The state Constitution does not guarantee children in California a minimally funded quality education, a divided California Court of Appeal ruled Wednesday in a landmark decision closely watched by proponents of more K-12 spending.
In a poll released Wednesday by the Public Policy Institute of California, a solid majority — 62 percent — of likely voters supported extending for 12 years Gov. Jerry Brown’s Proposition 30 income tax increase on individuals earning over $250,000 to pay for education and health care. An initiative being circulated by teachers unions and health care organizations would put that proposal before voters in November.
In recent years, people moving to Texas from other states — rather than from other countries — have played a key role in the state’s population growth, according to a new analysis by the Office of the State Demographer. From 2005 to 2013, an estimated 5.9 million people moved to Texas, and 4.8 million of those came from one of the other 49 states.
This week, San Francisco became the first major US city to require solar panels on all new buildings that have 10 floors or less. (Larger buildings are exempt for now.) Analysts estimate that the resulting solar installations could help avoid 26,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually. If we use the EPA’s handy greenhouse gas calculator, that’s the equivalent of taking 5,500 cars off the road. . . So if San Francisco relaxed its restrictions and enabled, say, an additional 10,000 people to move from elsewhere in the Bay Area to the city, we could expect that to cut 79,000 metric tons of CO2 per year (to a first, crude approximation). This is three times as much CO2 as the solar panel law would save.
“In the next 10 to 15 years, we expect U.S. employers to demand more labor than will be available, which will, in turn, constrain overall economic growth,” the Conference Board said in a report to be released Tuesday.
Organized labor has always counted on Democrats’ support for issues like raising the minimum wage and paid sick leave. But in the new gig economy, run on apps for companies like Uber and TaskRabbit, the very nature of work is changing. And the new tech-driven workplace could put some Democrats at odds with their friends in the labor movement.
Los Angeles workers would be able to earn at least six paid sick days annually — twice the state minimum — under a proposed law that the City Council backed Tuesday.
While the most current complete tax data from the Franchise Tax Board is for 2013, the recently published zip code data enables some preliminary analysis for the 2014 receipts. By region, 40.3% of PIT revenues came from the Bay Area. More importantly, 51.2% of the increased PIT revenues in 2014 came from this region, once again illustrating how much California is reliant on a single region not only for continued jobs and employment growth, but the continued health of the state’s fiscal situation. Los Angeles, with 30% of the population, was the next largest region, paying 27.5% of total PIT and a 25.5% share of the increased PIT receipts. In the absence of state policies that promote more balanced and geographically dispersed jobs growth, California’s finances will likely continue to be reliant on the economic health of one region.
As a whole, U.S. cities are expanding as rapidly as they have throughout the last half-century. . . On the one side are cities such as San Francisco, Boston, New York and Miami that have slowed their pace of expansion dramatically since the 1970s, in part as they have added layer upon layer of building regulations. On the other side are cities concentrated in the southeast and Texas, which have grown outward and seen much slower price growth.
The trouble with my view is that the White House and Congress want to use the tax code to reward and punish. This enhances their power; relinquishing it reduces their power. We know this from history. The Tax Reform Act of 1986 followed the dictum of lowering rates by broadening the tax base. It was a commendable achievement, a rare example of bipartisanship. President Reagan supported it, as did many Democratic and Republican congressional leaders. It might have, if followed by similar laws, transformed the tax code.
Most prescriptions for boosting growth involve macroeconomic policy: increased government spending, for instance, or lower interest rates. But competition policy has the potential to do the same, by tearing down the barriers that keep companies from entering new markets. That would stimulate business investment in the short run, and productivity in the long run.
By 2015, the Workers’ Compensation Insurance Rating Bureau says in a new report, employers’ average insurance premiums, which had topped $6 per $100 of payroll in 2003, had dropped to $2.86.
To see why, it’s best to first think of investment in entrepreneurial endeavors like a coin toss. Heads, we earn $100 in capital gains; tails, we lose $100. If there are no taxes on a winning coin toss, then we have to believe that the odds of winning the toss are better than 50% to play the game. . . Let’s add in state taxes for that other wellspring of west coast innovation, Silicon Valley. At California’s top tax bracket of 13.3%, and with Hillary Clinton’s proposed rate of 45% on whatever is left, we get to keep $48 for each heads, and lose $100 for each tails. We need to expect at least a 68% chance of “heads.” And we’re taxed on inflation. If it takes 10 years to cash out, and inflation has boosted the cost of living by 25%, we need to win more than three out of four coin tosses to justify making these kinds of bets!
In many states you can’t so much as get a haircut or have a manicure unless the person performing the service has an occupational license. Last summer, the White House released a report targeting this tangled maze of job-licensing requirements, and saying that trimming the thicket would improve the economy.
Today Ms. Trauss’s group is one of several pro-housing organizations (GrowSF and East Bay Forward are others) that represent a kind of “Yimby” party, built on the frustrations of young professionals who feel priced out of the Bay Area. BARF has won the backing of technology millionaires — Jeremy Stoppelman, co-founder and chief executive of Yelp, is the group’s largest individual donor — and the encouragement of local politicians.