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Fewer workers are moving to the Bay Area than in the past, further exacerbating the scarcity of skilled workers for in-demand fields. The total number of workers arriving in the Bay Area still exceeds the number of workers fleeing the region, but

The total number of workers arriving in the Bay Area still exceeds the number of workers fleeing the region, but net number of new arrivals has fallen 17 percent since February, according to June data out from LinkedIn. By comparison, Seattle saw a net migration increase by 2 percent over the same period.

California state lawmakers have proposed more taxes and fees in the first six months of the 2017-18 legislative session than in the entire previous two-year session, the nonpartisan California Tax Foundation reported today.

If every tax and fee increase were enacted, the burden on California taxpayers would increase more than $370 billion a year, the Foundation noted in its updated Tax Watch report.

Efficient carbon-price trajectories begin with a strong price signal in the present and a credible commitment to maintain prices high enough in the future to deliver the required changes. Relatively high prices today may be more effective in driving the needed changes and may not require large future increases, but they may also impose higher, short-term adjustment costs. In the medium to long term, explicit price trajectories may need to be adjusted based on the experience with technology development and the responsiveness to policy. The policy dynamics should be designed to both induce learning and elicit a response to new knowledge and lessons learned. Price adjustment processes should be transparent to reduce the degree of policy uncertainty.

A combination of policies is likely to be more dynamically efficient and attractive than a single policy. These policies could include investing in public transportation infrastructure and urban planning; laying the groundwork for renewable-based power generation; introducing or raising efficiency standards, adapting city design, and land and forest management; investing in relevant R&D initiatives; and developing financial devices to reduce the risk-weighted capital costs of low-carbon technologies and projects. Adopting other cost-effective policies can mean that a given emission reduction may be induced with lower carbon prices than if those policies were absent.

Based on federal government data, past reports, and contemporary studies, this report highlights regulatory compliance and economic impacts of federal intervention of $1.9 trillion annually. . . . If it were a country, U.S. regulation would be the world’s seventh-largest economy, ranking behind India and ahead of Italy.

If one assumed that all costs of federal regulation and intervention flowed all the way down to households, U.S. households would “pay” $14,809 annually on average in a regulatory hidden tax. That amounts to 21 percent of the average income of $69,629 and 26.45 percent of the expenditure budget of $55,978. The “tax” exceeds every item in the budget except housing.

At that volume, California’s three-decade-old consumer-recycling program should be considered a smashing success. But the CalRecycle system is in trouble and most agree it needs to be, well, recycled. . . • Hundreds of recycling centers across the state have shuttered since last year, stung by plummeting scrap rates on the global market over the past four years. • Declining oil and natural gas prices — used to remanufacture plastic bottles from recycled mulch — have made regeneration more expensive.

Los Angeles County’s homeless population has soared 23% over last year despite increasing success in placing people in housing, according to the latest annual count released Wednesday.

(Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco) Employment and Wages On balance, the labor market tightened further, and contacts reported continued moderate wage gains. In the technology, financial services, and health-care sectors, demand for skilled information technology (IT) labor remained strong, pushing up wages for those workers. Contacts in the hotel industry noted widespread strong upward wage pressure for all positions, with one contact reporting plans to raise workers’ wages.

Recent changes in immigration policy created substantial labor supply shortages for low-skilled workers in the agriculture sector; as a consequence, some growers discarded portions of their harvest. Several contacts observed that applicants for some low-skilled positions did not meet the minimum job requirements or were unable to pass pre-employment screenings such as drug tests. 

I tossed new Census data into my trusty spreadsheet to see if a recent upswing in construction activity was making a significant change in how much housing — for ownership or for rent — was available. What I found was that Southern California added 34,000 housing units in the year ended July 1, 2016, to 6.4 million. Yes, Southern California’s new housing in 2016 approximates the combined additions in Alabama, New Jersey and Wisconsin. But the 0.53 percent increase last year — yes, better than 0.41 percent average annual rate in the previous five years — again trails the U.S. pace.

It wouldn’t be the first time that a high price tag torpedoed a government takeover of health care. In 2014, Vermont’s attempt at single-payer ended abruptly when Gov. Peter Shumlin rejected the 11.5% payroll tax hike and 9.5% individual tax hike required to fund the program. Yet the financial costs of single-payer are practically negligible compared with the human costs.

Consider the Department of Veterans Affairs’ scandal-plagued single-payer health program. Last month, the agency’s inspector general found that more than 100 veterans died while waiting for care at a Los Angeles VA facility between October 2014 and August 2015. 

When the Bay Area’s Metropolitan Transportation Commission decrees that 82 percent of all new housing in the region should be multi-family apartments—and that its climate policies will be paid for via a new regional tax of $1.75 per gallon of gas—it should acknowledge who will bear the greatest burden. (We can guess: low-income workers, mostly people of color, commuting from outside the region.)

When the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research proposes to intentionally increase road congestion to make commutes longer—and force more people to use transit—it should also tell us which workers and employers will be most impacted. (Pretty much all of us, since less than 10 percent of jobs, even in our dense coastal areas, can be accessed within an hour via transit.) When advocates for extending and reinventing cap-and-trade make similarly expansive climate proposals—calling for doubling or tripling the cost of carbon or for applying new carbon taxes on all products imported into the state—they should be required to explain how these new measures will impact prices. (Our best estimate: by increasing the cost of pretty much everything.)

California liberal policy-makers have been at war with suburbia and home construction for decades. When Gov. Jerry Brown was attorney general, for instance, he sued counties that had growth plans that allowed the construction of too much sprawling development. The rationale was the fight against global warming, which the governor believes is exacerbated by suburban-style living. It can take decades here to get all the government approvals to build new housing units, and in already pricey coastal cities government permits and fees can add more to the price of each unit than the total cost of a house in other parts of the country.

In addition, land-use restrictions drive up the cost of developable land. The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) makes it simple for environmentalists to tie up proposed projects in years of litigation. The slow-growth-oriented California Coastal Commission must give its blessing for projects anywhere near the state’s coastline.

A decline in government spending, rising rents and falling incomes have created a shortage of nearly one million affordable homes in five Southern California counties, the nonprofit California Housing Partnership Corp. reported Monday, May 22.

The five-county area needs 949,016 more affordable rentals to meet the needs of families earning 50 percent or less of the median household income, the report said.

California’s newly passed transportation package will nearly double drivers’ gas taxes. Don’t like that? Then Gov. Jerry Brown thinks you’re a freeloader. “The freeloaders—I’ve had enough of them,” Brown announced in Orange County earlier this month. “Roads require money to fix.” Without an increase in the gas tax, he argued, Californians might have to drive on gravel.

The state’s nearly 40-year-old spending limit law is on the fast track to a date in court. While the state senate budget committee yesterday agreed with the governor’s framework for the budget, which excludes $22 billion from the spending limit, a number of lawyers have concerns or outright disagree. I expect the courts will be called on to referee different interpretations of the spending limit.

How much does it really cost Californians to use renewable energy, and who’s going to pay for it? That’s the question raised by Southern California Edison’s proposed rate hike of nearly 13 percent.

The list of people who are upset about the increase includes the members of the International Union of Operating Engineers, Local 12. “SCE’s habit of raising rates on its ratepayers indiscriminately has to stop,” wrote union official Ronald J. Sikorski in a letter to the California Public Utilities Commission. “Working families can’t afford it and neither can seniors on fixed incomes.”

But Edison says the money is needed to upgrade its infrastructure to handle the many demands of California policies, like mandates for 50 percent renewable power by 2030, and a goal of 1.5 million plug-in electric vehicles on the road by 2025 (up from about 285,000 now).