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LAEDC’s Institute for Applied Economics has released the report, Goods on the Move: Trade and Logistics in Southern California. The report looks at jobs, wages, economic impact, trends, and factors affecting the future of this major regional industry cluster, which directly employs over half a million people in Southern California. The industry continues to grow, with more jobs being added. While average wages for the industry as a whole are above the LA County average, the individual occupations span a wide range of salaries. Warehousing experienced a 55% increase in employment during the past ten years, but salaries in that sector have been trending down, and increasing automation is a factor to watch.

The cost of imprisoning each of California’s 130,000 inmates is expected to reach a record $75,560 in the next year, enough to cover the annual cost of attending Harvard University and still have plenty left over for pizza and beer.

The price for each inmate has doubled since 2005, even as court orders related to overcrowding have reduced the population by about one-quarter. Salaries and benefits for prison guards and medical providers drove much of the increase. The result is a per-inmate cost that is the nation’s highest and $2,000 above tuition, fees, room and board, and other expenses to attend Harvard. For example, the corrections department has one employee for every two inmates, compared with one employee for roughly every four inmates in 1994.

So far this decade, California has defied economic logic, largely due to the explosive growth of Silicon Valley, as well as the effects of rapid real estate appreciation. Yet, these gains have failed to reverse, and in some ways have even exacerbated, the state’s highest-in-the-nation poverty rate, growing inequality and a mounting outmigration of middle-class families. These facts suggest that it’s time to end the celebration and start focusing on how create a more expansive, less feudal California.

“Total district pension contributions are expected to increase by about $1 billion (in 2017-18),” the Legislative Analyst’s Office calculated. Local school officials complained that Brown’s initial budget increased their financing by just $744 million, meaning they would have to divert operating funds to pay for pensions. Brown’s revised budget boosted school money by another $1-plus billion, thanks to higher tax revenues, but a big chunk wouldn’t be paid until 2019, which could still force schools to cut other spending next year to pay for pensions. All of these burdens will grow. Not only are the state’s pension costs scheduled to nearly double by 2023-24 – once again, assuming CalPERS hits its earnings targets – but CalSTRS’ bite on school districts is projected to rise from $4.7 billion in 2017-18 to $7 billion by 2020-21, plus another $2.5 billion for CalPERS.

What has been the biggest accomplishment of the Fight for $15 movement?

It’s reaffirmed a very bedrock principle of working people, which is when we join together, we can make the impossible, possible. This bodacious demand, four years ago, for $15 and a union—that people were laughing at, thought was crazy—the $15 part of that has become a standard against which people will debate. I have more people coming up to me than ever before and asking, “When is it going to $20? When are you upping the demand?”

This year’s rains brought a welcome respite to California’s farmers, who had grappled with surface water supply shortages for the previous four years. But now farmers are increasingly worried about the availability of another crucial element to their farms’ productivity―farm labor. The connection between farm labor and immigration patterns was among the topics covered in a recent conference at UC Davis.

No state needs to reform the relationship that governments have with public-employee unions more than California. Yet lawmakers keep going in the wrong direction. Contract negotiations between government and the labor unions who represent the public employees should be transparent. Too often, both sides are working toward a common goal – a generous deal for the unions. Simply put, there isn’t much bartering between state and local governments and the public-sector unions. Union bosses secure the contracts they want because there is little push back during collective-bargaining sessions. This arrangement has been finely tuned. Unions have for decades delivered cash and manpower to elect friendly candidates to state and local office.

. . . Assembly Bill 1455, which is currently awaiting a State Assembly vote, would conceal the material content of collective bargaining talks with public-employee unions from taxpayers, who have to pay for above-market wages, hordes of duplicative and often unnecessary positions, and luxurious retirements.

California proposes to issue a pension obligation bond to finance extra contributions to the state pension fund, CalPERS. It would also cover up wealth transfers from citizens to state employees. Here’s how it works: When pension promises are made by the state to its employees, both the state and employees incur costs (“Normal Costs”) in the form of contributions to CalPERS with the hope that the sum of contributions and investment earnings will be sufficient to fund the promised pension payments. If investments earn at the rate CalPERS used when setting the Normal Cost, everything works out. But if investments earn at a lower rate, deficits (“Unfunded Liabilities”) arise. In contrast to joint sharing of Normal Cost, employees don’t share in the cost of Unfunded Liabilities. 100% of that cost falls on citizens, whose services get crowded out and taxes get raised to pay off the liabilities.

California is spending record sums on anti-poverty programs, $19 billion per year more than in 2012. We have the highest poverty rate in the nation, over 20 percent, according to the Census Bureau, when the cost of living is taken into account. But taxpayer-funded programs can never catch up to the problem, because higher taxes are part of the cause of the problem. Where are the jobs that allow people to climb out of poverty and enjoy a rising standard of living, instead of declining wages and never enough money to buy things?

Using panel data on individual labor income histories from 1957 to 2013, we document two empirical facts about the distribution of lifetime income in the United States.  First, from the cohort that entered the labor market in 1967 to the cohort that entered in 1983, median lifetime income of men declined by 10%–19%. We find little-to-no rise in the lower three-quarters of the percentiles of the male lifetime income distribution during this period. Accounting for rising employer-provided health and pension benefits partly mitigates these findings but does not alter the substantive conclusions.  For women, median lifetime income increased by 22%–33% from the 1957 to the 1983 cohort, but these gains were relative to very low lifetime income for the earliest cohort.  Much of the difference between newer and older cohorts is attributed to differences in income during the early years in the labor market. Partial life-cycle profiles of income observed for cohorts that are currently in the labor market indicate that the stagnation of lifetime incomes is unlikely to reverse. Second, we find that inequality in lifetime incomes has increased significantly within each gender group. However, the closing lifetime gender gap has kept overall lifetime inequality virtually flat. The increase within gender groups is largely attributed to an increase in inequality at young ages, and partial life-cycle income data for younger cohorts indicate that the increase in inequality is likely to continue. Overall, our findings point to the substantial changes in labor market outcomes for younger workers as a critical driver of trends in both the level and inequality of lifetime income over the past 50 years.

The big risk the Governor will have to face is the possibility that the investment markets may tank after making the contribution prepayment. Remember, if you lose 50 percent on your investments this year, you have to earn 100 percent next year just to break even on your principal. Will Rogers put it best, “I am not so much concerned with the return on capital as I am with the return of capital.”

It’s not a good idea to time the market. It’s better to dollar-cost average, which means investing the same amount at regular intervals over time.

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.”

Many local governments are getting squeezed, as Calpers, the state pension fund, demands higher contributions to cover exploding costs. But the fact that even Mountain View is struggling to come up with the money highlights how grim the situation is for the state as a whole. Not all California towns are home to huge wealth-creating enterprises and affluent tax bases; in fact, many inland areas have been hemorrhaging high-paying jobs for years.

Even states that have overcome the effects of the recession may face financial pressures that could shape their budgets now and for years to come. A major issue for a number of states is how to cope with an accumulation of unfunded public pension and retiree health care liabilities, which total more than $1.5 trillion nationwide. In addition, debate among U.S. lawmakers over financing for Medicaid, which is jointly funded by federal and state governments, has sparked fresh uncertainty over how much of the costs states will pay. The health care program accounts for the largest share of total federal aid to states. Another challenge for states is tax revenue volatility, which can confound policymakers’ best efforts to balance budgets.

In the span of a few decades, Los Angeles area construction went from an industry that was two-thirds white, and largely unionized, to one that is overwhelmingly Latino, mostly nonunion and heavily reliant on immigrants, according to a Los Angeles Times review of federal data.

At the same time, the job got less lucrative. American construction workers today make $5 an hour less than they did in the early 1970s, after adjusting for inflation.