We updated our manufacturing employment numbers, comparing us to the nation. Since January 2010, the country has seen 4.5 percent growth with 517,000 new manufacturing jobs, while California has been stagnant with the loss of 10,300 manufacturing jobs, about one percent of its manufacturing base. That two-year trend seems to accelerate the gap that has [...]

In 2003 California manufacturers lost a sales tax credit on their capital equipment purchases, making them approximately six percent less competitive than manufacturers in most other states.  Since then, there have been no less than 20 proposed exemptions in different forms before our state legislature.  None have made it to even a second committee hearing. [...]

Discussions are increasingly centered around California’s job growth and business climate. We decided to look at employment versus population growth to see how the state fared against the country. We also compared median incomes to see if we were keeping pace with the country on that front as well. Over the last decade we have [...]

Last week the most independent voice in California policy analysis said the following in a letter:  a cap-and-trade “allowance auction is not necessary to meet the AB 32 goal of reducing GHG emissions statewide to 1990 levels by 2020.” The impartial Legislative Analyst (LAO) responded in a decisive letter to Sen. Henry Perea who had asked three [...]

Theory met reality on Tuesday at a Senate informational hearing on California’s carbon cap-and-trade program that is set to start with an auction in November 2012. Craig Anderson from Solar Turbines, an industrial gas turbine manufacturer with 4,000 employees in San Diego, testified that the soon-to-be-fully-implemented cap-and-trade program is the most significant threat to his [...]

The California Business Alliance for a Greener Economy recently retorted in Fox and Hounds that the California manufacturers “continue to cry wolf”, after we wrote a piece on the needless employer costs being built in to the California Air Resources Board’s carbon cap-and-trade auction. The group’s response did not substantiate any miscalculations in our $3 [...]

Crossposted on MPowered The California Air Resources Board’s (CARB) cap-and-trade auction will create needless costs for employers at a time when our state must compete, scrap, wrangle, advocate and fight for every high-wage job we can get. These costs will seriously hamstring our ability to grow.  What most people don’t know is that CARB is [...]

Only time will tell how much AB 32 will actually cost California. Since our landmark global warming bill passed in 2006 there has been no shortage of guessing about the costs and benefits of mandating greenhouse gas reductions on California’s economy. Now all the rules are in place and experts are sharpening their pencils and [...]

On Friday, the Sacramento Bee’s Dan Walters chided the California Republican Party for opposition to all tax increases, even those that would close a “completely unjustified special interest tax loophole.” We’re not sure what Dan had in mind, but we’re certain that it is not the tax policy — known as elective sales factor — that [...]

This weekend, Gov. Jerry Brown proclaimed that revenue from the cap-and-trade system under AB 32 will go toward the construction of California’s High Speed Rail project. AB 32 was not intended to be a revenue raiser for the state of California.  We dug up then-Assembly Speaker (and bill author) Fabian Nunez’ 2006 letter of legislative [...]