The Los Angeles Times published an article last week about Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad's efforts to recruit California businesses to his state, citing complaints about California's business climate.

Gov. Jerry Brown's spokesman, Gil Duran, told the Times in response, "This is a Republican myth that is often repeated yet simply not true. Reputable studies have shown that businesses are not fleeing the state for the cold, empty and desolate hinterlands."

The response typified the Capitol's dismissive attitude toward any suggestion that we have become economically uncompetitive.

This is no small matter. As the latest employment data indicate, California may be emerging from recession, but it's a glacial recovery.

While there's no evidence of a massive exodus by business, the issue is whether we will get the expansion we need.

There are still 2 million Californians on the unemployment rolls (plus those who have dropped out of the labor market in frustration). It will take many billions of dollars of investment capital for prosperity to return to the state.

Making California hospitable to that job-creating investment should be Job No. 1 in Sacramento, as it is in most other state capitals.

But California's politicians have seemingly gone out of their way to make the state inhospitable, with a dense regulatory structure (including the new cap-and-trade system for limiting carbon emissions), ever higher utility costs, one of the nation's highest tax burdens, and deficiencies in education, transportation, water supply and other forms of public infrastructure.

And it's not just a Republican myth.

Democratic Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom has become one of the most vociferous critics of the state's business climate. He participated in a very bipartisan "California Economic Summit" in Santa Clara this month whose "playbook" laid out in detail the state's "long-term and structural" factors that discourage investment.

A few Democratic legislators, such as Assemblyman V. Manuel Pérez of Coachella, have introduced bills to align California with the kinds of investment incentives being offered in other states. But they have gotten a chilly response from their leaders and colleagues, to whom job development seems to begin and end with putting more unionized workers on public payrolls.

Yes, as Facebook, Apple, Intel and other high-tech success stories demonstrate, California is still receiving a lot of venture capital for innovative technology, but it's not translating into middle-class jobs.

Technology executives and research-and-development folks may be in California, where the weather, scenery and food are enticing, but their blue-collar jobs are going elsewhere. If we don't capture them, we will continue to evolve into a two-tier society of rich and poor.

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