In a world in which malnourishment continues to claim at least 1.4 million children’s lives each year, 1.2 billion people live in extreme poverty, and 2.6 billion lack clean drinking water and sanitation, this growing emphasis on climate aid is immoral.
The Labor Department only classifies people as unemployed if they are actively looking for work. All those who don’t have a job and aren’t looking are lumped together under the fishy-sounding classification “not in the labor force.” The share of Americans not in the labor force has been climbing for nearly 15 years, a development that even many economists and demographers failed to anticipate.
A large California union is seed funding an organization aimed at accelerating such campaigns around the country, seizing on growing public support for raising the minimum wage to heights that just one cycle ago would have seemed like total fantasy.
An initiative to raise California’s minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2021 has enough signatures to qualify for the November 2016 ballot, according to a press release from SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West, which is sponsoring the measure.
According to new research, states with a high concentration of married couples experience faster economic growth, less child poverty and more economic mobility than states where fewer adults are married, even after controlling for a variety of economic and demographic factors. The study, from the conservative American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for Family Studies, also finds that the share of parents who are married in a state is a better predictor of that state’s economic health than the racial composition and educational attainment of the state’s residents.
On Wednesday, Wal-Mart stunned Wall Street by forecasting that its earnings would decline by as much as 12 percent in its next fiscal year to January 2017 as it struggles to offset rising costs from increases in the wages of its hourly-paid staff, improvements in its stores, and investments to grow online sales. This at a time when it faces relentless price competition from Amazon.com Inc , dollar stores and regional supermarket chains. Keeping the prices it pays suppliers as low as it can is essential if it is to start to claw back some of this cost hit to its margins.
The nation’s colleges and universities collectively spend an estimated $27 billion each year trying to comply with federal requirements. . . Compliance with all federal requirements accounted for between 3 and 11 percent of the institutions’ operating expenditures, excluding any expenses associated with running a hospital.
The nation’s biggest employer blames its recently released lower forecast on a plan it unveiled in February to hike minimum hourly compensation to $10, up from $7.25 at the federal level.
So we’ve raised standards and lost such jobs. In effect, we’ve decided such jobs aren’t worth keeping.
Even if a $15 an hour minimum wage risks job losses, it is still the right thing to do.
The roads and highways are the veins and arteries that pump life into our economic system. They must be cared for to prevent the economic system from getting a form of man-made sclerosis. The governor and legislators during the Special Session are walking a tightrope to balance the need to improve the roads and highways with voters being turned-off by a slew of tax proposals.
Businesses in San Francisco’s Mid-Market district skirted nearly $34 million in city payroll taxes last year thanks to a controversial incentive program known as the “Twitter tax break” intended to keep tech firms from fleeing for Silicon Valley. . . Last year, six companies qualified for the program — a drop from 11 in 2013.
A U.S. Department of Education report shows that California’s high school graduation ranking dropped from 30th in 2012-13 to 33rd in 2013-14, even though its graduation rate increased slightly.
. . . economists across the ideological spectrum have paid little attention to the links between household family structure and the macroeconomic outcomes of nations, states, and societies. This is a major oversight because, as this report shows, shifts in marriage and family structure are important factors in states’ economic performance, including their economic growth, economic mobility, child poverty, and median family income.
In other words, the regulations under which EPA and CARB are prosecuting truckers are based on dubious science. But when the cause is green virtue, such details don’t matter.
In his final term, Brown is focused on creating a legacy of fiscal prudence after inheriting a $26.6 billion state deficit when he returned to the governor’s office in 2011. But unlike social measures that can easily pass the state Legislature on a majority vote, finance issues are more complex. Tax increases require both Republican and Democratic support to reach a two-thirds vote.