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I had no idea what the Private Attorney General Act (PAGA) was, and I wondered what we could have possibly done wrong when it comes to our employees.  As I spent time researching PAGA law I soon realized that this lawsuit could potentially cost the company millions of dollars. From what I understand, PAGA was originally designed to protect the employee; but unfortunately the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction and these days many ambulance-chasing attorneys open unfair litigation against good companies in California chasing that easy dollar.

The U.S. economy isn’t growing very fast these days. Some state economies are, though! The fourth-quarter state gross domestic product data, out Thursday from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, has Texas, Utah, Florida and Washington leading the way, all with annualized real GDP growth of more than 3 percent in the fourth quarter. Also growing at faster than 2.5 percent: the District of Columbia, California, Idaho and Oregon.

AB 5, authored by Assemblymember Lorena Gonzalez-Fletcher (D-San Diego) and Assemblymember Ash Kalra (D-San Jose) prohibits California businesses with as few as 10 employees from hiring part-time help until those work hours have been offered to existing employees. Under this bill, if a company has offices in Northern and Southern California and the office in Irvine has a growing workload and needs to hire

Under this bill, if a company has offices in Northern and Southern California and the office in Irvine has a growing workload and needs to hire extra help they would be precluded from doing so until the extra hours were offered to existing employees in Lodi. Yes, this is an actual bill and two Legislators put their names on it.

California Gov. Jerry Brown released a revised, $180 billion budget proposal Thursday that closely mirrors his January plan, maintaining a cautious approach amid uncertainty about the direction of the economy and possible federal actions that could hurt the state’s bottom line.

Advocates for expanded child care and kindergarten and other services were buoyed when Legislative Analyst Mac Taylor opined that Brown’s overall revenue estimates through the 2017-18 fiscal year were “probably too low.”

It was a long-standing pattern. For 45 years starting in 1960, around 40 to 50 percent of African Americans in Sacramento County owned their homes, census figures show. By the turn of the century, the black homeownership rate in Sacramento County was higher than the statewide average and higher than other California urban centers such as Los Angeles and San Diego.

California gives corporations billions of dollars in special tax breaks each year on the assumption that they will generate more job-creating investment.

However, state officials only occasionally check on whether these loopholes actually do what they are supposed to do, or just fatten corporate treasuries. In fact, a new nationwide study of how states manage their “incentives” says that California’s oversight is one of the weakest.

Corporate income taxes are one of the smallest sources of state and local tax revenue. On average, only 3.7 percent of state and local tax revenues came from corporate income taxes in fiscal year 2014 (the most recent data available).

Some, however, mistake the corporate income tax as the entirety of a business’s tax burden. In reality, businesses pay many types of taxes (such as sales tax, property tax, excise taxes, and more) and the corporate income tax makes up only 9.5 percent of total business taxes.

The share of revenue from corporate income taxes will decline as more businesses organize as pass-throughs (S-corps, partnerships, sole proprietorships, etc.), which “pass their income through” to their individual tax returns and therefore are liable under the individual income tax code.

Broome chastised the state for not doing enough to keep jobs in California and said the economic council was committed to a “new beginning to make jobs a priority.” He said the state “lacks compassion” when it comes to widespread job losses. Council officials cited Texas, Arizona, Minnesota, Washington and Alabama as having more sophisticated statewide economic development programs.

“As the state prison population comes close to exceeding a court-mandated limit, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is pursuing new regulations that aim to get more inmates paroled more quickly over time,” the Sacramento Bee reported. “The proposed rules, originating from voter approval of Proposition 57 in November and unveiled [March 24], would allow ‘nonviolent’ felons to first seek parole at the conclusion of the base term for their primary offense, before serving additional time for other charges and enhancements that can add years to their sentence.”

As Hamby’s experience reflects, the frustrations of living in the Bay Area have become so pronounced that confidence in the economy has sunk to its lowest level in four years, according to a survey released Saturday by the Bay Area Council. Housing and traffic concerns have usually topped the list, but they have intensified this year. In 2014, 53 percent of respondents said they felt the economy was doing better than it was in the previous six months. According to the survey, only 31 percent of respondents feel that way today.

Police officers began making fewer arrests. The following year, the Los Angeles Police Department’s arrest numbers dipped even lower and continued to fall, dropping by 25% from 2013 to 2015. The statewide numbers are just as striking: Police recorded the lowest number of arrests in nearly 50 years, according to the California attorney general’s office, with about 1.1 million arrests in 2015 compared with 1.5 million in 2006.

Many measures track some form of business optimism, and generally reveal the same trends. But the RSM Index has a novel twist: a new set of questions that track how that optimism is tied up in expectations that President Donald Trump will be able to change the business environment for U.S. firms. The surge in business optimism largely owes to hopes that regulations and taxes will decrease, and that the federal government could invest heavily in the nation’s infrastructure. These views have come in for criticism from those wondering if the new administration will be able to execute on all of its goals. But businesses are already building in different expectations about how much will be accomplished in Washington in coming years.

The Legislature’s budget analyst, Mac Taylor, says Brown’s proposal is “violating the spirit of Proposition 4.” He describes the $22 billion in school-related spending Brown wants to exempt as “nowhere money” and is telling legislators that “the plan would be highly vulnerable to legal challenges.

Assemblyman Jose Medina (D-Riverside) says the Rams — and at least five other large developers whose projects were approved by similar means in recent years — have been able to spend significant sums of money to ignore state environmental laws. He’s authored new legislation to block future developers from doing what the Rams did, by prohibiting local governments from approving projects without an exhaustive environmental review.