A homeless man in Oceanside. (Photo: David Little)With news this week that California’s tax revenues came in $6-$8 billion stronger than previous estimates, California now has an undeniable choice: a high road that lifts up all our people and strengthens our state, or a low road that ignores the nearly one in four residents who live below the poverty line in the wealthiest state in the nation.
Calpensions: Employer and employee groups are urging CalPERS to “undertake all efforts” to avoid the “Cadillac Tax,” a 40 percent tax on high-cost health plans imposed in 2018 by President Obama’s health care law, a CalPERS staff report said this month. But it’s far from clear that one of those efforts will be Gov. Brown’s proposal to give state workers the option of a low-cost plan with a high deductible, even though the administration mentions the looming penalty tax as a reason for offering the plan.
Coastal housing in Laguna Beach. (Photo: John Bilous)For decades, people living in California paid more for shelter than those in most of the rest of the country. But during the 1970s, “the gap started to widen. Between 1970 and 1980, California home prices went from 30 percent above U.S. levels to more than 80 percent higher,” the Legislative Analyst’s Office reported. Today, the average California home costs $440,000, or two-and-half-times the average price tag of $180,000 for a home across the country.
A photo illustration of the temptation of drug use. (Photo: David Orcea, Shutterstock)OPINION: As a public safety officer for nearly 20 years, I am often asked what I believe is an effective way to suppress crime in our nation. The answer is simple: Solve our drug problem. And while many envision street drugs as the problem, the misuse of prescription drugs is a huge crisis with no bias toward any community in this state. Prescription opioid abuse is estimated to cost the United States about $56 billion annually due to health costs, criminal justice costs and lost productivity.
A homeless man in a wheelchair wiping his eyes at a pier in Oceanside, Calif. (Photo: David Little via Shutterstock)We are moving into the post-industrial age, an era of mechanized production, where machines can increasingly do jobs that used to pay real people livable wages. In California, we have strong environmental and labor regulations that did not exist at the birth of the industrial age. These rules have improved and saved lives of workers and the communities where manufacturing plants are based. But they have also driven costs of manufacturing higher.
OPINION: Senate Bill 3, authored by State Senator Mark Leno (D-San Francisco), would enact an unwarranted additional hike in the state’s minimum wage, similar to his measure earlier this year, SB 935, which was a California Chamber of Commerce “Job Killer”. California’s minimum wage was just raised $1 to $9 per hour on July 1 of this year, well above the current $7.25 per hour mandated under federal law.
Calpensions: A new comparison with four other large public pension funds found that CalPERS, while scoring average on service, had high pension administration costs — $213 per member a year, nearly twice the average of $108 per member.
OPINION: That’s why our organizations, the California Medical Association and the Central Valley Health Network, strongly oppose Proposition 46 on the November 2014 ballot. We have joined a broad coalition that includes doctors, community health centers, hospitals, local governments, the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, business and labor groups and many others to fight this misleading ballot measure.
Calpensions: A small but affluent Orange County city, with a current staff of only a half dozen employees, would have to pay about $3.6 million to leave CalPERS, the giant state pension system estimated two years ago. “I almost feel like just handing this to a reporter and saying, ‘Look at this.’
Calpensions: Backers of a Ventura County pension reform initiative, which was removed from the November ballot recently by a judge last week, are not appealing the ruling. But they may meet with other reformers after the elections this fall to discuss a statewide pension reform initiative.