California faces a $76.67 billion cost to provide healthcare and dental benefits to retired state employees, state Controller Betty Yee reported Wednesday, an increase of $2.49 billion over the previous year’s estimate.
The jobs, wage, and establishment data has been updated through the latest, 2016:Q1 data from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW), through a special data run by the state Employment Development Department. This data is location based, providing information on the number and types of jobs and establishments operating within each district, and is provided for the Congressional, Senate, and Assembly Districts.
Several recent theories emphasize the negative effects of an aging population on economic growth, either because of the lower labor force participation and productivity of older workers or because aging will create an excess of savings over desired investment, leading to secular stagnation. We show that there is no such negative relationship in the data. If anything, countries experiencing more rapid aging have grown more in recent decades. We suggest that this counterintuitive finding might reflect the more rapid adoption of automation technologies in countries undergoing more pronounced demographic changes, and provide evidence and theoretical underpinnings for this argument.
Saltsman wrote: “Despite the challenges of doing business in California, Salem (unlike some of his competitors) is still committed to making his products domestically. ‘I’m an American – I want this country to do well, to succeed….’ He told me he’s not opposed to raising wages – but that the entire burden can’t rest on small business owners. ‘I need the government to meet me halfway. In California, unfortunately, that kind of compromise doesn’t exist.’”
President Donald Trump’s team has compiled a list of about 50 infrastructure projects nationwide, totaling at least $137.5 billion, as the new White House tries to determine its investment priorities, according to documents obtained by McClatchy’s Kansas City Star and The News Tribune.
Overhauling the environmental law, the California Environmental Quality Act, is a perennial issue at the Capitol, and the measure benefiting the Warriors arena was one of the most high-profile CEQA reforms in recent years. But the failure of the 2011 legislation to meet its stated goals reveals the difficulty lawmakers have had in making meaningful changes to the law.
The paper, by Daron Acemoglu of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University, argues aging populations have not had a negative effect on the growth of per-capita gross domestic product. In fact, some aging countries have seen faster growth. . . The economists find that countries where the population over age 50 is growing faster than the 20- to 49-year-old population have been more likely to acquire robots to do a worker’s job. Those investments make it easier for firms to replace departing workers even when there are fewer younger workers to take the retirees’ place.
The California Legislature enacted a dizzying array of new bills last year — with Gov. Jerry Brown signing more than 900 into law. With job growth stagnant and small business optimism unclear here in California, hundreds of new laws and regulations on the books this year present new burdens and risk of non-compliance for businesses across the state.
It would take even more – much more – to make up for lack of construction in the last decade – a dearth that’s driven housing costs to sky-high levels and given us the nation’s highest level of poverty. . . Two new proposals, one imposing a new tax on real estate transactions and another abolishing state income tax deductions for second home mortgage interest, would generate perhaps $600 million a year for affordable housing – enough for around 1,800 units, or just 1 percent of the state’s overall need.
Despite an economic recovery, local government leaders in California say rising pension costs have made it more difficult to restore some programs they cut during the recession. . . Local government officials are bracing for even higher costs following a decision in December by the state’s retirement system to forecast lower investment returns, forcing governments and some employees to increase their pension contributions. Officials are still estimating how much the change will cost when it takes effect in July 2018 for local governments, but expect them to exceed the increases of recent years.
“California unemployment fell to 5.2 percent last month, although payrolls grew by an anemic 3,700 jobs, the state reported Friday. The Employment Development Department said the statewide unemployment rate dipped by a tenth of a percentage point in December. But the addition of just 3,700 payroll jobs across the state was remarkably weak and suggests the state’s economy may be slowing down.”
“Two years ago, California Senate leader Kevin de León pushed through a law requiring the state to generate half of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030. On Thursday, he said there was a mistake in the legislation, SB 350 — it didn’t go far enough.”
To date, there are two common errors when thinking about Orange County’s future. One maintains that Orange County, rejecting the dispersed model suggested by its origins, ought to mimic Los Angeles (which, in turn, thinks IT should be mimicking San Francisco or New York) and become more “city like” — code for high density housing, mass transit and a centralized downtown. Although this strategy works in older, downtown-centric “legacy cities”, it has proven far less successful elsewhere. This is most evident in neighboring Los Angeles, OC’s closest relative. The determined drive there to become “city-like” may have benefitted some, such as developers and beneficiaries of public contracts, but has demonstrably failed to improve economic conditions across the metropolis
Jed Kolko, chief economist at job site Indeed, used Census Bureau data to dissect the occupational, educational and geographical background of immigrants in the U.S. He shows the most recent arrivals—those who came to the U.S. in the past five years—gravitating to jobs as medical scientists, software developers, physical scientists and economists. By contrast, earlier immigrants were more likely to land in blue-collar jobs at beauty salons, on construction sites or operating sewing machines.
As the graph shows, the vast majority of plug-in electric vehicle sales in the US have been in California — with Georgia, Washington, New York, Florida, and Texas making up the anemic vanguard.