California had more manufacturing businesses (38,741) than any other state in 2012 and their 1.2 million employees were also the largest industrial workforce of any state, the report says. Those workers produced products valued at $512.3 billion, up 4.3 percent from the previous industrial census in 2007.
Although California’s unemployment dropped fractionally to 7 percent in December, the state stands alone with the nation’s second-highest rate, exceeded only by Mississippi’s 7.2 percent.
Income inequality sharply increased in California as the state emerged from the Great Recession, with the top 1 percent of Californians capturing 135 percent of income growth between 2009 and 2012, according to a new national analysis.
Across the state, report cards are undergoing a sea change in how students are measured for academic performance. Where teachers once graded students on traditional math or English skills, they now judge attributes such as grit, gratitude or being sensitive to others.
The responses fell into two broad categories – anger that existing gas taxes and other transportation revenues had been diverted into non-transportation uses, and skepticism that the Department of Transportation could be trusted to do the needed work.
California state workers’ salaries rose a total $1.1 billion last year, according to new payroll data, while the number of state employees also grew.
All of that notwithstanding, Proposition 2 is not the best solution to revenue volatility, which is caused by a too-high reliance on personal income taxes from a relative handful of wealthy Californians whose incomes from stocks and other capital assets go up and down like yo-yos.
But that was then. What passes for oversight these days are often brief, highly orchestrated hearings that curry favor with some interest group.
Looking ahead, we should be spending at least $100 billion more on maintenance, repair and reconstruction over the next decade.
The income gap between African Americans and whites in California has reached its widest point in decades, a trend that reflects a broader, growing chasm between the state’s wealthy and poor, experts said.
In practice, Proposition 103 prevents insurers from offering time-sensitive rate adjustments that allow consumers to realize the benefits of competition. This out-of-date and clumsy initiative also inhibits companies from creating and offering new insurance products, as is necessary for transportation network companies such as Uber and Lyft.
Taught by local construction workers, young men and women on the margins learn how to operate heavy equipment at Job Corps’ sprawling Meadowview center before they move to “The Ranch,” Operating Engineers Local 3’s Rancho Murieta training grounds. There, they receive seven weeks’ more paid instruction with the opportunity to apprentice with the union and work with local construction firms.
But, as Brown warns in his proposed 2015-16 budget, “economic expansions do not last forever. In the post-war period, the average expansion has been about five years. The current expansion has already exceeded the average by nine months. While there are few signs of immediate contraction, another recession is inevitable.”
School-construction and home-building groups Monday launched an effort to qualify a $9 billion school bond for the November 2016 ballot, only days after Gov. Jerry Brown released a budget plan that minimized the state’s role in paying for building new classrooms and modernizing existing ones.
Although lawmakers cut general fund expenditures by $16.6 billion during the recession from 2007-08 to 2011-12, they shifted money from funds to keep many of the programs operating.