It’s Time to Level the Playing Field and Adopt E-Fairness in California
The holiday season has just ended and it has been reported that retailers overall experienced an uptick in sales from the previous year. This would be good news for California’s small businesses.
Unfortunately, California’s outdated e-commerce laws allow for out-of-state, online-only retailers to thwart the law and deliberately refuse to collect the sales tax so that they can gain an unfair advantage over California small businesses. This has resulted in a less than sweet holiday season for the small businesses in our state.
The practical impact of this loophole is vast. Job creators are harmed as they are treated more and more like showrooms where customers determine what they want to buy and then purchase it online to avoid the sales tax. This translates to approximately a 10 percent advantage over small businesses located in our state.
Department of Hypocrisy: Card Check and the Parent Trigger
If you have a taste for hypocrisy, the controversy over the
parent trigger law is delicious.
Particularly
when considered in light of a running controversy over a similar principle in a
different context, the so-called "card check" power for union organizing.
What are
these two things?
The parent
trigger is a new California law that allows anyone who gathers signatures from
a majority of parents at a school to demand big changes in the school, including
the takeover of the school by a charter company. While the regulations remain
to be worked out, the parent trigger is at this point mostly unregulated. The
petitions are not secret, not are the signatures. Parent organizers don’t have
to inform the school district or anyone like that. (And in the first test case,
in Compton, the organizers worked secretly).
"Card check" refers to the
legislation, pursued by the labor movement, to permit the organizing of
workplaces via the signing of cards by a majority of employees in the
workplace. This would be a change from the current federal system requiring
secret ballot elections.
Jobs with the Most Projected Openings in California
The state Employment Development Department (EDD) periodically issues 10-year projections of fastest growing occupations in California and occupations with highest number of job openings. The most recent projections show some of the “knowledge” jobs among the fastest growing jobs in California. But the jobs with the greatest job openings remain the low tech, largely unglamorous jobs as personal and home aides, customer service representatives, waiters and waitresses, and retail salespersons.
Below is the chart of the 10 fastest growing occupations in California. Though issued in 2010, the projections cover the period 2008-2018.
The Artless Deal: Why Billionaire Phil Anschutz Is Getting Richer and LA Is Going Broke
Cross-posted at RonKayeLA.
It doesn’t take a brilliant sleuth like Sherlock Holmes to solve the Case of the Bankrupt City.
It’s not a mystery. You just have to look at the record of City Hall’s artless deals, its giveaways public moneydow to unions, billionaires, developers, Hollywood, contractors and a lot of other special interests with few, if any, benefits to the general public.