Brown on Indexing the State Income Tax
One of the hot tax issues during Jerry Brown’s first turn as governor was indexing the state income tax. Brown has noted recently he supported indexing. That’s only part of the story.
Indexing the income tax is a process of widening the tax brackets to account for inflation. Without indexing, a taxpayer would be pushed into higher tax brackets when inflation increased his or her income despite the taxpayer gaining no "real" income gain. Government benefited from this "inflation tax."
The Great Automation Scare in California
When employment professionals in California meet today, as at the recent California Workforce Association gathering in Monterey, a central issue is the following: To what extent is the job losses brought by the Great Recession cyclical, representing the ups and downs of the business cycle? To what extent do these job losses represent structural change in a California economy that will need fewer workers?
We won’t know the answer to this for some time. However, some perspective on this discussion can be gained from going back nearly 50 years in California when we had a similar discussion in state government about technology. In the mid-1960s, California state government was up in arms about the march of automation, and the job losses following automation.
L.A. At the Tipping Point
Cross posted at www.ronkayela.com.
Few places on Earth needs to worry more about the impact of global warming than Los Angeles. If we lose this climate, we won’t have a lot left.
The big banks and big stores have all left town or closed down along with the big defense contractors that provided the middle class jobs that drove the consumer economy.