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Average federal, state and local taxes and fees for California customers reached a record 18%, meaning that the government’s slice of your wireless bill is now at least twice as high as the state sales tax imposed on most other goods and services. . . Even though smartphones have become necessities and a crucial component of the digital economy, they’re still taxed in large part as a luxury item. . . In 1898, the federal government imposed a 3% excise tax on telephone use to help cover a face-off with Spain over the future of Cuba. Phones were relatively scarce at the time, so the tax was intended to be a levy on wealthy Americans.

Real gross domestic product — the value of the goods and services produced by the nation’s economy less the value of the goods and services used up in production, adjusted for price changes — increased at an annual rate of 2.1 percent in the third quarter of 2015, according to the “second” estimate released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the second quarter, real GDP increased 3.9 percent.

She plans to amend and revive stalled legislation guaranteeing double Thanksgiving pay so it would only apply to workers at large retail businesses that have more than 500 employees in California.

Earlier this month, Gov. Jerry Brown’s top aide, Nancy McFadden, when asked about the administration’s on-the-record opposition to efforts to raise the minimum wage, pointed out that a $15 minimum wage comes with a multi-billion price tag for state government.

A study released Monday by the American Highway Users Alliance, a nonprofit group that lobbies for interstate highway investment, examined which routes in the United States are the most continuously crowded, 24 hours a day, rather than during peak periods. Eleven of the 30 worst bottlenecks are in Greater Los Angeles.

Little has changed since 2010 despite all the talk about “peak car” and a supposed massive shift towards transit. Single occupant driving remains by far the largest mode of transport to work in the 53 major metropolitan areas (with over 1,000,000 population), having moved from 73.5 percent of commutes to 73.6 percent.

Germany’s shift to renewable energy has created a power market so volatile that humans are having trouble keeping up with it.

During this decade, however, a slow recovery from recession and a temporary hike in taxes approved by voters in 2012 have boosted general fund revenues from scarcely $80 billion when Jerry Brown began his second governorship in 2011 to an estimated $116 billion today.

After the minimum wage ordinance was approved, LoGuercio invested in a $150,000 industrial dishwasher he had been eyeing to save on utility costs. The machine will also allow him to stop paying six to eight people who earn $10 to $11 an hour washing dishes. LoGuercio expects to recoup his costs in nine months, and save a couple of hundred thousand dollars a year going forward.

“A minimum-wage job has always been the role of an entry-level position into the workforce,” Lapsley said. “(Those jobs are) to help get people initially trained and then move into a … different job so that they have a long-term future.”

“It doesn’t work,” said Chris Thornberg, a founding partner of Beacon Economics. “Does a higher minimum wage reduce poverty? No. Does it reduce homelessness? No. Does it get more at-risk inner-city youth to work? No. So why are we doing it? We have to find a different plan.”

As executive director of BANANAS, an Oakland-based nonprofit that connects families with childcare providers, he has seen how Oakland’s minimum wage hike has impacted workers who benefit from a higher wage, while creating new challenges for families facing more expensive or reduced access to child care. . . “Their profit margins are so thin to begin with, so they have to lay off those providers. So those are working people who are out of jobs. Then what happens is they have to reduce their services to families because license requirements (say) that if you don’t have a certain number of people in the center or the family childcare home, you have to reduce the number of families you serve. So families have lost their child care.”

The inefficiency of the minimum wage stems directly from who are working minimum wage jobs in California. First, based on the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, in 2014, almost one-third of hourly workers making $9 per hour live in households with family income above the federal poverty line; moreover, 79 percent were ages 25 or younger (i.e. individuals who are just entering the labor force).  And lastly, 73 percent of Californian hourly workers making $9 per hour (or less) didn’t have a college degree, suggesting a majority of minimum wage workers are, in fact, lower skilled.  

California employers added 41,200 net jobs in October, a significant increase from more sluggish growth reported a month earlier, according to federal data.

With breathtaking abruptness, the British government has in recent months slashed its support for solar power and other renewable forms of energy, leaving a once-promising industry with grim prospects and throwing into doubt the country’s commitment to clean power. . . Britain on Wednesday became the first major economy to propose a phase-out of coal-fired power plants, saying it intends to do so by 2025. But the government’s plan relies heavily on a switch to gas rather than cleaner alternatives.