Economic activity in the Twelfth District continued to improve moderately during the reporting period of mid-November through late December 2014. Overall price and wage inflation remained modest. Retail sales and demand for business and consumer services increased moderately. Overall manufacturing activity picked up, while agricultural conditions were mixed. Real estate activity advanced, mainly in the commercial construction sector. Lending activity was mixed.
Federal spending on such side projects has increased 38% since 2008, while highway spending is flat. Here’s what the politicians won’t say: Simply using the taxes that are supposed to pay for highways to, well, pay for highways makes the HTF 98% solvent for the next decade, no tax increase necessary.
Now, with congestion worsening at the nation’s busiest seaport complex and the Pacific Maritime Association’s suspending all ship-unloading on night shifts, all eyes turn to the warring longshore workers union and their employers, the PMA, to quickly resolve a contract through federal mediation.
Taught by local construction workers, young men and women on the margins learn how to operate heavy equipment at Job Corps’ sprawling Meadowview center before they move to “The Ranch,” Operating Engineers Local 3’s Rancho Murieta training grounds. There, they receive seven weeks’ more paid instruction with the opportunity to apprentice with the union and work with local construction firms.
Those additional pension costs steadily increase until 2046. That year, districts are expected to spend an additional $9.3 billion over what they would have under the prior structure. The state would contribute an additional $2.2 billion that year, and teachers would chip in $1 billion.
U.S. employers advertised the most job openings in nearly 14 years in November, the Labor Department said Tuesday. That suggests businesses are determined to keep adding staff because they are confident strong economic growth will create more demand for their goods and services.
The earnings gap between people with a college degree and those with no education beyond high school has been growing since the late 1970s. Since 2000, however, the gap has grown more for those who have earned a post-graduate degree as well. The divergence between workers with college degrees and those with graduate degrees may be one manifestation of rising labor market polarization, which benefits those earning the highest and the lowest wages relatively more than those in the middle of the wage distribution.
In reality, however, California’s path back remains slow and treacherous. California Lutheran University economist Bill Watkins, like other economists, is somewhat bullish on the state’s short-run situation, but suggests that the highly unequal recovery, particularly for the middle class, could prove problematic over time.
Although lawmakers cut general fund expenditures by $16.6 billion during the recession from 2007-08 to 2011-12, they shifted money from funds to keep many of the programs operating.
Its official poverty rate was roughly in line with the nation as a whole, but the Census Bureau’s alternative measure, which took into account all forms of income and the cost of living, found nearly a quarter of Californians to be impoverished, by far the highest rate of any state.
Brown offered few specifics for financing deferred transportation maintenance on Friday when he unveiled his $113 billion state spending plan, other than to say he’d bring a bipartisan group of lawmakers and stakeholders together.
Employees who while on call are required to stay at a worksite should be compensated for all their hours, including sleep time, the California Supreme Court ruled unanimously Thursday.
But unemployment hasn’t fallen just because some people are getting jobs, and other people are retiring. It’s also fallen because some other people who we’d expect to be working have given up trying to. So-called “prime-age workers” between 25 and 54 years old—too old to be in school, for the most part, and too young to be retired—aren’t working or even looking for work as much as they were before the Great Recession.
The U.S. concluded its best year of job growth in 15 years as the unemployment rate fell to a postrecession low last month, signs of strength that mask continued challenges of stagnant wages and a stubbornly high number of Americans still on the sidelines.
In its first congestion report card in five years, the Bay Area’s transportation planning agency said that average congestion — defined as traffic moving 35 mph or less — increased 65 percent in the Bay Area from 2009 to 2013.