The high school graduation rate in the United States will not increase as quickly as experts think it can without more improvement in California, which educates one-fifth of the nation’s low-income school children and more Hispanic students than any other state, a report set to be released Monday concludes.
The deep recession wiped out primarily high-wage and middle-wage jobs. Yet the strongest employment growth during the sluggish recovery has been in low-wage work, at places like strip malls and fast-food restaurants.
At a meeting last week of the Northern Nevada Development Authority in Carson City, Minden businessman Daniel Wray threatened to abandon plans to move the Southern California segment of his research and development business, Biofilm Management Inc., to Nevada.
Today, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis released real, price-adjusted estimates of personal income for states and metropolitan areas for 2008-2012.
California Democrats proposed a bill Thursday that would raise state taxes on publicly traded companies that pay their top-earning employee 100 times as much or more as the company’s average worker.
Lawmakers advanced legislation Wednesday that would allow employees that are denied wages to record a lien on an employer’s property and the property where the employee worked.
A bill that would allow nonexempt employees to negotiate an alternative work schedule of up to 10-hours a week without overtime died Wednesday in an Assembly labor committee.
Things can and should be better in California, and we should have real conversations about how to address the state’s problems. We need real policy reforms, real tax reform, and real expenditure reform. But any real discussion has to begin on an honest footing, with a candid conversation about what is really happening in the state and local economies. Instead, headlines continue to be dominated by hype, hyperbole, and flat out nonsense.
A fairly constant refrain among California’s Democratic politicians and their liberal allies is that corporations should be paying more in taxes to support public services. . . There is, however, no consistency. The same folks who demand higher business taxes as a matter of supposed principle are often willing, even eager, to give certain industries and even certain corporations big tax breaks.
While the people who decide where to make movies uniformly say that they’d prefer to work in their hometown, better subsidies that other states and countries offer has made that almost impossible to justify.
California’s economy added 11,800 net new jobs in March, a meager showing after robust gains the month before, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday
One of California’s few emollients for employers is its limit on “pain and suffering” medical liability judgments, which has improved access to medical care and held down health costs. But look out: Plaintiffs lawyers abetted by Attorney General Kamala Harris are now trying to gut the cap with a ballot initiative dressed in patient-protection garb.
Probably the best single indicator is the unemployment rate. At 6.7 percent, it is now slightly more than 1 percentage point above the 5.2 to 5.6 percent central tendency of the Committee’s projections for the longer-run normal unemployment rate. This shortfall remains significant, and in our baseline outlook, it will take more than two years to close.
As the nation’s second largest city, Los Angeles has a vibrant culture, a diverse population and a strong economy. The city is not only the largest entertainment capital in the world, but also the nation’s largest manufacturing center and retail market, a major tourist destination and financial center, and home to one of the world’s busiest ports.
Contrary to the oft-repeated claim that high-income Californians pay an unfair amount of taxes, it is actually California’s low-income households who pay the largest share of their incomes in state and local taxes. Given widening income inequality over the last generation, and the ongoing economic challenges facing Californians in the aftermath of the Great Recession, policymakers could take specifi c steps to reduce the regressive nature of California’s system of state and local taxes and to promote economic security for low-income families.