This letter to Honorable Tom Lackey, Assembly Member, 36th District, estimates the effects of including transportation fuels in California’s cap-and-trade program on: (1) the retail price of gasoline and diesel fuel and (2) the additional amount motorists are spending on gasoline and diesel fuel as a result of the program.
Ridership of all modes of public transportation declined 1.3% last year from 2014, when transit use reached the highest level since 1958, according to new data from the American Public Transportation Association. The average price of a gallon of gasoline fell 27% in 2015 from a year earlier.
The U.S. economy needs to add 145,000 jobs per month just to hold the unemployment rate steady and absorb the flow of new workers into the labor force, according to estimates in the latest Wall Street Journal survey of economists.
Compensation for the chief executives of the biggest U.S. companies fell more sharply last year than any year since the financial crisis, as weaker corporate performance slowed cash bonuses and accounting rules pared back pension growth.
The Bay State, which hiked its minimum wage from $8 to $9 at the start of 2015 and to $10 on the first day of 2016, is now mired in its longest stretch of net job losses since the recession in both the retail and the leisure and hospitality sectors, Labor Department data show.
U.S. demand for foreign skilled-worker visas often used by technology companies surpassed the entire year’s mandated supply within five days, prompting the government to announce it will award them through a lottery.
Planned moves—across labor, health, finance and the environment—range from overtime pay for white-collar workers to more obscure matters such as requiring food makers to disclose added sugar on cartons of flavored milk.
The impact of the minimum wage rising from $8 in 2008 to $10 today is a lower-quality program, said Steven Amick, director of policy and partnerships for THINK Together, which provides after-school programming for 40,000 students each day at 40 different school districts. But the impact of raising the minimum wage to $15 a day is closure, he said. “The math just doesn’t work on that.”
The state’s merchandise exports had a total value of $12.13 billion in February, down nearly 3.5 percent from $12.55 billion a year earlier, according to a report from Beacon Economics, a consulting firm with offices in the Bay Area and Los Angeles.
The State of California added 19,600 private sector jobs during the month of March
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors has unanimously passed a new law requiring all businesses in the city with more than 20 employees to offer six weeks of fully paid parental leave to their workers.
In contrast, inflation in California is expected to worsen. Consumer prices, the metric that economists use to quantify inflation, rose 1.5 percent statewide during 2015, but are expected to rise by an annual pace of 2.3 percent in 2016. In 2017, consumer prices in California are expected to jump 3.5 percent.
More Americans were hired to start a new job in February than in any month since before the recession that began in 2007—about 5.4 million people.
The U.S. trade deficit in February increased 2.6% from January to a seasonally adjusted $47.06 billion, its highest level since August, the Commerce Department said Tuesday. Exports of goods and services rose 1%, the largest gain since September, but were down 4.2% from a year earlier. Imports climbed 1.3% in February from the prior month, their largest jump in 11 months, and edged up 0.3% from a year earlier.
But the state minimum wage increase affects more than the nonexempt workers who received the minimum wage; the increase also affects the classification of employees as exempt versus nonexempt.