In 2016, the U.S. Census Bureau found that it took the average commuter more than 26 minutes to get to work. That figure might sound less than much—26 minutes is about enough time to finish a podcast, after all, and some historians argue that a roughly half-hour commute has been optimal since caveman days. But […]
Will any of it work? Is California setting an example that the world can follow? The short answer: no. Renewables alone cannot power the global economy. The latest data on global energy consumption by source show how dependent the world remains on fossil fuels. In 2015, oil supplied 33 percent of all energy consumed globally, […]
Over the last year, the media have published story after story after story about the declining price of solar panels and wind turbines. People who read these stories are understandably left with the impression that the more solar and wind energy we produce, the lower electricity prices will become. And yet that’s not what’s happening. […]
Local reforms can be initiated by city councils and county boards of supervisors, but they can also be initiated by citizen activists. That’s exactly what’s happened, three times, thanks to the efforts of a group based in Pasadena called “TeaPAC.” Their specialty has been to offer voters the opportunity to repeal local taxes, utility taxes […]
Business groups are prepared to spend tens of millions of dollars this year on a California initiative that would make it more difficult to raise state and local taxes. The proposal, which is currently gathering signatures for the November ballot, would increase the threshold for passing any new tax or tax hike to two-thirds of […]
Rising wages, loosening credit standards and demographic shifts are all creating momentum for owning rather than renting. The homeownership rate rose from the prior year for the fifth consecutive quarter in 2018, according to U.S. Census data released Thursday. It held steady at 64.2%, unchanged from the prior quarter and its highest level since 2014. […]
The median Bay Area home price surged to an all-time high of $820,000 in March, up 9.3 percent from February and up 14.7 percent from March of last year, research firm CoreLogic reported Tuesday. The previous peak was $784,000 in November. The report includes newly built and existing homes and condos sold in all nine […]
Gov. Jerry Brown and a few other state politicians have been upfront in their concern about a potential exodus of the taxpaying rich to other states, some of which have no state income taxes, such as neighboring Nevada, Texas and Florida. There were anecdotal accounts of such relocations following a 2016 ballot measure that made […]
Thanks to a booming economy and soaring stock market, California’s income tax revenue has continued to far exceed both projections and last year’s totals. For the crucial month of April through Monday, personal and corporate income tax revenues have come in about $700 million above projections and nearly $1 billion more than last year, according […]
Cal State, the nation’s largest public university system, will no longer consider a plan to raise tuition for the 2018-19 academic year, Chancellor Timothy P. White announced Friday. The decision is a bet that Sacramento will come through in the end. If Cal State loses that bet, it could mean cuts to campus programs. White […]
Half the results published in peer-reviewed scientific journals are probably wrong. John Ioannidis, now a professor of medicine at Stanford, made headlines with that claim in 2005. Since then, researchers have confirmed his skepticism by trying—and often failing—to reproduce many influential journal articles. Slowly, scientists are internalizing the lessons of this irreproducibility crisis. But what […]
America’s housing shortage is more wide-ranging than cloistered coastal markets, stretching from pricey locales such as California and Massachusetts to more surprising places, such as Arizona and Utah. Some 22 states and the District of Columbia have built too little housing to keep up with economic growth in the 15 years since 2000, resulting in […]
California’s housing shortage is a crisis that the next governor will have to fix, the six leading candidates for the job say. . . . California has added fewer than 80,000 homes each year over the past decade, while the need has been closer to 180,000, according to the state Department of Housing and Community […]
Four-dollars-a-gallon gasoline, not seen in the Golden State since midsummer 2014, is starting to look likely due to developments that pushed at-the-pump prices into overdrive last week. February predictions of $4-a-gallon gasoline in California by Memorial Day stalled a bit in March, but prices are climbing again, and not just in California. Nationwide, energy experts […]
A record-high number of adults (72%) say that California ranks above average or near the top in per capita state and local tax burden compared to other states. This perception is close to the fiscal facts: a Tax Foundation report ranked California’s 2014 state and local tax collections per capita as 13th-highest in the nation. […]