Last week, Gov. Jerry Brown gave his final state of the state speech. Just one sentence in, he asserted, “[s]imply put, California is prospering.” Personal income has grown to $2.4 trillion, from $154 billion in 1975, and 2.8 million new jobs have been created.
In 1975 the governor started the first of two terms that ended in 1984. In 2011, when he began his third term, California faced a $27 billion deficit, and the media disparaged the state without mercy: The New York Times called California “The Coast of Dystopia,” the Wall Street Journal foresaw a “Great California Exodus,” and the Economist of London pronounced the Golden State, “The Ungovernable State,” while Business Insider “simply said: ‘California is Doomed.’”