Years after the Great Recession slammed their Wall Street investments, at least five California counties have broken through the 10 percent ceiling, spending at least one of out of every $10 to fund their government-employee retirement programs. The resulting strain on local budgets, called the pension burden, is revealed in California Policy Center’s latest analysis of county reports....
March 2016 Update: Here’s a documented comparison of California taxes and economic climate with the rest of the states. The news is bad, and getting worse. But it doesn’t have to be this way! The state and local government policies that created an unaffordable California can be reversed. PERSONAL INCOME TAX: Prior to Prop 30 passing in...
Former speaker of the California State Assembly and State Treasurer Jesse “Big Daddy” Unruh once said, “Money is the mother’s milk of politics.” As the war chest necessary to mount a successful political campaign only continues to grow, Unruh’s words seem perhaps truer today than at any other time in our republic. But many worry...
Arrests have been made in China over a $7.6 billion Ponzi scheme involving a P2P (person-to-person, without the intervention of a bank) lender. My first response was: P2P lending in the Chinese banking system: what could possibly go wrong? My second, more thoughtful, insight is that distinguishing out-and-out Ponzi schemes from the world economy as...
Last week, the Federal Housing Finance Agency released its quarterly home price indices for the fourth quarter of 2015, so we now have a 41-year time series for every state and many metropolitan areas. The numbers show that, even after adjusting for inflation, housing prices in the San Francisco Bay Area have exceeded prices during...
Last year, CPC published a study on California City Pension Burdens. Most of the data for that study came from plan-specific actuarial valuation reports published by CalPERS. These reports show how much local government employers must pay CalPERS in the coming fiscal year and projects contributions for several years into the future. At the end...
The November 2016 ballot is likely to contain an initiative that would raise the statewide minimum wage to $15 by 2021. At the beginning of this year, the state’s minimum wage rose from $9 to $10. If Measure 15-0032 passes, it will rise an additional dollar each year between 2017 and 2021; after that, it would...
This is the second of an occasional series of posts on municipal bond issuance costs. You can see the first one, focusing on Fullerton, here. In a recent study of 800 municipal bond issues for UC Berkeley, I found that issuance costs varied widely – from less than 0.2% of face value to over 10%....
California lags behind other states in transparency because it has not produced an on-line checkbook, showing detailed spending information by payee. The state does tell us how tax money is allocated by purposes (health, education, corrections, etc.), but it doesn’t tell us who receives this money.
On November 17, State Treasurer John Chiang launched a new web site that provides information on bonds issued by California state and local governments. The site, at http://debtwatch.treasurer.ca.gov, has detailed data on over 50,000 bonds sold to investors over the last thirty years.
Although many California political leaders espouse their support for transparency, the state lags behind most others in opening its spending data to public scrutiny. So while Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, has called on governments to “lean into notion of openness and transparency,” the state he may soon lead is leaning in quite the opposite direction....
I was eighteen years old in 1966 when my plane circled the tiny airport in Ontario, California. I was traveling from the Bay Area to Claremont to begin my freshman year in college. Looking down from my window seat, the overcast cloud cover prevented me from seeing the freeways and buildings on the ground. When...
For Immediate Release August 12, 2015 California Policy Center Contact: Robert Fellner Robert@CalPolicyCenter.org (201) 206-6469 Data: No correlation between teacher compensation and academic performance TUSTIN — K-12 employee compensation data released today by Transparent California shows there is no meaningful correlation between teacher compensation and student performance; when the compensation of all district employees is compared to...
State Legislation Statute – AB 340 – Governor Brown’s 12 Point Plan – signed by Governor on September 12, 2012 text of AB 340 Key Provisions: For new hires, reduces defined benefit formula and offers “hybrid” plan incorporating a defined benefit and a 401K with a target retirement of 75% of pay (based on a...