It’s to bypass unions entirely and create a new organizing tool that allows groups of gig workers to collectively bargain with the company operating the app. It’s titled the California 1099 Self-Organizing Act — 1099 being the annual tax form independent contractors are supposed to receive from the entity paying them, such as Uber.
Gardena electric car start-up Faraday Future announced Thursday that it will build a $1-billion production plant in Nevada, a major move for an upstart rival to Tesla Motors.
Rapid growth of upper-income households, coupled with an increase in less-educated low earners, has driven the decline of the middle-income population to a hair below 50% of the total this year, Pew found. In 1971, the middle class accounted for 61% of the population, and it has been declining steadily since.
In Los Angeles and Orange counties, 58.5% of renters spent more than 30% of their income on housing last year, the point at which economists consider it burdensome, the report found.
Even as California sells itself as an environmental success story during the United Nations summit here, the state is in danger of failing to meet its own targets for getting clean vehicles on the road.
“Never underestimate the coercive power of a central state in the service of good and wisdom,” he said. “You can screw it up, but you can also do it well.”
California gasoline typically costs more than in the rest of the country because of higher taxes and fees as well as a unique state-mandated blend that produces less pollution. But this year the gap has widened into more of a gulf.
A coalition of labor and community groups stepped up its battle with a Chinese-owned company that manufactures electric vehicles in Los Angeles County on Tuesday, accusing the firm of breaking promises and failing to provide safe “living wage” jobs with the tens of millions of dollars the firm has received from government contracts and other public investment.
It also means that utility ratepayers could end up overpaying for clean electricity to meet the state’s benchmark because lawmakers, by excluding rooftop solar, left out the source of more than a third of the state’s solar power.
That’s right: The treasury is spilling over, but some unions want to keep collecting income taxes at the highest rate in state history.
Average federal, state and local taxes and fees for California customers reached a record 18%, meaning that the government’s slice of your wireless bill is now at least twice as high as the state sales tax imposed on most other goods and services. . . Even though smartphones have become necessities and a crucial component of the digital economy, they’re still taxed in large part as a luxury item. . . In 1898, the federal government imposed a 3% excise tax on telephone use to help cover a face-off with Spain over the future of Cuba. Phones were relatively scarce at the time, so the tax was intended to be a levy on wealthy Americans.
A study released Monday by the American Highway Users Alliance, a nonprofit group that lobbies for interstate highway investment, examined which routes in the United States are the most continuously crowded, 24 hours a day, rather than during peak periods. Eleven of the 30 worst bottlenecks are in Greater Los Angeles.
California employers added 41,200 net jobs in October, a significant increase from more sluggish growth reported a month earlier, according to federal data.
For example, taxpayers currently pay amounts equivalent to 37% of state firefighters’ salaries to CalPERS to cover their future retirement checks. That payment is based on estimates that the fund’s investments will continue to earn 7.5% over the decades. But if the investments earn just 6.5%, required taxpayer payments for firefighters jump to an amount equal to 55% of their salaries, according to CalPERS documents.
The cuts to government services to pay CalPERS may have just begun. The pension fund has already warned cities that they are in the midst of a six-year span in which pension payments will rise 50%. The new plan will add even more to those costs.