(Just The News)—California has lost 173,000 fully private sector jobs since January 2023, offset by a gain of 181,100 largely part-time government and government-supported jobs.
Thirty-eight percent of these new government and government-supported jobs are from elderly or disabled individuals using state funds to pay household members and others minimum wage for part-time care and assistance.
The report also found that while hourly wages are up, average hours worked are down, suggesting employers are cutting hours to reduce labor costs, such as those imposed by the state’s sector-based minimum wages.
According to the new report from the California Center for Jobs and the Economy, a project of the California Business Roundtable pro-business association, “California’s job growth has been dominated by government and government dependent jobs in Healthcare & Social Assistance.”
CCJE says of the 181,100 new taxpayer-funded jobs, 124,800 were in health care and social assistance, and that 55% of those were from the government’s household care program.
“Using the unadjusted series, Social Assistance — composed primarily of minimum wage, part-time, government paid jobs in In-Home & Supportive Services (IHSS) — was responsible for 55% of the Healthcare & Social Assistance jobs growth in California — and 2/3 of total net jobs growth. This source comprised only 4% to 16% in the other states.”
The report said in the private sector, essentially only “green” energy and transportation jobs experienced any growth.
“Trade related jobs in Transportation, Trade & Utilities have been the one bright spot in the state’s recovery progress, but as indicated in the Texas numbers, California’s lead in this area has been under increasing competition from other regions,” continued the report. “To put it more directly, other than in Trade, California has not grown jobs during the past 4 years of recovery; it has bought them with public funds.”
Without state and federal funding and regulations mandating labor and capital-intensive replacement of energy and transportation infrastructure, it’s thus likely every single sector in the private industry in California would have shrunk over the past two years.
The report also said the low quality of the new “jobs” could create issues for the state over time.
“California has not expanded its tax base; it has used that tax base to cover its competitive weakness for private sector jobs,” wrote the CCJE. “And the jobs California has bought are not the ‘good-paying’ jobs promised in the state’s economic development goals, but are predominantly minimum wage, part-time and limited term.”
Last year, the state-funded Legislative Analyst’s Office reported the state’s fully private sector employment started contracting in 2022 and that all job growth had been through government.
Now, the LAO has a new report on just how much IHSS — which largely facilitates elderly and disabled individuals paying household members $21.65 per hour for the time they spend together — will cost the state in the coming 2025-2026 fiscal year.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has proposed a $28.5 billion budget for IHSS this coming year, due to an estimated 7% increase in caseload and 2.9% increase in labor costs.
The LAO explained IHSS recipients generally can receive up to 283 hours of paid assistance per month “with tasks such as bathing, dressing, housework and meal preparation,” and that county workers conduct assessments to approve service hours.
“In most cases, the recipient is responsible for hiring and supervising a paid IHSS provider — oftentimes a family member or relative,” wrote the LAO. “The average number of service hours that will be provided to an estimated 771,650 IHSS recipients is projected to be 123.7 hours per month in 2025-26.”
The LAO noted most costs for the program are shared with the federal government, and as a Medicaid program, receives 50% reimbursement from federal taxpayers, leaving the state and county governments with the rest of the tab, except in the case of certain individuals with federal reimbursement rates of up to 90%.
The LAO warned “caseloads are growing at an increasing rate.”
The office noted program growth has risen since all illegal immigrants were made eligible for Medi-Cal and the state ended asset means-testing for the program, allowing technically low-income but asset-rich individuals to qualify for taxpayer-funded healthcare, nursing and other benefits.
The LAO also said demographic changes are further increasing IHSS spending.
The state expects a quarter of Californians to be 60 or older by 2030, which, combined with the out-migration of net taxpayers and in-migration of net beneficiaries, could further complicate the state’s deteriorating budget.
Even with current spending levels, the LAO says the state will face a $20 billion deficit for 2026 and that will continue to rise to $30 billion by the end of the decade.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
