Under welfare reform [in 1996], the country’s bloated caseload dropped very quickly. In its first four years, about 2.5 million families came off the dole ... This unprecedented mass transformation is an important but underappreciated element of the prosperity of the late 1990s.
The state’s political establishment and social services bureaucracy have resisted the reforms of 12 years ago at nearly every possible turn, as shown here.
And yet in a recent speech on energy policy, President Obama chose an especially odd example:
In the late 1970s, the state of California enacted tougher energy-efficiency policies. Over the next three decades, those policies helped create almost 1.5 million jobs. And today, Californians consume 40 percent less energy per person than the national average--which, over time, has prevented the need to build at least 24 new power plants. Think about that. California--producing jobs, their economy keeping pace with the rest of the country, and yet they have been able to maintain their energy usage at a much lower level than the rest of the country.
I recall California’s "rolling blackouts" in 2000-2003. Today, with unemployment approaching 12%, California's economy is hardly "keeping pace" with the rest of the country.
The fact is that California should serve as a warning to Washington political elites, as well as to the rest of us, about the efficacy of big government.
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