The concept of a universal basic income, or UBI, has become part of the moral armor of Silicon Valley moguls who want a socially conscious defense against the charge that technology is making humanity obsolete. The logic of UBI runs that if every adult received $12,000 annually in free, unfettered cash, then we would not […]
At least 14 states already have supermajority tax requirements, according to a 2017 tally by the National Conference of State Legislatures. They include some states that Democrats are hoping to take back this year, such as Wisconsin and Michigan. In three additional states — Florida, Oregon and North Carolina — conservative lawmakers and business groups […]
Late last month, the Legislature enacted a 9,900-word bill purporting to protect Californians’ personal and financial information from being revealed without their permission. This legislation was hastily drafted to persuade San Francisco developer and privacy advocate Alastair Mactaggart to drop an initiative ballot measure on the same issue that he had qualified for the November […]
Californians dutifully load up their recycling bins and feel good about themselves. They’re helping the environment and being good citizens. But their glow might turn to gloom if they realized that much of the stuff is headed to a landfill. That’s because there’s no longer a recycling market for a lot of the paper, cardboard, […]
Last year, China bought up more than half of the scrap materials exported by the United States. . . . Globally, since 1992, 72 percent of plastic waste has ended up in China and Hong Kong, according to a study in the journal Science Advances. But since January, China has closed its borders to most […]
The push toward wind is playing out in a high-rise office building 100 miles south of Wyoming’s capital in Denver. There, TransWest Express is laying out plans to build a 730-mile transmission line across the American West. CEO Bill Miller points to a map and the start of the project — 1,000 wind turbines to […]
Prices on solar panels did rise last summer as the Trump administration publicly considered the tariffs, mostly on imports from China and other Asian countries. That caused U.S. companies to scramble to purchase as many foreign panels as they could to beat the looming duties. The higher prices led two U.S. manufacturers to say they’d […]
Tesla Inc. will build a factory in Shanghai, the city government announced on Tuesday, a move expected to boost sales in the world’s largest auto market but one that could also draw fire as U.S. manufacturers face political pressure to keep jobs at home. The electric-car maker will set up a plant with an annual […]
Yes, California has much to celebrate. We are home to the most formidable tech companies on the planet with half of the world’s tech billionaires living in Silicon Valley. State coffers bulge with historic budget surpluses fed by unprecedented revenues. Our economy enjoys utopian levels of unemployment and is ranked as the world’s 5th largest. […]
So why are so many local entities feeling strapped? Local officials will tell you, if you don’t quote them by name, that it’s mostly because their mandatory payments into the state’s two big pension funds are soaring. The California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS) and the California State Teachers Retirement System (CalSTRS) lost tens of […]
In June, California lawmakers approved a new state budget with a healthy $16 billion reserve, reflecting California’s strength as the fifth largest economy in the world. Now that the state has recovered from the depths of the Great Recession, it seems odd that lawmakers are still proposing higher taxes and fees. Since the start of […]
Thousands of Los Angeles residents were left without power Saturday morning after a heat wave prompted high electricity demand throughout the city. “Friday’s record-setting heat led to unprecedented peak electricity demand,” according to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP). High demand caused power outages throughout city and left 34,500 customers in the […]
In many ways, the oil business in the U.S. has never been better, with domestic producers in a growing number of states churning out barrels of crude in record numbers. But California’s output is going in the opposite direction — part of a larger, steady decline that began in the mid-1980s. For all of its […]
Global Warming: Once more, science provides bad news for global warming alarmists. U.S. CO2 levels again declined during 2017, despite overall global output again rising. Credit U.S. fracking and the natural gas boom. But don’t worry: the hysteria won’t end. The new report, based on U.S. data, shows clearly the U.S. continuing downward trend. “The […]
We score all 50 states on more than 60 measures of competitiveness, developed with input from a broad and diverse array of business and policy experts, official government sources, the CNBC Global CFO Council, YPO and the states themselves. States receive points based on their rankings in each metric. Then we separate those metrics into […]