California is restricting publicly funded travel to four more states because of recent laws that leaders here view as discriminatory against gay and transgender people. All totaled, California now bans most state-funded travel to eight states.
It is easy to see how tightly the state micromanages our lives and businesses. Our high tax burden, powerful unions, government debt, and overbearing regulations all speak to California’s low economic freedom. Whether one examines the United States, California, or each of its counties, Californians live in an economic prison.
Decades of blue model governance have left Illinois with powerful public sector unions, a legislature subservient to them, and an intractable public pension problem. Politico recently labeled Illinois America’s first “failed state,” as feuding between the Democratic legislature and the Republican governor over how to handle the state’s cascading fiscal crisis brings governance to a standstill.
Overzealous political promises notwithstanding, Wisconsin’s job growth over the past six years has been extraordinarily strong. In fact, job growth has slowed recently only because Wisconsin essentially has run out people who are unemployed due to broad economic factors. In other words, one cannot reduce a jobs deficit that no longer exists.
Around 100 truck drivers and warehouse workers serving the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports plan to launch a strike starting Monday — their 15th strike in the last four years.
The workers and Teamsters union Local 848 announced the labor action Thursday. The truck drivers have been pushing for years to become employees rather than independent contractors to improve pay and workplace protections.
California will increase jobs and incomes more slowly than expected this year, mainly because President Trump’s big spending plans don’t seem to be coming to fruition yet. That’s the upshot of the latest forecast from economists at UCLA, released Tuesday, that predicts employment in California will increase by a modest 1.4% and personal income will grow by 3.1% this year. Earlier projections were more optimistic.
A diaspora of tech talent, driven by Silicon Valley’s tumbling job market and sky-high rents, has pushed tech job seekers to some surprising places.
Job search site ZipRecruiter recently analyzed its database of more than 8 million active jobs, and ranked the 20 fastest-growing tech markets based on year-over-year data. Job growth for engineering, software, and IT roles may be losing steam in the Bay Area, but smaller cities are picking up the slack, the company says,
. . . Many of the cities on ZipRecruiter’s list are in the Midwest — Kansas City, Kan., Cincinnati, Ohio, and Indianapolis, Ind. are three standouts. The South also had a strong showing, with Nashville, Tenn. and three cities in Florida (Orlando, Jacksonville, Tampa) all making the cut.
Barrera credits government policies, like tax breaks that attract entrepreneurs and business startups for much of this growth. But the main impetus, she says, is the skyrocketing cost of living in coastal tech hubs like San Francisco and New York.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions has ordered prosecutors to stop settling corporate wrongdoing cases by requiring companies to make donations to third-party groups, a feature of some Obama-era bank settlements that congressional Republicans had opposed.
In a brief, one-page memo dated Monday and released on Wednesday, Mr. Sessions told Justice Department officials they could no longer include any provision in a civil or criminal settlement “that directs or provides for a payment or loan to any non-governmental person or entity that is not a party to the dispute.”
The list, which ranks U.S. companies by total yearly revenue, includes 53 firms whose headquarters are in the Golden State — a total that’s second only to New York’s 54. (The list of 500 companies is compiled by looking at results reported by publicly traded firms, as well as from the privately traded ones that file financial statements with a government agency.)
The misuse of settlement slush funds was one of the Obama Administration’s worst practices, which it used to end run Congress’s constitutional spending power. After the GOP took the House and tried to cut spending for liberal interest groups, the Obama Justice Department began to force corporate defendants to allocate a chunk of their financial penalties to those same groups.
Every manufacturing investment and job creation decision is made by company executives who are looking down the road at future costs, taxes, and regulations. Many states and countries want to attract manufacturing investments and jobs. If they have longstanding policies that will be in effect for ten or more years, they will beat out the locations with policies that expire in the short term. In fact, the larger and more important the investments, the more risk averse company executives will be; they will assume the expiration in existing law will occur, as promised.
Lawmakers may believe that California will nevertheless attract manufacturing jobs and investments even without the policies under discussion, but the data states otherwise. Since 2001 California has attracted less than 2 percent of US manufacturing new sites or expansions, far lower than the state’s share of manufacturing GDP. More recently the re-shoring surge shows a similar loss to the rest of the country, with under 2 percent of those jobs coming to California since 2013. That means manufacturing jobs and investments are now shifting to other locations under our noses and long-term policies to keep manufacturers here are crucial.
This year’s Fortune 500 marks the 63rd running of the list. In total, Fortune 500 companies represent two-thirds of the U.S. GDP with $12 trillion in revenues, $890 billion in profits, $19 trillion in market value, and employ 28.2 million people worldwide.
Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle raised concerns Tuesday that Gov. Jerry Brown’s state budget plan relies on a faulty calculation of a spending limit imposed by voters in 1979.
. . . An April 28 opinion from the legislative counsel of California, released publicly Tuesday, said that certain appropriations that Brown’s budget looks to exclude from the spending limit “must be included” per the language that voters placed in the California Constitution.
A bill proposing multiple tax hikes on state employers was sent directly to the full Senate without a vote on Monday by the Senate fiscal committee. SB 567 (Lara; D-Bell Gardens) was identified as a job killer because it will significantly increase taxes on California businesses, who already have one of the highest tax burdens in the country.
SB 567 (Lara; D-Bell Gardens) was identified as a job killer because it will significantly increase taxes on California businesses, who already have one of the highest tax burdens in the country.
This year’s rains brought a welcome respite to California’s farmers, who had grappled with surface water supply shortages for the previous four years. But now farmers are increasingly worried about the availability of another crucial element to their farms’ productivity―farm labor. The connection between farm labor and immigration patterns was among the topics covered in a recent conference at UC Davis.