The Bay State, which some boosters call “Hollywood East,” has become a fast-growing hub for film and TV production, joining dozens of states that have cut into a business once concentrated in the Golden State.
Gov. Jerry Brown said Wednesday that California is a “job creation engine,” defending his administration’s handling of the economy and state budget in a forceful election year speech.
The drought could cost the region’s farm industry $1.7 billion in 2014 and cause more than 14,500 workers to lose their jobs, according to preliminary results of the study, which also predicts that Central Valley irrigators will only get two-thirds of their normal water deliveries.
“By Autor’s calculations, if you’d taken all the income gains that flowed to the 1 percent over the last 35 years and redistributed them evenly to everyone else in the economy, that would have delivered an extra $7,100 a year to every household in the bottom 99 percent. That’s a lot of money. But it’s not as much as the growing pay differential between workers who went to college and those who didn’t.
In the last 35 years, he calculates, the so-called college premium – the boost in your paycheck from earning a diploma – increased by $28,000, adjusted for inflation. So if you took that entire increase and redistributed it to non-college workers, you’d be giving them a raise four times the size of the 1 percent redistribution.”
But the Toyota relocation is just an anecdote and does not paint a full picture of what is happening economically in the state – thus, it is unlikely to point to a cure for what ails California. The real solutions to the state’s problems are actually quite simple, but unfortunately don’t appeal to politicians, pundits or lobbyists. Unless something changes in that calculus, the state will continue to legislate largely by anecdote rather than analysis, ultimately failing to help California grow.
Without the dramatic revenue dips or spikes of years past, and with scant new policy proposals, this year’s May Revision was about as exciting as a jar of pudding.
But one number jumped out. By next year, the state expects 11 million Californians – 30% of the population to receive Medi-Cal benefits.
California’s unemployment rate dropped below 8% last month for the first time in nearly six years as employers put the state on the verge of recovering all of the jobs lost during the Great Recession . . . California’s unemployment rate remains the fourth-highest in the country, behind Rhode Island at 8.3%, Nevada at 8% and Illinois at 7.9%.
The move is part of a sea change in American manufacturing: After three decades of an exodus of production to China and other low-wage countries, companies have sharply curtailed moves abroad. Some, like Generac, have begun to return manufacturing to U.S. shores.
Tribal gaming operations in California generated an estimated $8 billion in economic output in 2012 – $2.9 billion of which represented earnings by California workers – and supported over 56,000 jobs statewide. The 2012 operations had a roughly 7%-7.5% larger impact on California economic activity than in 2010.
Futuris Automotive Inc., a supplier to Tesla Motors, just inked a deal with Prologis for 160,000 square feet of office and industrial space at 6601 Overlake Place in Newark.
There were 25,198 units of housing permitted in Los Angeles and Orange Counties, according to figures out Thursday from the Census Bureau. That’s up from about 17,500 in 2012 and triple the amount seen at the bottom of the housing market in 2009. But it’s still behind the 30,000-plus pace seen in the housing heyday of the mid-2000s.
Americans gained jobs at the fastest pace in more than two years last month and the jobless rate plunged, a sign the economy has rebounded from a winter rut.
A $50-million-dollar planned expansion at the Cargill Meat Solutions facility southwest of Fresno should add 300 jobs to the 1,000-person workforce already employed there.
Fillmore & Western Railway Co. may be forced to shut down as a result of a legal dispute with the Ventura County Transportation Commission, which recently filed a lawsuit to evict the company.
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.