California is failing to meet its goals to reduce vehicle travel, imperiling efforts to achieve ambitious greenhouse gas reduction targets, according to a state report released Monday. The report by the California Air Resources Board, the state’s climate change regulator, found that carbon emissions per capita from vehicle travel in California were increasing. That’s despite […]
Butte County’s Camp Fire not only claimed a staggering amount of lives and property, it spewed out a whole lot of greenhouse gases – about as much as all of California’s cars and trucks produce in a week, according to new state estimates. This blast of emissions contributes negligibly to the planet’s overall warming, but […]
The dramatic drop in the cost of solar photovoltaic (PV) modules, which has fallen by 99 percent over the last four decades, is often touted as a major success story for renewable energy technology. But one question has never been fully addressed: What exactly accounts for that stunning drop? A new analysis by MIT researchers […]
Now automation affects the US workforce is largely a question of which jobs and activities can be most easily automated. At a macro level, change will take time to occur. It’s not likely that a million truck drivers will be thrown out of work in the next few years, because the technologies to automate these […]
In 2015, average household income before accounting for means-tested transfers and federal taxes was $20,000 for the lowest quintile and $292,000 for the highest quintile. After transfers and taxes, those averages were $33,000 and $215,000.
But much more than theory or haggling over technical details, we have excellent empirical evidence that a Green New Deal just does not work. It’s been tried, twice, on different sides of the world and it didn’t work either time. The first time it was Australia. The global recession hits, so as a nice bit […]
A labor force participation rate that is at or above its long-run trend is consistent with a labor market at or above full employment. In 2018, the estimated rate is at its trend of 62.8%, suggesting that the labor market is at full employment. Studying the population’s demographic makeup and labor trends for different groups […]
In 2009, mired in the depths of recession, Ohio’s unemployment trust fund went broke, prompting the state to borrow $2.6 billion from the federal government so it could keep sending checks to unemployed workers. Now, with the state unemployment rate down to 4.4%, the debt has been repaid and the trust fund has started to […]
A new report shows a third of local governments in CalPERS will have police and firefighter employer rates next fiscal year that are at least 50 percent of pay, a level that a former CalPERS chief actuary believed a decade ago would be “unsustainable.” At the high end, the number of local governments with rates […]
Nine out of every 10 Silicon Valley jobs pays less now than when Netflix first launched in 1997, despite one of the nation’s strongest economic booms and a historically low unemployment rate that outpaces the national average. While tech workers have thrived, employees in the middle of Silicon Valley’s income ladder have been hit hardest […]
Unless you’ve been hibernating in the Himalayas, you must know of the recent surge in economic inequality. It’s not just that the rich are getting richer. The rest of us — say politicians, pundits and scholars — are stagnating. The top 1 percent have grabbed most income gains, while average Americans are stuck in the […]
In addition to his overall review of state finances, Taylor also issued a special report on K-12 schools and community colleges, which are dependent on the state budget, and it contained a not-so-rosy projection of their finances. Enrollment in both systems has been declining, thanks to interrelated demographic and economic factors, while their costs have […]
Four years after the state Legislature passed a bailout of the California State Teachers’ Retirement System that will nearly double annual direct contributions to the giant pension fund, a newly released internal report raises the prospect that the infusion of extra dollars may not protect CalSTRS from future disaster. The 2014 changes in funding required […]
A May 2017 survey collected information about workers who were in four alternative employment arrangements—people employed as independent contractors, on-call workers, temporary help agency workers, and workers provided by contract firms. These data were collected in a special supplemental survey to the Current Population Survey, the monthly household survey that provides information on employment and […]
Supposedly civic-minded prohibitions on consumer conveniences always have unintended consequences. California’s single-use plastic bag ban, for instance, has led to a surge in E. coli infections, created a swarm of thicker plastics bags that are a greater environmental hazard than the outlawed single-use plastic bags, boosted shoplifting, and been the cause of countless broken eggs […]