With the 2015-2016 legislative session under way, it’s worth reminding our elected leaders why legal reform is needed. Ultimately, enacting legal reform is about making our lawsuit system serve the interests of ordinary people, rather than making personal injury lawyers rich. Stopping the abuse of our legal system will enable California businesses to grow and create jobs.
Income inequality sharply increased in California as the state emerged from the Great Recession, with the top 1 percent of Californians capturing 135 percent of income growth between 2009 and 2012, according to a new national analysis.
Business leaders say L.A.’s business tax rate is too high and puts local firms at a competitive disadvantage. Since taking office in 2013, L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti has said he wants to reduce the tax to stimulate economic growth in the city.
Roughly two-thirds of the rate spike came because it’s costing more to buy energy in the first place, especially from renewable sources crucial to meeting the state’s 33 percent mandate, she said. “Renewables are simply more expensive than the traditional power.”
In contrast, the recoveries in the middle part of the country have been, to date, more egalitarian, with incomes rising quickly among a broader number of workers. At the same time, minority incomes in cities such as Houston, Dallas, Miami, and Phoenix tend be far higher, when compared to the incomes of Anglos, than they do in places like San Francisco, New York, or Boston. In these opportunity cities, minority homeownership—a clear demarcation of middle income aspiration—is often twice as high as it is in the epicenters of the ephemeral economy.
Mr. LePage, who just began his second term, would lower top individual and corporate income taxes, broaden the number of goods and services covered by the sales tax and offer tax credits for low-income residents. He said his plan would make Maine more competitive and attract more young families to the nation’s grayest state
Figures released Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics said the combined rate of private- and public-sector union membership was 11.1% last year, down from 11.3% the prior year. Membership in the private sector fell to a rate of 6.6% in 2014, from 6.7%, while public-sector representation rose slightly to 35.7%, from 35.3%.
Based on average pre-tax income earned by the third quintile, or the middle 20% of earners in each state, middle class incomes in California declined the most in the country. Incomes among middle class Californian households fell by nearly 7% between 2009 and 2013, while income among the state’s fifth quintile, or the top 20% of state earners, grew by 1.3%.
California’s unemployment rate fell to 7 percent in December, a drop of two percentage points from a month earlier, but the state added few jobs last month.
The California Employment Development Department says the number of payroll jobs increased by just 700 last month, despite the improvement in the overall rate.
One of the goals of tax reform is to improve the competitiveness of U.S. businesses and grow the economy. A promising way to do that is by lowering taxes on saving and investment through business tax reform. Much time is devoted to improving the corporate side of the tax code, but corporate-only business tax reform misses a significant portion of business activity.
The United States currently has a large number of pass-through businesses, or businesses that pay their taxes through the individual income tax code rather than through the corporate code. These sole proprietorships, S corporations, and partnerships make up the vast majority of businesses and more than 60 percent of net business income in America. In addition, pass-through businesses account for more than half of the private sector workforce and 37 percent of total private sector payroll. Pass-through businesses are represented in all industries in the United States.
All of that notwithstanding, Proposition 2 is not the best solution to revenue volatility, which is caused by a too-high reliance on personal income taxes from a relative handful of wealthy Californians whose incomes from stocks and other capital assets go up and down like yo-yos.
Proponents of the degrees say the programs could provide the state with thousands of workers in technical fields at a lower price. A four-year degree at a community college would cost about $10,000 in tuition, roughly half the cost of attending a Cal State campus, according to estimates.
So when we were able to zero in on four issues that frustrate a broad spectrum of businesses, we decided to dub them The Four Horsemen.
A comprehensive analysis of the Golden State’s cap-and-trade program.
In this first year, the SVCIP finds that highly productive, talented workers are the undisputed foundation of the region’s strength in innovation and in attracting businesses, despite the region’s high costs. It then identifies the critical public policy issues that need to be addressed to develop, attract and retain talent for the region’s continued success. Those issues include immigration, STEM and early education, housing and transportation. R&D funding, tax policies and the cost of doing business also emerge as issues of strategic concern for the region.