The state Assembly came dangerously close Monday to having a real debate about a vital public policy issue -- whether California is unconsciously killing its chances of economic recovery -- but pulled back from the brink in the nick of time.

Instead of doing something serious, the Assembly passed a resolution expressing overwhelming legislative support, not surprisingly, for California to become the site of a new Boeing Co. airliner plant that could employ up to 1,200 workers.

Republicans sniped that while Democrats were pushing the resolution supporting California's bid for the aircraft factory, they were also enacting dozens of bills that would drive up costs on employers and thus make job-creating investments here less likely. Democrats just ignored the criticism.

Boeing's 1,200 jobs are numerically insignificant in the larger scheme of things -- about two days worth of the quarter-million new jobs California needs each year -- but may symbolize the state's doldrums. The most recent employment data, released last week, and other indices imply that while the rest of the nation appears poised for a new economic growth spurt, California is languishing. The state's net job loss in just one month was 21,500, with the sharpest decline being seen in high-paying manufacturing employment. The net loss over the last year has been more than 70,000 jobs.

"We continue to lose jobs," Tom Lieser, senior economist at the University of California, Los Angeles, told the Associated Press. "We've been looking for evidence that California has bottomed out, and this doesn't show it."

The San Francisco Bay-centered high-technology industry is the bleakest economic sector, certainly, but one senses that its effects are being magnified by a general air of uncertainty and even anger among employers -- a lack of confidence that stalls adding workers even when their business volume may justify it.

The state's immense budget crisis is one factor in that negative atmosphere, not only because of its size but because California's political leaders are locked in a seemingly rigid stalemate over how to deal with it. Gov. Gray Davis' nose dive in public opinion polls is another factor, as is the increasingly powerful campaign to recall him.

Clearly, however, what Davis and the Legislature's dominant Democrats have wrought in recent years, and what they propose to do this year, have added to the malaise. Wherever one travels in California, employers -- especially the smaller ones without huge financial reserves -- are complaining bitterly about the sharp escalation in workers' compensation insurance rates that have added billions of dollars to operating overhead and thus made expanding payrolls more expensive. That increase in work comp costs -- Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi approved another big boost in insurance rates this month -- has several causes. But one of them is the increase in benefits that Davis and the Legislature approved last year, and employers tend to blame them for their woes and demand something be done.

New or projected state decrees on family leave, the eight-hour day, personal injury litigation and other overhead-increasing measures, along with plans for multibillion-dollar tax increases, contribute even more to what critics say is a "job killer" political climate.

One does not have to engage in such highly charged rhetoric, however, to wonder whether in their zeal to achieve their social goals, the state's Democratic Party leaders, including the governor, are pricing the state out of the market. There is a point at which the state's much-touted economic advantages, such as its climate and Pacific Rim location, are outweighed by its competitive disadvantages.

If the rest of the nation does, indeed, recover from its quasi-recession and California is left behind, not only will its social problems multiply as it continues to experience population growth of 600,000 each year, but governments at all levels will continue to experience stagnation in tax receipts, and California's budget crisis will also linger. Thus, the 1,200 jobs that Boeing will create somewhere loom as a symbol of whether California is still a leader or will become a chronic economic basket case.

That's a debate worth having.