Marc Joffe is a federalism and state policy analyst at Cato Institute and a California Policy Center visiting fellow.
After a long career in the financial industry, including a senior director role at Moody’s Analytics, he transitioned to policy research at CPC and Reason Foundation. Joffe’s research focuses on government finance and state policy issues.
Marc earned an MBA from New York University and an MPA from San Francisco State University.
Given declining enrollment, Orange Unified School District’s $288 million bond measure may fund more school upgrades than students need. There is also a risk that the taxpayer cost of debt service for the bond issue will exceed the district’s forecast rate of $29 per $100,000 of assessed valuation. According to statistics from Ed Data, enrollment...
By Marc Joffe
If Orange Unified voters approve Measure S this November, newly authorized bonds will be added to an already large district debt. A California Policy Center review of OUSD financial reports finds that the district owed $120 million to bond investors as of June 30, 2016. The largest portion of OUSD’s bond obligations takes the form...
By Marc Joffe
Orange County voters are being asked to approve over $2.4 billion in new school bonds. The largest bond: Capistrano Unified School District (CUSD)’s $889-million Measure M. The new CUSD bond would be serviced by property owners in most of the school district, but not quite all of it. One community, Rancho Mission Viejo, won’t be...
By Marc Joffe
Scholars from the University of California at Berkeley have played a pivotal role in making income inequality a major political issue. But while they decry the inequities of the American capitalist system, Berkeley professors are near the top of a very lopsided income distribution prevailing at the nation’s leading public university.
By Marc Joffe
Californians may be accustomed to living with the specter of a public pension crisis. But the federal government’s problem with its retirement system – including Social Security – is far worse, and yet none of the three remaining major-party candidates for president has a plan to do anything about it. The California Policy Center generally...
By Marc Joffe
Taxpayers in Stanton, a quiet suburb of Orange County with only 38,000 residents, will pay millions for a pricey bond deal approved in an obscure vote of a little-known city agency five years ago. Rather than risk voter rejection over the deal, Stanton city council members David Shawver, Alexander Ethans and Brian Donohue – acting in...
By Marc Joffe
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....
By Marc Joffe
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...
By Marc Joffe
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...
By Marc Joffe
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%....
By Marc Joffe
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.
By Marc Joffe
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.
By Marc Joffe
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....
By Marc Joffe
Download printable PDF version Summary: This study examines cost-per-pupil for high school students in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), comparing its traditional public schools to those attending its largest charter school network, the Alliance College Ready Public Schools. It also examines the educational achievement outcomes for traditional and charter high school students, focusing on...
By Marc Joffe
a new form will got here