California's Challenges

California has extraordinary assets: enviable weather and beauty; an excellent higher education system; an unparalleled innovation ecosystem; the world’s most productive agriculture; leadership in the entertainment industry; enormous aggregate wealth,  aking us the 4^th largest economy in the world. And yet…
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Despite our remarkable blessings, California has enormous challenges:

• The highest cost of living in the Continental U.S.
• A diminishing middle class, down from 62% in the sixties to 48% today
• The highest rate of cost-adjusted poverty in the U.S.
• One third of all U.S. welfare recipients
• Half of all unsheltered homeless in the U.S.
• Higher level of income inequality than all but 5 states
• Huge geographic disparities, with median household income in some regions at only one third of the more affluent regions
• Ranked 49^th in homeownership
• K-12 system ranked 40th (D+ grade)
• Last in literacy in the U.S.
• Once highly-rated infrastructure now ranked 31^st