The report finds that many new jobs in California are in low-wage industries, and the post-recession period favored low-wage job growth over middle-wage and high-wage job growth throughout the state by a wide margin. However, when compared with the rest of the nation, the trend of low-wage job creation is not unique to California.
For a city to sustain itself, it must provide a wide range of opportunities–not just for the affluent. The city, better seen as a metropolitan area, needs to addrss the diverse interests and preferences of its residents. And given that those interests and preferences are constantly evolving, the “over planning” mindset is untenable, even dangerous, to the future of cities that embrace it.
The Distressed Communities Index (DCI) is a customized dataset created by EIG examining economic distress throughout the country and made up of interactive maps, infographics, and a report. It captures data from more than 25,000 zip codes (those with populations over 500 people). In all, it covers 99 percent — 312 million — of Americans.
Rent control can have a negative impact on low-income households not living in rent-controlled units through higher growth in citywide median rents. Rents are too high because multi-family housing and the state’s housing stock have failed to expand
commensurately with the ever-growing population. The solution to this affordability problem is to expand the apartment stock in these cities, not introduce price ceilings.
How do taxes in your state compare nationally? This convenient resource compares the 50 states on many different measures of taxing and spending, including individual and corporate income tax rates, business tax climates, excise taxes, tax burdens and state spending.
Although 1 percent of adults earned income from the Online Platform Economy in a given month, more than 4 percent participated over the three-year period.
In this follow up to California’s High Housing Costs, we offer additional evidence that facilitating more private housing development in the state’s coastal urban communities would help make housing more affordable for low–income Californians. Existing affordable housing programs assist only a small proportion of low–income Californians. Most low–income Californians receive little or no assistance. Expanding affordable housing programs to help these households likely would be extremely challenging and prohibitively expensive. It may be best to focus these programs on Californians with more specialized housing needs—such as homeless individuals and families or persons with significant physical and mental health challenges.
The 2015 economic outlook ranking is a forward-looking measure of how each state can expect to perform economically based on 15 policy areas that have proven, over time, to be the best determinants of economic success.
A new study published by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University ranks each state’s readiness for an economic downturn based on the size of its rainy day savings fund and budget surplus.
“This year’s report shines its harshest spotlight on many courts and government authorities throughout hyper-litigious California, where legislators see fit to produce more than 800 new laws each year, inviting evermore litigation as residents and businesses can’t hope to keep up with what’s legal and what isn’t,” Joyce continued.
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) will make the labor supply, measured as the total compensation paid to workers, 0.86 percent smaller in 2025 than it would have been in the absence of that law, the Congressional Budget Office estimates. Three-quarters of that decline will occur because of health insurance expansions, which raise effective tax rates on earnings from labor—for instance, by phasing out health insurance subsidies as people’s income rises—and thus reduce the amount of labor that workers choose to supply. The labor force is projected to be about 2 million full-time-equivalent workers smaller in 2025 under the ACA than it would have been otherwise. Those estimates were based mainly on CBO’s calculations of the effects of the law’s major components on marginal and average tax rates and on the agency’s analysis of research about the change in the labor supply resulting from a change in tax rates. For components of the law that were difficult to express in terms of changes in tax rates, CBO based its estimates on a review of the available literature about similar policy changes.
The Pacific Coast Collaborative released its 2014 jobs update report showing the strength of the West Coast’s clean economy.
A new study released today by the American Highway Users Alliance identifies America’s 50 worst bottlenecks and finds that the very worst bottleneck, as measured by hours of delay, is in Chicago, IL. Los Angeles, CA owns the next six of the top 10.
The state budget is better prepared for an economic downturn than it has been at any point in decades. In 2015–16, we project that the state’s “Big Three” General Fund revenues—principally the personal income tax—will exceed June 2015 budget assumptions by $3.6 billion, with most of that gain to be deposited into the Proposition 2 rainy day fund. In 2016–17, we project that revenues will exceed spending under current policies, resulting in even further improvement in the state’s fiscal situation. Assuming no new budget commitments are made, we estimate 2016–17 would end with reserves of $11.5 billion.
In order to ensure the Bay Area’s economic vitality and resilience despite increasing boom and bust cycles, public and private sector leaders must come together around pragmatic solutions to persistent issues and barriers to success. The purpose of the Regional Economic Strategy Roadmap is to offer concrete actions for growing regional prosperity and a flexible framework for developing actions going forward. Its proposals are evergreen agents of economic resilience, strategies wise in both expansion and downtown, necessary to accelerate the former and dampen the latter. It is a recipe for a robust and enduring regional economy.