According to a new report from Jonathan Lansner at the Orange County Register, California still hasn’t recovered economically from 2020, with job creation still slogging far behind where it once was.

Per Lansner though, the problem is “an extended pandemic hangover,” and definitely not the state’s heavy involvement in the market, regulating businesses to literal death. Looking at two sets of data, job creation from 2015 through February 2020—the point at which “we all learned what a coronavirus was”— and then job creation from February 2020 through February 2025, “statewide job creation [has] cooled 81%” which is the cause behind what he calls, an “upended…business climate.” Again, not Democrat policy like unaffordable high minimum wage…forced government closures of small businesses…electric trucking mandates…rising energy costs from “green” energy…the import of millions of third world migrants reliant on welfare…but a cold virus that many don’t even know they have with an almost one hundred percent survival rate.

But as always, the devil is in the details.

Lansner reports that post-2020, Texas has actually had an increase in job growth, to the tune of 140,000 (Lansner doesn’t make it clear what the time frame for this growth is), while other data reveals that California transplants to Texas numbered at more than 105k just in 2020–2021. Considering that Austin, Texas is now the new tech hub as Silicon Valley shrinks—Tesla, Hewlett-Packard, and Oracle (among others) have all relocated due to California’s taxation rate and high cost-of-living—I suspect much of Texas’s job growth is in the tech industry alone.

Here’s an interesting little tidbit too: private schooling actually saw a relatively substantial amount of growth, and one can only deduce it’s a rebuke of the public education system, especially that of California. Private education added “35,900 workers in [the] last five years to 428,200 vs. 48,300 gained in 2015-20.”

Now, I know you’re not going to believe this, but there is one sector that has experienced steady growth despite the economic storm that battered millions…and that’s the bureaucracy, which is California’s biggest industry. Here are the numbers, from Lansner:

Local: Up 58,100 workers in the last five years to 1.9 million vs. 130,100 gained in 2015-20.

State: Grew 20,200 over the last five years to 561,600 vs. 36,100 added in 2015-20.

Federal: Added just 700 during the last five years to 252,200 vs. 8,300 growth in 2015-20.

Somehow, the parasite class remains unscathed.

Image: Free image, Pixabay license.