Another Washington-like tendency is passing sweeping legislation but leaving the sticky, all-important, details to unelected bureaucrats, such as the Air Resources Board’s multibillion-dollar “cap-and-trade” fees to curb greenhouse gases.
Gov. Jerry Brown’s January budget proposal called for an overhaul of California’s state worker retiree health care system. It faces more than $70 billion in long-term debt. Seven months later, nothing’s changed.
Today’s map cuts through this clutter, presenting effective tax rates on owner-occupied housing. This is the average amount of residential property tax actually paid, expressed as a percentage of home value.
The Silicon Valley Leadership Group is helping to lay the groundwork for ballot measures in November 2016 in Santa Clara, San Mateo, Santa Cruz, San Francisco and Contra Costa counties. The counties would join Alameda County, which already has a half-cent transportation sales tax in place.
The proposal asserts California voters have the right via initiative and referendum to determine state and local government employees’ pay and benefits. Employees hired Jan. 1, 2019, or later would not be allowed to join existing pension plans unless voters approved continuing those plans.
Health care spending will outpace the nation’s overall economic growth over the next decade, the government forecast on Tuesday, highlighting a challenge for the next president, not to mention taxpayers, businesses and individual Americans.
As part of their effort to pay for the major transportation overhaul Gov. Jerry Brown has called for without levying new taxes, Assembly Republicans have proposed cutting 3,500 full-time positions from the California Department of Transportation, at a savings to the state of half a billion dollars.
“There’s a sense that Prop. 30 solved all school budget woes when, in fact, it only stopped the bleeding,” said Alvarez. “Even if Prop. 30 was extended, that’s not going to give us more money – that’s going to keep us where we are now, and we are appreciative of that but we need to go further.”
Medi-Cal has expanded rapidly in recent years, largely due to California’s successful implementation of federal health care reform, and the program now provides affordable health care coverage to more than 12 million Californians with low or moderate incomes. The following discussion provides a more accurate and balanced perspective on the impact — and significance — of rising Medi-Cal enrollment under health care reform, a process that began with the passage of the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2010 and fully took effect in California in 2014.
More than a quarter of the nation’s major urban roads are rated in substandard or poor condition, providing motorists and truckers with a rough ride and increasing the cost of operating a vehicle.
More than 350 commissions, committees, councils and boards call California home, but few citizens and elected officials know exactly what they do.
Some Senate Republicans are open to raising costs on motorists, said Senate Republican leader Bob Huff. But Democrats must first agree to bureaucratic changes that will increase efficiency and redirect existing road funds back into transportation, he said.
An annual report card Wednesday from the trustees of both programs showed that the long-term deficits associated with the two largest benefit programs would be slightly smaller than forecast last year. The report also offered the latest warning that the Social Security disability-insurance program will exhaust its reserves late next year, which would trigger a 19% cut in benefit payments.
This tax proposal, like all of them, creates winners and losers and would hurt certain industries disproportionately. Developers, for example, who buy, sell and develop multi-million dollar properties would be hard-hit by this new tax, and I would imagine they’d have some serious objections to it. Warehouse owners would also be hard hit, as would any business that involves a large real-estate footprint in California. Retailers, manufacturers and restauranteurs could all be negatively impacted.
Most studies suggest these agreements hike constructions costs by as much as 25 percent because they reduce the number of contractors — and especially lower-cost nonunion contractors — who bid for these projects. As a result, trade unions have had a tough road in convincing districts to embrace them given the impact on costs, even though they tout them as a way to assure labor peace (i.e., no strikes).