The prospect of semi-permanent drought would require courageous political leadership. We should put at least as much effort into protecting our vital water supply as we are wasting on a bullet train that we neither want nor need.
As part of its one-state war on global warming, California grants rebates of $2,500 to purchasers of electric vehicles, no matter how wealthy they are, or how much the cars cost. That amounts to a taxpayer subsidy to Tesla Motors, which routinely sells its cars for upward of $100,000, of no less than $34 million so far to 13,600 customers.
The drought package Brown and lawmakers proposed Thursday includes $272.7 million in water recycling and drinking water quality programs funded by Proposition 1, the water bond voters approved last year.
Sparsely populated Glenn County’s court payroll this year averages about $120,000 per month, according to county documents. It employs just two judges. It can ill afford cutting an $800,000 check.
“The Bureau of Labor Statistics revised its 2014 employment numbers Tuesday and sharply raised net job creation in California to nearly a half-million. The upward revision in California was accompanied by a downward revision for Texas, reversing what had been reported earlier to be a big edge for the latter.”
“California’s unfortunate evolution into a society of haves and have-nots has many root causes, but a highly distorted housing market looms very large. We have the nation’s second highest home prices (only Hawaii is higher) and, not surprisingly, its third lowest level of homeownership.”
“Poverty is a very difficult issue, but as yet, the Capitol is just talking about applying bandages. It will be overcome only if California attracts private investment that creates real middle-class jobs and prepares potential workers for those jobs. “
. . . Assemblyman Kevin McCarty, D-Sacramento, introduced Assembly Bill 1434, which would give Jones rate-setting authority over “preferred provider organization” plans offered by Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield.
Although DeMaio and Reed belong to different political parties, they both believe pension obligations are siphoning money from local governments’ core services. As city officials in 2012, both backed successful local ballot measures intended to curtail public-pension costs. About two-thirds of voters in San Diego and San Jose approved the proposals. Unions immediately challenged their legality.
Why do state IT debacles happen over and over? Castro says it starts with government’s antipathy for brutal self-assessment. Without it, an organization hides its weaknesses and can’t figure out processes to fix them before they jump into making multimillion-dollar technology decisions.
California’s population will continue to grow over the next 45 years, but very slowly, a new projection by the state’s demographers reveals, with Latinos and Asian-Americans providing virtually all growth and the white population shrinking dramatically.
The official estimate is that California will have 6.3 million job openings in the current decade, and the vast majority will not be newly created jobs but rather vacancies from baby boomer retirements.
California unemployment fell to 6.9 percent in January as the state’s economy generated 67,300 new payroll jobs, state officials said Friday.
Analysts said the current surge is being driven by a stew of factors, all of them coming on the heels of unusually low gas prices seen in the last quarter of 2014 and in January this year. Prices are being pushed upward by soaring wholesale gasoline costs, which in turn prompt higher retail costs at service stations; in-state refineries switching over to pricier spring/summer gas blends; and the United Steelworkers union strike idling workers at Tesoro’s California facilities in Carson and Martinez.
The announcement came from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which operates a system of reservoirs and canals that make up the Central Valley Project. It mirrors a similar announcement last year that led to hundreds of thousands of farm acres being fallowed.