20 MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE: The United States isn’t in a recession, but California is.

“These mounting economic headwinds have pushed the state’s economy into a downturn,” the LAO continues. “The number of unemployed workers in California has risen nearly 200,000 since the summer of 2022. This has resulted in a jump in the state’s unemployment rate from 3.8% to 4.8%, as Figure 1 on the next page shows.”

Figure 1 then graphs California unemployment rates going back to 1978, with dots indicating each time California’s unemployment rate triggered the “Sahm Recession Indicator,” which Figure 1 explains “signals the start of a recession when the three-month moving average of the unemployment rate rises by 0.5 percentage points or more relative to its low during the previous 12 months.”

Figure 1 also shows California triggering the Sahm Recession Indicator this year, in 2020, and during the Great Recession in 2008. “Whether the recent weakness will continue is difficult to say,” the LAO continues. “However, the odds do not appear to be in the state’s favor.”

President Joe Biden has long held California out as an economic model for the nation.

In terms of “California’s Potemkin environmentalism,” that’s certainly Biden’s goal, writ large, for the entire US economy. Even during the Schwarzenegger era, Max Schultz of City Journal, who coined that phrase, noted that California’s “celebrated green economy produces pollution elsewhere, ongoing power shortages, and business-crippling costs.”