A Time for Truth
Los Angeles is barely treading water while the rest of the world is moving forward. We risk falling further behind in adapting to the realities of the 21st century and becoming a City in decline.
Los Angeles is barely treading water while the rest of the world is moving forward. We risk falling further behind in adapting to the realities of the 21st century and becoming a City in decline.
This summary report on the 2013 Summit lays out the background behind the Summit and gives a roundup of Summit commitments, a collection of some of the best thinking from across the state about how to drive sustainable economic growth in California.
Meanwhile, legislators who voted to abolish redevelopment have been writing proposals to re-establish it, with changes, under some other name.
Inside the governor’s 2013-14 budget plan is a proposal to make it easier to for voters to implement infrastructure financing districts, which are similar to redevelopment in that they allow local governments to fund public infrastructure through tax increment financing.
You might think that testing robotic aircraft for future civilian use would be a quintessential California enterprise. But not if you’re a U.S. senator from the state. The governor’s not exactly a cheerleader for the idea, either.
California’s two top legislative leaders — both Democrats — have their eyes on 2014 as California faces big challenges in continuing to improve the state’s still underperforming economy.
After four years of a fragile and uneven recovery, the U.S. job machine is likely to kick into high gear in 2014. Even recession-battered states such as Arizona and Florida are expected to generate jobs at a healthier clip.
Film industry and union officials are mobilizing to back legislation this year that would substantially increase funding for the state’s film incentive program and lift some restrictions to make the program more competitive with those offered by New York, Georgia and other states and countries.
The latest data are, for the most part, positive. A few years ago, the state’s unemployment rate was well over 12 percent, one of the highest in the nation, and it had lost well over a million jobs. But through November, the state Department of Employment Development reported, California had regained over 900,000 jobs, and its jobless rate had dropped to 8.5 percent. The darker side of the data, however, is that California still has more than 1.5 million unemployed workers and the gains have been pretty much confined to a few coastal enclaves, particularly those in the immediate Bay Area.
. . . Hollywood films, often seen as a risky place to invest money, can be anything but chancy for wealthy investors who have learned that some of those tax breaks can be packaged to generate cash from even mediocre box office results.
The Federal Aviation Administration announced the selection of sites in Alaska, Nevada, New York, North Dakota, Texas and Virginia.
The Lone Star State turned up the dial on efforts to poach businesses from the Golden State.
Through the difficult budgets of recent years, “a lot of my frustration was that there’s not a lot of research that indicates what a good investment is” to abate poverty and reduce inequality, he said. Just as the Legislature’s Environmental Caucus has been instrumental in developing landmark legislation that has put California ahead of the nation and world on various issues, so too does DeSaulnier hope this new caucus will do likewise.
In the 1950s, one third of the American workforce was employed in the manufacturing industry; the economy not only supported manufacturing jobs, it thrived on the power of this sector. Since then, U.S. manufacturing has been in a sharp decline as overseas production has become the dominant choice for American companies. Since 2000, the U.S. has seen 5.8 million manufacturing jobs shift overseas.
An official for Gov. Jerry Brown’s Office of Business and Economic Development, or GO-Biz, confirmed Monday that California will submit a proposal to Boeing ahead of the company’s Tuesday deadline for states to submit proposals to host production of the 777X.