in tech might be awash in capital and might have made their founders billionaires (New Economy founders typically retain large blocks of their own stock), but they employ surprisingly small numbers of U.S. workers. Google, the valley’s largest employer, has 46,000 people on its payroll. Facebook employs only 4,600, and Twitter, in San Francisco, fewer than 2,000. Apple claims 400,000 people putting together components and creating apps and other extras for its iPhones, iPads, iPods, MacBooks, and desktop computers. Yet only 16,000 of those are on the payroll in Cupertino. Another 31,000 work at Apple operations in Texas and other states, but the vast bulk of manufacturing is outsourced abroad via contractors to China and other cheap-labor purgatories. Yet those 16,000 in Cupertino make Apple the second-largest employer in the valley. [Joel] Kotkin compares those numbers to the 212,000 employed by GM, the 170,000 employed by Ford, and the more than 100,000 employed by Exxon Mobil, all three presumably Old Economy dinosaurs. The New Economy generates prosperity all right, prosperity that mostly flows to those in the upper echelons.