While Brown expects revenue to be up 3 percent next year, the governor and lawmakers assumed revenues would be even higher when they planned the current budget, and they spent accordingly. . . Lower revenue and higher costs mean the state has approved spending money that Brown doesn’t think it will collect.
Less than four years after declaring California’s budget was balanced for the foreseeable future, Gov. Jerry Brown on Tuesday said the state is now projected to run a $1.6-billion deficit by next summer.
Apple has requested to make finished products in its facility in Mesa, Arizona, according to the document, first reported by Business Insider. Right now, it has permissions to make consumer electronics components there, the filing said.
On Thursday, the independent Legislative Analyst’s Office reported that preliminary tax collections in December — a key month for quarterly tax payments — were almost $1.2 billion below predictions. . . Few will be surprised if Brown uses the lackluster revenue data to demand scaled back growth in future spending or cuts in current spending on some programs.
Education leaders in recent years have lauded achievement gains and progress of California’s K-12 students, but an annual national report card has rated the Golden State below mediocre — a solid C-minus, 10th from the bottom among the 50 states and Washington, D.C.
Executives have grown more optimistic about growth, in part anticipating that President-elect Donald Trump’s administration and Republican congressional majorities will bring regulatory rollbacks, corporate tax breaks and increased infrastructure spending.
If you have 10 hourly employees working eight-hour shifts, five days a week and you raise the wages a dollar an hour, that comes out to a nearly $20K increase on the year. In AQ’s best year — a phenomenal year by restaurant standards — that would have been nearly 10% of profits. . . With the introduction of Obamacare, most restaurant workers finally got the coverage they’ve needed for years through the employer mandate, but critics often talk about the strain it puts on small-business owners . . Semmelhack told me that in 2012 they paid $14,400 for health care costs. In 2015, they paid $86,400. That’s an increase of $72K MORE per year than 2012, or 29% of their best year’s profit.
And the printed version of the Federal Register, the daily depository of all things regulatory, has topped off at 97,110 pages, by far an all time record. . . That dwarfs last year’s count of 80,260 pages, and it shatters the 2010 all-time record of 81,405 by 15,705 pages
Most people can agree that 2016 was a hard year. And in the Bay Area, one group was hit particularly hard: restaurateurs. It seemed like every week, a beloved eatery closed, while another one opened, only to shut down a few months later. As the Bay Area continues to enjoy tech-fueled economic growth, the restaurant industry has suffered, even as the accolades–in 2015 Bon Appetit named San Francisco the country’s best food city!–continue to pile up. . . In 2017, the restaurants you go to–from the hole-in-the wall joint near your office to the fancy, anniversary dinner spot–will look different. They might be closed one day a week, to make up for their shortage of qualified staff. Your go-to dish might be more expensive, to make up for the rising minimum wage. They might be closed for good, and quickly replaced with an EDM bubble tea shop. . . Many restaurant owners see fast casual restaurants, instead of ones with full table service, as the solution to their economic woes. No table service cuts down on labor costs, offers diners a cheaper experience while shorter menus means a more efficient use of expensive labor.
U.S. consumer spending increased modestly in November as household income failed to rise for the first time in nine months, suggesting the economy slowed in the fourth quarter after growing briskly in the prior period.
What kind of financial stability can any insurance company have in California if at any point insurance officials can decide to retroactively decrease the prices they charged consumers? . . . But Rex Frazier, president of the Personal Insurance Federation of California in Sacramento, captured the significance here: “The Department of Insurance just reversed over 25 years of consistent legal interpretation, claiming new powers to order retroactive premium refunds with the stroke of a pen, no public debate and no explanation. If their authority to do this was that clear, why did it take a quarter of a century to find it? Their view of the law is wrong, and their suspicion of due process is worse. Even the IRS would think this is heavy-handed.” . . . Some argue it [Prop 103] ended up boosting insurance-industry profits by reducing competition. But that latter point doesn’t make the latest departmental edict anything other than what it is. It’s a taking, and a particularly troubling one because of the uncertainty it offers for the state’s insurance industry and for California businesses in general.
California again scored just behind Massachusetts, which gained ground by churning out more science and engineering graduates and producing jobs in those industries even though it had less technology company density than in 2015, according to the data compiled by Bloomberg.
In recent days, Obama has unveiled five major “midnight” regulations at the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Interior, a report from the American Action Forum (AAF) shows. Alone, these new rules will cost about $5.1 billion a year and require at least 350,000 hours of paperwork from companies. In addition, three other lesser rules will add an estimated $898 million to the regulatory tab, and another 146,000 hours of paperwork. The bottom line: These new rules that Obama is making the law of the land with little fanfare and no input from Congress will cost us $6 billion a year and nearly half a million hours of paperwork. We pay for these, by the way, not companies. The impact of this kind of rule-making is cumulative. Since 2009, when Obama took office, the EPA and Interior have added $349 billion in regulatory costs. As the late, great Illinois Sen. Everett Dirksen once supposedly joked, “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.” That’s where we are now.
With the passage of last week’s deadline for certifying election results from the November 8 general election, the impact of voters’ decisions on local tax and bond measures finally can be determined. With all votes counted, 353 out of 427 tax or bond measures ended up passing – a passage rate of 82.67 percent. . . The 167 tax measures that passed will increase the local tax burden by more than $2 billion annually. The most significant chunk of that financial burden will come from increased sales taxes, which account for more than $1.5 billion in increased local taxes.
The highly respected Workers’ Compensation Insurance Rating Bureau, or WCIRB, conducted a comprehensive study of a major overhaul of the system enacted by Gov. Jerry Brown and the Legislature four years ago. And it found that it did what it was supposed to do – cut costs, especially for medical care, to offset higher cash benefits.
