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Last week, California Gov. Jerry Brown announced that for the first time in years, the state was projected to run a surplus starting next fiscal year.Given what the state went through during the recession, few could have predicted this (although Bill McBride did).
So how’d they do it?
We dug in.
According to Richard Green, chair of USC's Lusk centre for Real Estate, the answer's pretty simple...

Here's YOY state employment growth in five different sectors, with TECHNOLOGY in blue. Case closed. Domestic industry is booming.

San Francisco's foreclosure rate is now one of the lowest in the nation — 1 out of every 2,420 units, compared with 1 out of every 728 nationally.

And when your bread-and-butter industry improves, employment for everyone goes up — here's San Francisco's labour force rate.

Orange County hosts the regional headquarters for most Asian automakers, most of whom have seen phenomenal turnarounds.

And as mentioned earlier, people wanna buy houses again — even in SoCal, where prospects recently bid up the price of a 1,500 sq ft. home 10 per cent.
The last key to the turnaround has been the popularity of Gov. Jerry Brown and his Sacramento reunion tour (he was also governor in the '70s).

This year, he proposed $8.5 billion in tax increases — a seemingly impossible task in a state where most taxes must be voted on by referendum.

But two months ago, after aggressive, if late, campaigning from Brown, voters approved Prop 30, which will raise $6 billion via a $0.25-cent sales tax hike and a new marginal income rate.

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