It’s simple arithmetic, writes Mark Warshawsky of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, author of the study. Paying for expensive health insurance squeezes what’s left for wage and salary raises. Economic inequality increases, because health insurance typically represents a larger share of total compensation for lower-paid than higher-paid workers. Their wages are squeezed the most.
Our jobless rate ranks 34th in the nation, better than neighboring Arizona and Nevada, but worse than other big states such as Florida, New York and Texas. While the lowest in nine years, the rate was 5.2 percent in May, with nearly 1 million Californians actively looking for work but unable to find it.
But as LAO researchers also pointed out, the global GDP numbers that suggest California’s economy as sixth largest in the world don’t take into account something of huge importance: The cost of living. . . .Once that’s factored in, the IMF data finds California drops from sixth to eleventh in the global size of its gross domestic product.
The BEA pegged the state’s economic output last year at $2.46 trillion and with several of its international rivals, particularly Brazil and France, experiencing slumps, that would place California at sixth place, behind only the U.S., China, Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom.
Both California and Oregon’s economies expanded at a 4.1% seasonally adjusted annual rate, leading the nation. Texas was next at 3.8%, suggesting much of the state’s economy had diversified enough to shrug off the collapse in oil prices.
In 1970, both cities boasted powerful industry clusters, similar concentrations of manufacturing firms, and highly educated and technically oriented workforces employed by innovative companies (Amgen in L.A., Genentech in the Bay Area). Prior to the 1990s, Los Angeles actually produced more patents than the Bay Area.
In California, the forecast anticipates continued steady gains in employment through 2018 and a steady decrease in the unemployment rate over the next two years. California’s unemployment rate is expected to be insignificantly different from the U.S. rate at 5.1 percent by the end of the forecast period.
The broader economy seems on track to rebound after a weak performance over the past few quarters. Gross domestic product, a broad measure of goods and services produced across the U.S. economy, expanded at a 0.8% seasonally adjusted annual rate in the first three months of 2016, the Commerce Department said in updated figures out Friday. That was up from an initial estimate of 0.5% growth but still represented a deceleration from the fourth quarter’s 1.4% growth rate.
The report, based on the Board’s third annual Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking, presents a contrasting picture of the financial well-being of U.S. families. Aggregate-level results show several signs of improvement. Sixty-nine percent of respondents said they are either “living comfortably” or “doing okay,” up 4 percentage points from 2014 and up 6 percentage points from 2013. Seventy-seven percent of non-retired adults without a disability are confident that they have the skills necessary to get the kind of job that they want now–an increase of 10 percentage points from the 2013 survey results.
Compared to 25 years ago, the incomes of the wealthiest households and others are now further apart, and the region’s middle class is smaller. Much like the greater Bay Area and California as a whole, Silicon Valley is a far more unequal place than it used to be.
Income inequality has been growing for decades, in California and the nation as a whole. In recent years, inequality—and the role of policy in addressing it—has become a major focus of public debate. This report documents the polarization of incomes across the state and shows how social safety net programs mitigate inequality.
The new Tax Policy Center study, from Steve Rosenthal and Lydia Austin, documents the growth of tax-advantaged investing. Just 24% of corporate stock is owned by taxable individuals, down from 84% in 1965. The remaining 76% includes tax-exempt investors such as endowments, mostly exempt foreign investors and retirement plans, which pay a second layer of tax at ordinary income-tax rates, but benefit from what can be decades of tax deferral.
In February, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average had fallen nearly 15%, concerns grew that the U.S. economy was slipping into recession. Those fears have since subsided in financial markets, but most economists continue to see an elevated risk of the U.S. falling into a new recession within the next 12 months.
Sen. Connie Leyva, D-Chino, said it would only benefit high-income, out-of-state residents who don’t need tax incentives. Although she supports the growth of the California electric-vehicle maker, she said, “I don’t even know if anyone in our district even owns a Tesla.”
So it came as something of a surprise when Chamath Palihapitiya — Sri Lankan war refugee, early Facebook employee, investor in Slack and Box, part owner of the Golden State Warriors — told Vanity Fair in March that if we are in fact in the early stages of a second tech collapse, venture capitalists have only their own mediocre, clubby selves to blame. They should, he said, “focus on using capital as a way to take really big bets on things that just seem totally audacious. Right now we haven’t done enough of that, and the result is that most of the things we’ve funded are mostly crap and largely worthless.”