It's the nation's biggest, most interesting, and certainly most complicated state, so it's to be expected that bad news has a way of morphing into calamity. You know, sliding into the ocean type stuff. So it is with the economy. Not that facts always matter, but for the record new Census data shows that while California did indeed report a drop in second-quarter tax revenue, so did a bunch of other states. Actually, the state's overall decline in tax revenue - 14 percent - was better than the national average of 17 percent.

Here are the states that fared worse:
--Alaska -87%
--Arizona -27%
--Colorado -24%
--Delaware -25%
--Georgia -17%
--Hawaii -16%
--Idaho -21%
--Kansas -15%
--Louisiana -18%
--Maine --15%
--Maryland -17%
--Massachusetts -19%
--Missouri -17%
--Montana -18%
--New Jersey -15%
--New Mexico -31%
--New York -22%
--North Carolina -22%
--North Dakota -16%
--Ohio -15%
--Oklahoma -22%
--Oregon -27%
--South Carolina -21%
--Utah -16%
--Virginia -15%
--Wisconsin -24%

All right, this is just one measurement, and there are plenty of states on the above list that clearly are in better economic shape than California - in part by not relying on the volatile year-to-year changes in the amount of tax money coming in. That said, these Census numbers (courtesy of the WSJ) suggest that California's revenue problems, while obviously serious, are not at all isolated. So take that, North Dakota!