That struck me too, when I read the article. The jobs that are going away are mostly manufacturing jobs. The new ones seem to be retail.
The thing I got from the article, is that companies who are here are staying, and if they are expanding, they are mostly expanding elsewhere. Those which might be coming here are going to Nevada or Arizona instead.
Yeah, that's probably right.
But California's economy is so huge (and Davis knows this) that it will "coast" for many years just because there are so many talented and entrepreneurial people there.
New York State took decades and decades to kill its economy. The effort to kill the golden goose in New York started way back in the early 1900's and it took until the seventies to see the results.
Sometimes I wish that businesspeople weren't so darned pragmatic. By nature, they take problems (like state-imposed pregnancy leave or living-wage rules) and just try to figure out how to still make a profit.
The Libs count on this, indeed they build it into their calculations.
Ultimately, it doesn't work. Economics is becoming more and more like History and English as a discipline. It takes so long for the damage of a bad policy to become obvious, that the perpetrators are long gone and the causes forgotten.
Nice sounding proposals can win with ignorant citizens.