States’ unemployment insurance trust funds were battered by the Great Recession. Thanks to a spike in demand for jobless benefits, some went deep in debt to pay for help for the unemployed. Some still have billions left to repay.
The state began borrowing in 2009 and accounted for more than $10 billion of the debt at its peak, but it has declined only slightly – thanks to a political stalemate in the Capitol – and California now accounts for nearly half of the national debt total.
Texas struck again Monday, luring Toyota Motor Corp.’s headquarters away from Torrance and forcing California officials to defend the state’s business climate anew.
The high school graduation rate in the United States will not increase as quickly as experts think it can without more improvement in California, which educates one-fifth of the nation’s low-income school children and more Hispanic students than any other state, a report set to be released Monday concludes.
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.
Toyota Motor Corp. plans to move large numbers of jobs from its sales and marketing headquarters in Torrance to suburban Dallas, according to a person familiar with the automaker’s plans.
At a meeting last week of the Northern Nevada Development Authority in Carson City, Minden businessman Daniel Wray threatened to abandon plans to move the Southern California segment of his research and development business, Biofilm Management Inc., to Nevada.
One recent study predicts the cost of electricity in California alone could jump 47% over the next 16 years, in part because of the state’s shift toward more expensive renewable energy.
In a dramatic sign of the rise of streaming video and how vulnerable companies can be to changing technology trends, Qumu Corp. (NASDAQ: QUMU) is coming back to the Bay Area and will divest itself of its shrinking disc publishing business so it can focus entirely on its growing corporate video content management software business.
Today, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis released real, price-adjusted estimates of personal income for states and metropolitan areas for 2008-2012.
Heading into the third year of a prolonged drought, the Allens are among the many California farmers forced to make dire choices that could leave as much as 800,000 acres, or about 7 percent of the state’s cropland, fallow. While some think that estimate may be inflated so early in the planting season, the consensus is that drier and drier seasons are on the horizon.
California Democrats proposed a bill Thursday that would raise state taxes on publicly traded companies that pay their top-earning employee 100 times as much or more as the company’s average worker.
Lawmakers advanced legislation Wednesday that would allow employees that are denied wages to record a lien on an employer’s property and the property where the employee worked.
A bill that would allow nonexempt employees to negotiate an alternative work schedule of up to 10-hours a week without overtime died Wednesday in an Assembly labor committee.
Things can and should be better in California, and we should have real conversations about how to address the state’s problems. We need real policy reforms, real tax reform, and real expenditure reform. But any real discussion has to begin on an honest footing, with a candid conversation about what is really happening in the state and local economies. Instead, headlines continue to be dominated by hype, hyperbole, and flat out nonsense.