Without quick action by Congress, the U.S. Transportation Department may begin scaling back or halting work on thousands of roads, bridges and other infrastructure projects at the height of the construction season this July, when the nation’s Highway Trust Fund is expected to run dry.
The move is part of a sea change in American manufacturing: After three decades of an exodus of production to China and other low-wage countries, companies have sharply curtailed moves abroad. Some, like Generac, have begun to return manufacturing to U.S. shores.
But recent research shows that dynamism is slowing down. Business churning and new firm formations have been on a persistent decline during the last few decades, and the pace of net job creation has been subdued. This decline has been documented across a broad range of sectors in the U.S. economy, even in high-tech.
Low-wage and mid-wage workers still earned signifi cantly less in 2013 than before the Great Recession began, after adjusting for infl ation. This wage erosion continues a decades-long trend of widening wage inequality.
This report categorizes and provides information about $340 billion in California’s key retirement, infrastructure, and budgetary liabilities. In addition, this report provides a framework for the Legislature to consider in prioritizing repayment of these liabilities and makes recommendations on which liabilities to pay down first and how the state could address such costs in the future.
Tribal gaming operations in California generated an estimated $8 billion in economic output in 2012 – $2.9 billion of which represented earnings by California workers – and supported over 56,000 jobs statewide. The 2012 operations had a roughly 7%-7.5% larger impact on California economic activity than in 2010.
Globo, a Greek company that makes enterprise mobility products, is reversing the normal migration pattern of Silicon Valley technology companies.
Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration is rolling out a new $750-million program that offers some modest financial incentives to encourage California employers to stay put and help persuade out-of-state companies to move here.
It has become increasingly clear that economically, California is becoming increasingly divided between its prosperous coastal counties and its struggling inland counties. That split has made it important for the state’s leaders to recognize that policies that appear to make sense to those representing the state’s successful areas may be generating unintended negative consequences to the parts of the state outside of their frame of reference.
Futuris Automotive Inc., a supplier to Tesla Motors, just inked a deal with Prologis for 160,000 square feet of office and industrial space at 6601 Overlake Place in Newark.
As news came in Thursday that tax receipts have come in more than $2 billion above revenue projections made by the Brown administration in January, legislative leaders struck a deal on the governor’s rainy day fund plan.
The deep recession wiped out primarily high-wage and middle-wage jobs. Yet the strongest employment growth during the sluggish recovery has been in low-wage work, at places like strip malls and fast-food restaurants.
In-state businesses shipped merchandise valued at $15.43 billion in March, up a robust 9.6 percent from $14.07 billion in March 2013, according to an analysis of Tuesday’s U.S. Commerce Department figures by Beacon Economics, a consulting firm with offices in the Bay Area and Los Angeles.
The AFL-CIO originally supported the tax but reversed course after a study determined that it would seriously undermine the state’s competitiveness as a business location, and some firms that had targeted the state as a relocation site said they would reconsider if the tax passed. The AFL-CIO, which helped collect signatures to put the measure on the ballot also balked when the teachers’ union got greedy and raised the proposed rate on the tax to 2 percent, up from 0.8 percent.
Musk said the automaker is working through a number of issues with Gov. Jerry Brown’s staff but fears the company would not get the various environmental and other permits in time to get the factory built and running quickly . . . “We can’t afford to wait a year or more for permits to proceed,” Musk said. “If we don’t have the gigafactory online when we have the vehicle capacity online we would be in deep trouble.”