“In 2012, nearly 1 million California households faced “energy poverty”—defined as energy expenditures exceeding 10 percent of household income. In certain California counties, the rate of energy poverty was as high as 15 percent of all households.”
“Following a 3.0% increase in 2014, nonfarm jobs are expected to grow by 2.9% in 2015, and then slow slightly to 2.4% in 2016. The unemployment rate stood at 6.3% in July and is expected to decline to 5.8% in 2016. With further improvements anticipated for the labor market, personal income and total taxable sales should increase by 4.9% and 4.5% respectively this year, with similar or better gains in 2016.”
The gap between the better performance of cars in testing by regulators and the lower fuel economy drivers experience has been widely known. But a wider gap could jeopardize the United States from reaching its targets for reducing carbon emissions, according to the study by researchers at self reported the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge.
A new study released today from UT’s Howard H. Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy indicates that the gap between government fuel economy estimates and what consumers are reporting has increased for recent model year vehicles.
Total cost of compliance across all institutions in the study was found to vary between 3 percent and 11 percent of each institution’s FY2014 operating expenditures, with a median value of 6.4 percent (Exhibit 4). This variation in overall compliance was found to be driven by two key factors: 1) presence and extent of research at the institution; and 2) scale of expenditures at the institution.
This report updates and extends projections of California’s workforce skills through 2030, focusing on the supply and demand for workers with a bachelor’s degree. We find that the state will fall about 1.1 million college graduates short of economic demand if current trends persist—a problem we call the workforce skills gap. Even the arrival of highly educated workers from elsewhere is unlikely to be large enough to fill this gap.
We examine the consequences of underreporting of transfer programs for prototypical analyses of low-income populations using the Current Population Survey (CPS), the source of official poverty and inequality statistics. We link administrative data for food stamps, TANF, General Assistance, and subsidized housing from New York State to the CPS at the individual level. Program receipt in the CPS is missed for over one-third of housing assistance recipients, 40 percent of food stamp recipients and 60 percent of TANF and General Assistance recipients. Dollars of benefits are also undercounted for reporting recipients, particularly for TANF, General Assistance and housing assistance. We find that the survey data sharply understate the income of poor households. Underreporting in the survey data also greatly understates the effects of anti-poverty programs and changes our understanding of program targeting. Using the combined data rather than survey data alone, the poverty reducing effect of all programs together is nearly doubled while the effect of housing assistance is tripled. We also re-examine the coverage of the safety net, specifically the share of people without work or program receipt. Using the administrative measures of program receipt rather than the survey ones often reduces the share of single mothers falling through the safety net by one-half or more.
“State personal income grew 0.9 percent on average in the second quarter of 2015, after growing 0.8 percent in the first quarter, according to estimates released today by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. Personal income grew in every state except Oklahoma in the second quarter. In the first quarter, personal income grew in 34 states. Second-quarter personal income growth rates ranged from zero in Oklahoma to 1.5 percent in the state of Washington.”
“Small firms with fewer than 50 employees have been the primary engine of job creation during the post-recession recovery, but that turned last month, according to a report Wednesday from ADP and Moody’s Analytics.”
California’s severe shortage of affordable housing has hit low-income renters particularly hard. Nearly 1.6 million low-income California renter households paid more than half of their income for housing in 2013, and this number has risen 28 percent since 2007. While the shortage is most severe on California’s coast, many families throughout California struggle to pay the rent (see Figure 1). A multifaceted approach with roles for local, state, and federal governments is needed to address the severe affordable housing shortage, but the federal Housing Choice Voucher program can play an outsized role.
“Four years of warnings of the consequences of government culpability – from cancelling water projects to releasing millions of acre-feet of precious stored reservoir water in utopian efforts to restore 19th-century salmon runs in the San Joaquin River or to rebound a bait fish population in the San Joaquin-Sacramento River Delta – are no longer written off as shrill.”
The evaluation was funded by a grant from the U. S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (R305E090009). It was designed to determine whether the children who participate in the TN‐VPK program make greater academic and behavioral gains in areas that prepare them for later schooling than comparable children who do not participate in the program. It is the first prospective randomized control trial of a scaled up state‐funded, targeted pre‐kindergarten program that has been undertaken.
“Take the fast food industry, for example, an industry that virtually every economic and social policy of the contemporary progressive movement is trying to maim. From the $15-an-hour minimum wage in the industry demanded by New York to the fight against fast food on nutritional grounds by the Broccoli Police and the Nutrition Nannies, to this new NLRB ruling mandating that the employees of franchises be considered for certain regulatory purposes employees of the parent companies, the progressive movement is trying to do to McDonalds and related companies what Bill deBlasio and the taxi lobby want to do to Uber. The net effect of these changes will be to narrow the choices of food that poor people have, to raise the price of the food they have to buy, and to accelerate the automation of the restaurant industry, further reducing the already limited number of jobs open to people with few skills. Progressives will look on the consequences of this disaster and conclude that with urban unemployment higher and the cost of living for the poor rising, we obviously need more food stamps and rent subsidies—and so we must impose heavier taxes on the companies and industries that are still profitable in order to pay for these necessary benefits.”
“California jobs will grow at a healthy rate this year, but at a slower pace over the next two years, according to a new forecast by UCLA’s Anderson School of Management.”
“The high level of income inequality in the United States is at the forefront of policy attention. This paper focuses on one potential policy response: an increase in the top personal income tax rate. We conduct a simulation analysis using the Tax Policy Center (TPC) microsimulation model to determine how much of a reduction in income inequality would be achieved from increasing the top individual tax rate to as much as 50 percent. We calculate the resulting change in income inequality assuming an explicit redistribution of all new revenue to households in the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution. The resulting effects on overall income inequality are exceedingly modest.”