The total for the 2015-16 tax roll, $5.2 trillion, is a 5.9 percent increase from the previous year’s $4.9 trillion and should generate about $57.3 billion in property taxes for schools and local governments, roughly $3 billion more than the current year’s levies. The state government also benefits because increases in school property taxes reduce the legal requirement for state aid.
Introduced by the League of California Cities, California State Association of Counties, and Association of California Water Agencies, the measure comes eight months after an appellate court struck down a Southern California city’s method of charging water users based on a tiered-rate system – essentially charging larger users a higher per-unit rate. . . In the case out of San Juan Capistrano, the 4th District Court of Appeal ruled in April that tired rates must correspond to the cost of delivering the service.
In 2013, the latest year for which comprehensive data are available, California ranked fifth among the states in creation of new businesses, fourth in job creation from new businesses and fourth in total job creation.
The Every Student Succeeds Act replaces the No Child Left Behind law that former President George W. Bush persuaded Congress to enact and state and local education officials intensely disliked as being too simplistic and inflexible in rating schools only on academic test results. . . In continuing to require officials to identify low-performing schools, the federal law also may rescue another aspect of the accountability process that the education establishment dislikes – the “parent trigger” law that allows parents to intervene when a school is failing, even seizing control and converting it to a charter.
The climate agenda being pursued in California is one of high taxes and stringent regulations that are hampering cheap and abundant forms of energy while propping up costly ones at taxpayer expense. It may please activist billionaires (who don’t seem to have a problem producing their own massive carbon footprint), but it is increasing unemployment, poverty and income inequality in the state.
However, the official poverty rate calculated for the report used a half-century-old method that makes no allowance for regional differences in either incomes or living costs. The bureau has developed a “supplemental measure” that takes those and other factors into account and by that method, California’s poverty rate is the nation’s highest at 24.3 percent, largely due to its extraordinarily high housing costs.
Amid the sea of data in the report was this: California shipments to China in the August-to-October period fell by 11.4 percent, from $4.19 billion last year to $3.71 billion in 2015. Shipments declined across the board, from computer equipment to agricultural products.
“You do have to have, at the end of the day, a regulation, a law,” he said. “Progress comes from well-designed regulatory objectives that business then follows.”
The Legislative Analyst’s Office said, “Since bottoming out in late 2011, California’s median house price has increased by 45 percent – about 10 percent a year – reaching around $450,000 as of September 2015.”
A significant portion of the decline in unemployment, however, is because many Californians have given up looking for work. Labor force participation in October was barely 62 percent, below the historic low in 1976. For those not around way back then, those were the dark years of “stagflation” – the triple whammy of slow economic growth, high unemployment and rising prices.
Despite the prospects of heavy precipitation from El Niño, the Department of Water Resources said major reservoirs remain well below capacity and water must be used sparingly.
For years, the state has conducted something of a shell game to help finance Medi-Cal, its health insurance system for the poor that now covers nearly a third of Californians.
The bankruptcies of three cities and high-profile financial scandals in a couple of others demonstrated the operational vulnerabilities of California’s municipalities.
California has the nation’s largest court system, and perhaps its most troubled with severe financial and managerial tangles, and a virtual war between a San Francisco-based administrative superstructure and hundreds of rebellious local judges.
Land retirement is coming to California agriculture. The drought will end someday, maybe even this winter, but farmers will still face long-term shortages of water. The driving force: a new state law regulating the extraction of groundwater.