Over the past year, the levels of quitting and hiring haven’t made any progress. Hiring plunged during the recession, but by the end of 2015 the rate had climbed to a post-recession high of 3.8%. For the past eight months, it has hovered below that rate.
Brown’s plan unveiled on Tuesday would add $4.3 billion a year over the next decade on everything from repairs to additional public transit. The governor convened a special session of the Legislature to deal with transportation funding in the summer of 2015, but it finally fizzled out last fall.
In sharp contrast to the 1960s California governed by Jerry Brown’s great father, Pat, upward mobility is not particularly promising for the state’s majority Latino next generation. Not only are housing prices out of reach for all but a few, but the state’s public education system ranks 40th in the nation, behind New York, Texas and South Carolina. If California remains the technological leader, it is also becoming the harbinger of something else — a kind of feudal society divided by a rich elite and a larger poverty class, while the middle class either struggles or leaves town.
The trade gap for goods and services increased 6.8% from a month earlier to a seasonally adjusted $45.24 billion in November, the Commerce Department said Friday. That took the monthly deficit to its highest level since February.
Home is the foundation for life. It’s where we raise families, feel safe and secure, rest and recharge. Our options for where we live have far-reaching impacts in our lives – from our job opportunities to our physical and mental health, from our children’s success in school to our environmental footprint. With California’s desirable climate, diverse economy, and many of the nation’s top colleges, the State continues to experience strong housing demand; however, housing construction is constrained by regulatory barriers, high costs, and fewer public resources.
The evidence in this report suggests that Californian children have higher rates of income mobility because of their parents’ and their own characteristics, not because growing up in California results in more mobility. On average, growing up in California results in somewhat lower adult earnings for children compared to living elsewhere in the United States. . . According to the Chetty and Hendren estimates, had these children grown up somewhere else, they would have experienced slightly greater upward income mobility. . . While growing up in California results in lower future earnings for low–income children on average, there is a great deal of variation in these outcomes at a local level. Within California, growing up in a particular county can increase or decrease a child’s future annual income by a couple of thousand dollars.
Although Americans nationwide have been flooding south and west for years, the Golden State has become an exception. Nearly 62 percent of Americans lived in the two regions, Justin Fox observed from Census figures. “That’s up from 60.4 percent in the 2010 census, 58.1 percent in 2000, 55.6 percent in 1990 — and 44 percent in 1950. The big anomaly is California, which is very much in the West, yet has lost an estimated 383,344 residents to other states since 2010.”
“Nonfarm payrolls rose by a seasonally adjusted 156,000 in December from the prior month, a slowdown from November’s more robust gain, the Labor Department said Friday. For all of 2016, the economy added just under 2.2 million jobs, the smallest gain for a calendar year since 2011. The unemployment rate ticked up to 4.7% last month, but remains historically low. Wages showed new signs of firming, rising at the best annual rate since 2009, a sign that more than seven years into a slow-growing expansion labor-market conditions are finally tightening enough to reap payoffs for workers.”
Education leaders in recent years have lauded achievement gains and progress of California’s K-12 students, but an annual national report card has rated the Golden State below mediocre — a solid C-minus, 10th from the bottom among the 50 states and Washington, D.C.
The jobs that have been disappearing, like machine operator, are predominantly those that men do. The occupations that are growing, like health aide, employ mostly women. . . But while more than a fifth of American men aren’t working, they aren’t running to these new service-sector jobs. Why? They require very different skills, and pay a lot less.
Demand for small and midsize passenger cars has collapsed amid a sustained run of cheap fuel, pushing buyers to gravitate toward sport utilities, crossover wagons and pickups. . . Barclays’s Mr. Johnson estimates a “sedan recession” will have companies scrambling to cut about 2 million units of car production annually to make way for more SUVs and crossovers. This trend extends beyond the domestics—last spring, Toyota Motor Corp. retooled a cars-only assembly line at a plant in Princeton, Ind., to be able to build the Highlander SUV, helping notch its best sales month ever.
“What the report tries to get at is that the facts on the ground for a typical California family are really as bad as they’ve ever been in the state’s history,” said Ben Metcalf, director of the Department of Housing and Community Development.
Several plans have been floated to put more money into housing – such as a tax on real estate transactions or eliminating the income tax deduction for interest on second homes – but even if Democrats can muster two-thirds votes for these tax changes, they’d have no more than a marginal effect on the crisis.
Executives have grown more optimistic about growth, in part anticipating that President-elect Donald Trump’s administration and Republican congressional majorities will bring regulatory rollbacks, corporate tax breaks and increased infrastructure spending.
Earlier this year, a video explaining Sweden’s efficient trash burning system made the Facebook rounds, touting a shocking statistic: less than one percent of this country’s household waste ends up in a landfill. Instead, much of it is incinerated and converted into usable electricity and heat via waste-to-energy plants. In the U.S., the clip left the social media community scratching its collective head, and asking: Why aren’t Americans burning more of our own garbage?