On October 23, the Los Angeles City Council will consider approving a 1,000% increase in their Street Damage Restoration Fee (SDRF) ordinance. This is a fee that companies or utilities pay when they must cut in to a street in order to fix or build new infrastructure like internet cables, gas lines, or water pipes. […]
If you are not familiar with PAGA, it stands for the Private Attorney General Act, a law referred to as the “sue your boss law”. It was enacted in 2004 and California is the only state in the union that has such a law. When the law was created there was a budget deficit in […]
Among the 250 cities analyzed, ranging from Suisun City with just over 29,000 residents, to big Los Angeles, with over 4.0 million residents, only two got the top grade of A, Rancho Palos Verdes, located in Los Angeles County, and Poway, located in San Diego County. Grades of F, on the other hand, were handed […]
Today’s map shows states’ rankings on the property tax component of the 2019 State Business Tax Climate Index. The Index’s property tax component evaluates state and local taxes on real and personal property, net worth, and asset transfers. The property tax component accounts for 15.4 percent of each state’s overall Index score. Property taxes matter […]
Almost all news coverage of the current election season has focused on cultural issues such as gender, race, and immigration. What the media have missed are deep socioeconomic trends driving parts of the country in divergent political directions. President Trump has overseen a significant transformation in the geography of the nation’s growth and prosperity. Instead […]
“There is a persistent belief, among both state officials and the public, that clean cars and clean fuels alone can achieve California’s climate goals, but this is fundamentally untrue,” he says. “Even if we have 100 percent zero-emission vehicles and 75 percent renewable energy production by 2050—both ambitious goals—we still need a 15 percent reduction […]
Economic activity in the Twelfth District continued to expand at a moderate pace during the reporting period of September through early October. Conditions in the labor market tightened noticeably, and wage pressures picked up. Price inflation increased moderately. Sales of retail goods picked up slightly, while activity in consumer and business services was solid. Activity […]
The third and most ignored reason California doesn’t use much electricity is that their tax and regulatory policies and high costs of doing business have steadily driven out industries that use a lot of energy to manufacture things such as steel and cement. There’s irony in this, of course, and it’s this: California’s environmentally-minded leaders […]
A NIMBY group may be satisfied with stopping a housing project in their neighborhood but I wonder if they realize that their efforts are discriminatory – creating displacement and relegating people of color to areas of greater poverty. According to a recently released study, that’s exactly what those efforts produce. The study, conducted by the […]
Most public sector union contracts have clauses that prevent workers from quitting until the month before the labor agreement ends. Some unions earlier this year released new agreements that compel members to commit to membership for at least one year. Both of those membership clauses are intended to buffer unions from extreme swings in membership […]
Using administrative employment data from the state of Washington, we use short-duration longitudinal panels to study the impact of Seattle’s minimum wage ordinance on individuals employed in low-wage jobs immediately before a wage increase. We draw counterfactual observations using nearest-neighbor matching and derive effect estimates by comparing the “treated” cohort to a placebo cohort drawn […]
Elon Musk’s companies have propelled his net worth to almost $20 billion. But how have government policies and taxpayer money boosted his businesses? From subsidies at the national and state level, to federal tax credits for consumers buying electric cars and solar panels, to fuel efficiency standards that help bring millions in revenue for Tesla […]
There is “a fine line public agencies, officials and employees walk between legally disseminating information and illegally advocating for or against a ballot measure or candidate” under California law. That’s the opening of an article in publicceo.com, a website devoted to governmental management, written by two lawyers well-versed in the subject. The article, essentially a […]
For most of the last two decades, the share of women participating in the U.S. labor force was in decline, puzzling demographers and economists since female participation was rising in many other developed economies. Thanks to a strong economy, that long-running decline shows signs of reversing. Labor-force participation among prime-age U.S. women aged 25 to […]
Academic researchers, state analysts and California’s gubernatorial candidates agree that the fundamental issue underlying the state’s housing crisis is that there are not enough homes for everyone who wants to live here. The problem, a new poll says, is that the public doesn’t believe it. A USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times survey found that just 13% […]