It doesn’t help that California is tremendously unfriendly toward business. A state report released last year found that Sacramento squeezed nearly half a trillion dollars per year in regulation costs for businesses to operate here. Four million jobs have been lost due to excessive regulation, as small businesses pack up and leave for friendlier states. Forbes magazine ranks California #49 in business climate. (See California Businesses Waterboarded By Governmental Overregulation and listen to an audio report on the John and Ken radio show – highly recommended!)

So California is doubly screwed by the national economy and incompetence in Sacramento. Plus, we certainly don’t need additional workers from around the world. An immigration moratorium and universal E-verify would help this state enormously.

Bay Area jobs market won’t recover until 2015, forecast says, San Jose Mercury, April 4, 2010

Battered by the Great Recession, the Bay Area won’t fully recover the jobs it has lost until 2015, according to a forecast prepared for the Mercury News and its sister papers, leaving tens of thousands of workers struggling to find permanent employment.

Such a prolonged slump will take a heavy toll on the region, keeping home sales depressed, squeezing Bay Area retailers and leaving the overall economy jittery for years.

”It does have the potential to be the most durable period of unemployment since World War II,” said Jon Haveman, a founding principal of Beacon Economics, the San Rafael-based firm that prepared the forecast.

And the social costs have civic leaders and others concerned, as the ranks of the unemployed put a strain on tight budgets for job retraining, social services and other safety net programs when the state and cities are already in a financial bind.

From the time employment peaked in early 2008, to the end of 2009, the Bay Area’s core counties – including Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara – have lost 251,000 jobs out of a work force of nearly 3 million people.

Beacon’s forecast, which tried to determine when the Bay Area would replace those lost jobs, is in line with the views of a wide range of economists, who say it will take the region years to regain its economic footing, although it will begin to add some jobs this year. Beacon prepared the forecast by modeling how the jobs market had rebounded from previous recessions and factoring in assumptions about how different sectors of the region’s economy will act in the future to arrive at an estimate of the pace of this recovery…