Mark Steyn's column on California has this intersting tidbit: without California, the country added 4500 jobs last month. This might not seem like much, except that the 21500 jobs that California cost the economy shows up as .2% in the unemployment rate.

But you can't just take a saw and cut California off from the rest of the country. Losses in tech jobs, to take one very personal example, affect the tech sector in the rest of the country, too. Grey Davis is on the verge of dragging the whole US economy back from recovery.

There's a concept in accounting called EBIT, Earnings Before Interest and Taxes. This might seem like a dodge, but it turns out to be a very useful measure of a company's performance. Maybe we should institute a new concept: EBC, Economy Before California.