Title should be: News media cherry pics statistics to promote an agenda. California GDP is top ten in the world and has been for decades. Meanwhile California

Title should be: News media cherry pics statistics to promote an agenda. California GDP is top ten in the world and has been for decades. Meanwhile California's unemployment rate is almost 9% while Florida's is pushing 5%. Just skip ahead to the ending of the article to avoid the agenda. The UCLA report also suggests that “the answer lies in the structure of the California economy.” In California, “sectors with a high degree of human contact” — that is, “leisure and hospitality, education, retail trade, and health care and social services” — contributed only “0.3 percentage points to annual GDP growth over the decade preceding the pandemic.” But last year, “they accounted for 75 percent of the state’s job losses.” Meanwhile, the sectors driving growth in California — “information, professional and business services, manufacturing and financial services” — weren’t hit nearly as hard. That helps to explain the discrepancy between the state’s unemployment rate and its overall economic performance. UCLA expects “many of those lost jobs to return"