03/29/2024

News

Bank of America Study Shows Small Business Optimism Growing

The study, which surveyed businesses with revenues from $100,000 to $5 million, showed 47 percent of entrepreneurs believed the Los Angeles economy would improve in the next year – up from 40 percent in a spring survey. Of those surveyed, 39 percent felt the national economy would improve, a 10 percent gain from the spring.

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Is Growth in the Gig Economy Stalling Out?

Just as we’ve started to get a handle on the ways online sharing platforms such as Uber and Airbnb are changing the nature of work in the U.S., it appears growth on the platforms may be slowing.

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Car Makers Gear Up for Electric Push

What’s missing are consumers, however. Auto makers are suffering from a glut of U.S. sedan and coupe inventory amid strong demand for light-trucks. The coming addition of electric-vehicle capacity could worsen that oversupply if shoppers continue to prefer pickups and sport-utility vehicles to plug-in cars.

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California jumps the shark

California is on the road to a bifurcated, almost feudal, society, divided by geography, race and class. As is clear from the most recent Internal Revenue Service data, it’s not just the poor and ill-educated, as Brown apologists suggest, but, rather, primarily young families and the middle-aged, who are leaving. What will be left is a state dominated by a growing, but relatively small, upper class, many of them boomers; young singles and a massive, growing, increasingly marginalized “precariat” of low wage, often occasional, workers.

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Teslas in the Trailer Park: A California City Faces Its Housing Squeeze

If there is anything that just about every Californian agrees with, it is that it costs too much to live in the state. Over the last few years, the price of buying a home or renting an apartment has become so burdensome that it pervades almost every issue, from the state’s elevated poverty rate to the debate about multimillion-dollar tear-downs to the lines of recreational vehicles parked on Silicon Valley side streets.

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Districts pass $23 billion in construction bonds, most parcel taxes

Voters in 184 K-12 and community college districts throughout California considered local school bonds worth more than $25 billion – and approved $23 billion of them.

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You need to earn $104,000 to afford a house in L.A. County — three-quarters of households do not

Homebuyers needed at least a six-figure income to afford the median-priced house in Orange and Los Angeles counties over the summer, the California Association of Realtors reported Wednesday.

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Job Gains at Startups Are Way Down and That’s a Bad Sign

Job gains from opening establishments as a percentage of overall private-sector employment dropped to 1% in the first quarter of 2016, the lowest level recorded since the Labor Department began the data series in 1992, and half what it was at its peak.

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Minimum-Wage Votes Show Worker-Friendly Policies Gaining Momentum

Voters in Arizona, Colorado, Maine and Washington approved ballot questions seeking to raise minimum wages in those states to $12 an hour or more, and then lock in those higher levels in real terms by binding future increases to the cost of living. And in two states, the provision also guarantees sick leave to workers.

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Economic Participation Matters Most

The best way up for people is — and always has been — the capacity to participate in the economy as an employee, entrepreneur, or owner. No amount of redistributive policy can achieve the same result. The safety net, as the name implies, is to prevent downward mobility; it has never been a very good trampoline.

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Guide to Tax-Related Ballot Questions

Okay, maybe that’s not the biggest draw today. Perhaps that honor belongs to Oregon Measure 97, or Maine Question 2, or Louisiana Amendment 3, or California Proposition 55. But just on the off chance that these aren’t the headlines on the election coverage you’re following, here’s a quick guide to some of the major tax-related ballot issues voters will see today

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Study: Nearly 58 percent of Fresno renters ‘cost-burdened’

Fresno is No. 7 on the 19-city list for cost-burdened renters, with 57.75 percent percent of renters paying more than 30 percent of their income on rent. The Stockton-Lodi region comes in at 56.84 percent for the No. 9 spot, while Modesto ranks 16th with 54.37 percent.

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The left vs. a carbon tax

It’s a fight happening within the left, and like a great many such fights in US politics these days, it reveals sharp differences over how to make progress in the face of Republican intransigence. In this case, the subject is climate change policy, but the fissures being exposed are relevant to all of left politics in an age of hyperpolarization.

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Decline in Prime-Age Workers Signals Economic Weakness

While commentators tend to focus on the unemployment rate—which is moderate at 4.9 percent—the employment-population ratio is arguably more informative. After long spells out of a job, people may become discouraged and give up looking for work altogether. A large group of working-age, able-bodied individuals outside the labor force is a sign of major weakness in the economy.

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Big government is the new West Coast craze

The new West Coast Model is higher taxes on the rich, higher spending by the state and wide-scale efforts to lift the working poor, all in the pursuit of stronger and more evenly shared growth. It is on the ballot in three states: Californians are set to essentially make permanent an income tax surcharge on millionaires in order to fund education. Washington voters appear likely to raise their minimum wage statewide to $13.25 an hour, and to mandate paid sick leave for workers. . . The booms, though, have been slow to spread beyond major metro areas. Lawmakers have struggled to balance their budgets, slashing aid to higher education and straining to fund schools at what they consider to be adequate levels — a challenge that is often felt acutely in their vast, slower-growing rural regions, and among the poorest residents of the high-cost metro centers.

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