ShareThisWhen Gray Davis was being inaugurated for a second term as California governor in 2003, having barely won re-election, he declared that he would make job creation the cornerstone of his regime.
"From this day forward," Davis declared, "the first goal of my administration will be creating new jobs and improving California's economy ... and I will direct every resource at my command to re-energizing our economy. In the days to follow, I will be releasing details of a new California Jobs Plan. With this new initiative, I am setting a statewide goal of 500,000 new jobs over the next four years."
It sounded impressive until you looked at the numbers in context.
The state's economy was doing pretty well and generating about 250,000 new jobs a year, so the "statewide goal" of 500,000 jobs in four years was a meaningless buzzword.
Six years later, California is in a severe recession, one that's already erased about a half-million jobs with no bottom yet in sight. But that doesn't prevent a newly minted candidate for governor from promising the moon.
Meg Whitman, the former boss of eBay, is running for the Republican gubernatorial nomination next year on her successful business record and a promise to create 2 million new jobs in the first five years.
"This is the amount we need if we're going to replace the jobs our economy has stopped producing or is losing to neighboring states," Whitman said in her first major speech this week. "It's the target we need to hit if we're going to restore prosperity. ... We'll do it by streamlining regulations, restructuring and cutting taxes, spending less and spending smarter."
That statement defies economic, demographic and political reality. When the California economy is popping, as noted above, it creates about 250,000 new jobs a year, somewhat more than the annual growth of the labor force. Whitman is saying she could create 400,000 jobs a year, twice as much as labor force growth.
It's doubtful whether anything she could do as governor would reach that goal, especially since she'd have to deal with a Legislature controlled by liberal Democrats who oppose her specific proposals. And really, do we really want rapid economic growth of those dimensions, even if it were possible? Probably not.
California has had a boom-and-bust economy for too many years, with those cycles coming about once a decade. The defense spending boom of the 1980s, the high-tech boom of the 1990s and the housing boom of this decade all went bust, leaving personal, economic and fiscal chaos in their wake. One effect was the state's chronic budget crisis.
California desperately needs some economic equilibrium, with steady expansion to match its population growth. It needs efficient infrastructure, and good education and job-training programs to attract long-term investment in permanent new jobs.
The next governor should make those conditions a priority, not offer pie-in-the-sky promises that can't -- and shouldn't -- be kept.
(E-mail Dan Walters at dwalters(at)sacbee.com. Back columns, www.sacbee.com/walters. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service
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