The Obama administration’s belief that it can mandate its way to economic growth—and its imposition of new regulatory costs that eclipse any in recent history—is holding back job creation and America’s national recovery. The overtime mandate is more of the same.
The California job market is getting closer to recovering from the Great Recession, but workers still face a diffi cult hiring environment. After losing 1.3 million jobs between July 2007 and February 2010, California has since added more than 2 million jobs.1 Despite this progress, the labor market is not yet back to pre-recession strength.
The crazy cost structure in the U.S. also bears scrutiny. America’s infrastructure is so hard to fix in part because it is so much more expensive to do stuff here than in many other countries. It’s a bit like our health care system, in that regulatory capture, cronyism, and sweetheart deals involving both business and labor combine to drive up public costs. It ought to be getting cheaper to fix infrastructure—we use materials more efficiently, the machines are more powerful and faster, designs have improved—but costs are instead exploding.
That’s what seems to have happened this week around an issue that’s crucial to the growth of new businesses like Uber and Taskrabbit: How to provide benefits to workers who use those platforms to find clients. On Tuesday, a letter surfaced calling for a new social safety net regime that could allow people to move easily from gig to gig without losing the benefits and protections usually contained within the traditional employment relationship. Right now, companies say, it’s difficult for them to offer employment-like perks without running the risk of getting hit with lawsuits.
One million more skilled workers, to close a growing degree shortage driven by shifts in technology and educational expectations among industries. One million more homes for middle-income families, as soaring costs once again put buying out of reach for most Californians. And one million more acre-feet of water per year, representing a push for sustainable management of the state’s dwindling supplies.
About 14.3 percent of Californians between 65 and 75 worked full time in 2014, up from 7.5 percent in 2000. As baby boomers become seniors, that translates into almost 440,000 senior citizens working full time last year in California, more than double the number from 2000.
The State of California added 23,000 private sector jobs during the month of October, according to the ADP Regional Employment Report
Of the 9,000 businesses that he estimates disinvested in California, some relocated completely while others kept their headquarters in California but targeted out-of-state locations for expansions, Vranich found. The report did not count instances of companies opening a new out-of-state facility to tap a growing market, an act unrelated to California’s business environment.
Most voters in counties along the coast were hopeful about their personal finances in the next few years. But in the interior, mainly the Central Valley and Inland Empire, less than half were hopeful and most were at least somewhat anxious.
Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill last month that provides employers with a limited window to correct technical violations in itemized wage statements before being subject to costly litigation.
Located in Carlsbad, in the San Diego area, the plant has raised hopes for drought relief — but has brought elevated stakes along with it. “The billion-dollar project is only the nation’s second major seawater plant,” noted the Associated Press. “The first U.S. foray in Tampa Bay is widely considered a flop.” That plant, a decade in the making, lost financing and couldn’t pass performance tests, the AP added. Its capacity was only half that of the Carlsbad plant, expected to churn out 50 million gallons of drinking water every day.
California fared poorly in the latest round of a bellwether series of key elementary and middle-school tests. “What’s sometimes called the Nation’s Report Card, a sampling of fourth- and eighth-graders in reading and math, painted a dismal picture of a state that insists it is prioritizing K-12 education, on which it is spending $53 billion this fiscal year,” the San Jose Mercury News noted.
Other major economic divides—between capital and labor, Wall Street versus Main Street—defined politics for much of the 20th century. But today’s tangible-intangible divide is particularly tragic because it undermines America’s peculiar advantage in being a powerhouse in both the material and non-material worlds. No other large country can say that, certainly not China, Japan, or Germany, industrial powerhouses short on resources, while our closest cousins, such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, remain, for the most part, dependent on commodity trade.
U.S. employers hired at their strongest clip this year in October and wage growth picked up, signs of reassurance for Federal Reserve officials as they weigh an interest-rate raise before year’s end.
Finance and insurance; professional, scientific, and technical services; and wholesale trade were the leading contributors to the increase in U.S. economic growth in the second quarter of 2015, according to statistics on the breakout of gross domestic product (GDP) by industry released today by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). Overall, 18 of 22 industry groups contributed to the 3.9 percent increase in real GDP in the second quarter.