It’s on: California business leaders Monday are kicking off a statewide effort to defend the landmark 1978 property tax measure Prop. 13 from an already-qualified 2020 “split roll” ballot measure that aims to revise it. The California Business Roundtable has launched FightforProp13.org, a campaign that executive director Rob Lapsley tells POLITICO will begin this week […]
With the LA Chamber of Commerce leading the opposition – arguing that the revenue surge wouldn’t make it to the intended classroom cause — and the California Business Roundtable and real estate interests supplying funding for the “no” side. The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association lobbed in a legal challenge. The two sides have raised more than $7 […]
Enjoying the tailwinds of a massive surplus and large Democratic supermajorities in both houses, Gov. Gavin Newsom is using his first budget proposal to put his policy stamp on nearly every sector of California government. The Democratic governor described Thursday — in detail, for nearly two hours — how he would use his $209 billion […]
What I found is that widespread adoption of electric vehicles nationwide will likely increase air pollution compared with new internal combustion vehicles. You read that right: more electric cars and trucks will mean more pollution. That might sound counterintuitive: After all, won’t replacing a 30-year old, smoke-belching Oldsmobile with a new electric vehicle reduce air […]
The speech, at a meeting of the California Latino Economic Institute, served as a counter-step to Gov. Jerry Brown’s indictment of Trump in his State of the State address last week. While echoing Brown’s characterization of California as a “beacon of hope” for other states and countries, Villaraigosa lamented rising home prices, stagnant wages and a state poverty rate that ranks highest in the nation when adjusted for the cost of living. . . .“So we can’t be truly progressive unless all of us in California are progressing together … Economic inequality has grown because our policies have not kept pace with our changing economy.”
The Obama administration Monday is calling on cities and counties to rethink their zoning laws, saying that antiquated rules on construction, housing and land use are contributing to high rents and income inequality, and dragging down the U.S. economy as a whole.
The survey, commissioned by POLITICO and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, found that 51 percent of Americans expect the pace of growth to remain at about the current rate over the next 10 years. That’s a grim outlook at a time when year-over-year increases in gross domestic product have come in well below 2 percent in recent quarters.
Whatever your view of the past several years, America’s economic growth is not what it used to be. Our real gross domestic product roared along from 1947 to 1974, growing an average of 3.8 percent per year, and slowed only slightly until 2004. But since then, it’s dropped by half. Today’s economy, growing at a sluggish 1.6 percent per year, has been described using an old term inherited from the 1930s, “secular stagnation.”
As early as this week, the Labor Department could propose a rule that would raise the current overtime threshold — $23,660 – to as much as $52,000, extending time and a half overtime pay to millions of American workers. The rule has already come under fire from business and Republican opponents who say it will kill jobs and force employers to cut hours for salaried employees.