While announcing last month the state’s Regional Investment Initiative “to fund ready-to-go projects,” Newsom’s office declared that “California is the nation’s top state for” a number of economic sectors, including manufacturing.
It’s a recurring message from the governor’s press team.
It is true that California has the most manufacturing jobs in the country. Federal data put the number at 1.2 million. Texas is next with 971,000, Ohio third with 688,000.
But, with 39.4 million residents, what else should we expect? California also has not only the most people in the 50 states, it has the most cars, most homes, most billionaires and most retail stores in the country, to name a few rankings it can be found atop of.
A better gauge than total manufacturing jobs, though, is manufacturing jobs as a portion of the population. Here, California is far down the list. The top five states in manufacturing jobs per 10,000 are Wisconsin with 832, Indiana with 792, Iowa (726), Michigan (637) and Kansas (616).
California’s number? An anemic 356. Which is behind less-regulated red states such as Kentucky (590), Alabama (576), Arkansas (550), Nebraska (548), Tennessee (534), South Dakota (519), Mississippi (513) and South Carolina (507).
California is also laggard in manufacturing as a portion of state GDP. Indiana, a red state, leads at 26%. California logs in at 10%, a percentage point lower than Texas, and far behind Louisiana, Iowa, Wisconsin, Alabama, Mississippi and Arkansas.
Granted, manufacturing is not the economic workhorse it once was in this country. Factory jobs as a portion of total non-farm employment have fallen from 32% in 1950 to 8% today.
And some will argue that factory jobs in California aren’t that important anyway, given the state’s dominance in tech and agriculture. It’s not an unreasonable assertion.
But boasting about California’s role in domestic manufacturing shouldn’t be a political talking point if it’s misleading. Nor should there be too much bragging when California has the highest unemployment rate in the country (5.4%) outside of Washington, D.C.’s, 5.9%.
There are unemployed and underemployed Californians who would be glad to have factory jobs. But more universal to the state are the millions who would be happy with affordable groceries. Four Golden State cities, San Francisco (second), San Jose (sixth), Sacramento (10th) and Los Angeles (11th), are among the cities with the highest grocery prices in the nation. No state has more than two among the 20 most expensive cities for feeding the family.
This, of course, is one reason why California is the No. 2 outbound state. For many, it simply costs too much to live here.
Curiously, these facts are not mentioned by the governor.
We close with another set of statistics that doesn’t fit the Newsom narrative: California netted only 22,400 new jobs from January 2024 to January 2025. All of them, the Wall Street Journal has noted, “were in government (58,300), and health care, social assistance and private (often higher) education (148,200), which rely to a large extent on government spending.”
Meanwhile, private businesses lost jobs over the same time frame, 33,400 of them in the manufacturing sector. Construction dropped 28,600 jobs while the leisure and hospitality dumped 29,500 during an era of mega-minimum-wage hikes.
From almost any angle, it appears one of the busiest factories in California is in the governor’s office, where aides are busy manufacturing a slippery narrative.
Kerry Jackson is the William Clement Fellow in California Reform at the Pacific Research Institute and co-author of The California Left Coast Survivor’s Guide.
