While new-vehicle registrations fell 1.4% nationally in January through March, California dealers experienced a 0.7% increase in registrations, putting the state on the path for another year of sales exceeding 2 million vehicles.
In the same time frame, 4.8% of new vehicles registered in the Golden State were zero-emission vehicles and plug-in hybrids, the highest share ever recorded.
A new council would be created to review the necessity of every occupational licensing requirement in Wisconsin under a bill being circulated for co-sponsors.
The measure unveiled Wednesday would require the submission of a report by the end of 2018 that recommends elimination of licenses and other changes rules and requirements. The Legislature in 2019 would then consider approving the recommendations.
The problem of PAGA lawsuits threatening small businesses is growing and solutions to deal with incidental violations are obvious. The legislature, to show its support for the state’s valuable small businesses, should create legislation giving small businesses the right to cure minor problems instead of putting businesses at risk for financial ruin.
San Francisco’s ever-rising minimum wage—set to hit $15 next year—has restaurant owners asking for the check. “At Least 60 Bay Area Restaurants Have Closed Since September,” read a January headline at the website SFist, which partly blamed “the especially high cost of doing business in SF, with a mandated, rising minimum wage that does not exempt tipped employees.” Another publication, Eater, described the rash of recent closures as a “death march.”
California legislators have raised fines for traffic infractions to some of the highest in the United States to generate revenue, and the poor are bearing an unfair burden, losing cars and jobs because they cannot pay them, civil rights activists said on Friday.
The state wants to slash greenhouse gas emissions so deeply in the coming years that oil refineries and other industries could face skyrocketing costs to comply with regulations, driving up gasoline prices until the system loses political support. If that happens, an effort touted as an international model for fighting global warming could collapse.
More than 130 housing bills surfaced this year as of the last count, many of them aimed at addressing the state’s housing shortage, lack of affordable housing and protecting those at risk of losing their homes.
While “cap and trade” – the issuance and trading of greenhouse gas emission allowances – is a relatively small part of the state’s strenuous efforts to combat climate change, it has been the most contentious. It indirectly affects consumers by raising prices and is designed to raise billions of dollars that Capitol politicians can spend without directly taxing their constituents.
What’s the upshot for consumers and the economy? Gasoline prices, already among the highest in the nation, would increase as much as 24 cents a gallon in the short run to reflect higher carbon-emission costs. Lawmakers proposed issuing “climate dividend” checks to Californians to offset the higher cost of carbon. The financial impact of an all-renewable electricity grid is uncertain.
If the net effect of our policies is to reduce California’s GHG footprint on the backs of California’s most vulnerable residents while increasing net global GHG, why would any other state or nation want to follow California’s example?
Oregon takes the No. 1 spot when it comes to renewable energy use, and also for the overall Best States for energy rnaking. Nearly 80 percent of the state’s renewable energy comes from hydropower, according to the National Hydropower Association.
The primary cost for an electric car is its battery, responsible for almost half the pricetag of a mid-sized plugin. If you take that away, electric cars are much cheaper to produce and maintain than internal combustion vehicles. (That’s why French carmaker Renault sells its popular Zoe without a battery, which customers pay a monthly fee to lease.
For true mass-market appeal, the up-front sticker price is what matters most, and battery prices must come down further. Fortunately, prices are falling fast—by roughly 20 percent a year. The manufacturing cost of electric cars will fall below their gasoline counterparts across the board around 2026, according to a recent analysis by Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
Those investments have California officials confident they are setting the groundwork to meet the ambitious ZEV goal. But encouraging consumer adoption is proving a more difficult battle.
“The companies have the vehicles and they are ready to sell them,” CARB Chair Mary Nichols told Utility Dive at the Los Angeles March for Science. “But the public doesn’t yet understand they are a viable alternative because they are still too expensive and there is not enough charging and hydrogen fuel supply.”
Local minimum wage hikes cause restaurants to leave or shut down and deter new ones from entering, according to a new Harvard Business School study of the San Francisco Bay Area restaurant industry that contradicts the orthodox liberal view that steeply raising the cost of unskilled labor will not affect jobs or hiring.
More interesting, though, are the study’s findings about which restaurants are forced to leave by the higher wage floors. The authors compared rates of departure of restaurants across different Yelp ratings, and found that the policy hit low and mid-quality restaurants much harder than top-tier restaurants. “Our point estimates suggest that a $1 increase in the minimum wage leads to an approximate 14 percent increase in the likelihood of exit for the median 3.5-star restaurant but the impact falls to zero for five-star restaurants.” While a restaurant’s Yelp rating doesn’t correlate directly with its price range, this differential effect suggests that it’s easier for rich people to ignore the deleterious effects of minimum wage hikes. Virtually all of the most expensive restaurants in San Francisco have four or more stars; the city’s business and professional elite are unlikely to see many of their favorite high-end destinations pushed out of the city. Poor or middle-income workers are less likely to have the luxury of only frequenting top-rated establishments, not to mention that they are more likely to work at the restaurants that the hikes put out of business.
We study the impact of the minimum wage on firm exit in the restaurant industry, exploiting recent changes in the minimum wage at the city level. The evidence suggests that higher minimum wages increase overall exit rates for restaurants. However, lower quality restaurants, which are already closer to the margin of exit, are disproportionately impacted by increases to the minimum wage. Our point estimates suggest that a one dollar increase in the minimum wage leads to a 14 percent increase in the likelihood of exit for a 3.5-star restaurant (which is the median rating), but has no discernible impact for a 5-star restaurant (on a 1 to 5 star scale).