“Tariffs on Chinese goods like manufactured parts and chips “are going to make the production process more complicated and more expensive,” said economist Christopher Thornberg with Beacon Economics.
Thornberg said California companies that rely on those materials like Apple and Nvidia, which makes highly sought-after chips essential for training AI programs, will be able to absorb the costs “because of the mountain of profits they are sitting on.”
The longer the trade spat goes on, though, the more likely knock-on effects like higher consumer prices, but also bites out of the budget, become as companies absorb increased costs.”
“If minimum wage increases were a drug, governments would have to conduct trials and monitor adverse effects afterward. That’s what happened in Seattle when it raised the minimum wage in 2014. The city called for proposals to study the impact on actual workers earning below the minimum before the law. The Evans School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Washington was the only volunteer. Its researchers found that the law didn’t cause an increase in layoffs among workers who had previously earned below minimum wage, but it did reduce their hours by an average of 7 percent. That was partly offset by a 3 percent increase in hourly pay for the hours they did work. On net, the law cost these workers an average of $888 per year.
That amount is significant in itself, but it’s important to consider that it accounts for only the short-term effects. As mentioned above, some layoffs and hour reductions will happen immediately, but others—such as more businesses closing and fewer opening, or automation and other changes reducing employment—can take years. Another point is that the workers who benefited from higher pay were the ones most likely to have risen out of the minimum wage ranks to the middle class even without a mandated increase, while the workers who lost much more than $888 per year are more likely to be the ones blocked forever from economic advancement. In fact, the paper found that the workers who benefitted net were the most experienced and highest paid among the group–earning more than the old minimum but less than the new–while the less-experienced workers earning the old minimum or close to it, lost considerably more than the average.
Seattle legislators must have been unhappy with those findings because they cut funding for the Evans School and reached out to the same group at U.C. Berkeley that did the California minimum wage study to do its own distorted analysis, which was rushed out a week before the Evans study was made public. Eventually, Seattle raised the minimum wage again.”
Trump seems eager to help red states with natural disasters, but not California, seeming to not understand the extent that weather made California particularly susceptible to hard to stop fires.
“In some contexts, those policies do make the damage done by wildfires worse. They’ll certainly complicate Los Angeles’ recovery efforts.
But the connection between bad land use, insurance, and environmental regulations and the damage done by the current Los Angeles fires to people and property is more tenuous.
On closer inspection, this appears to be a severe natural disaster with natural causes. Bad public policy has played only a marginal role.”
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“there’s also only so much fuels reduction can do to reduce wildfire risk in the conditions that led to Los Angeles’ current fires: exceptionally strong seasonal Santa Ana winds that reached hurricane levels of intensity.
“If you have strong winds, embers fly away miles ahead of the fire,” says Carmignani. Clearing a few hundred yards here or there can provide firefighters with areas to operate. But it isn’t going to stop the fire from spreading to new areas when winds are that high.
If the four-lane Pacific Coast Highway wasn’t enough of a fire break to prevent beachside Malibu homes from burning down, one wonders what would be.”
“The biggest housing issue on the California ballot was rent control. Proposition 33 would have repealed all state-level limits on local rent control policies, thus giving cities and counties a free hand to regulate rents however they pleased.
The measure went down in flames on Election Day, with roughly 60 percent of voters casting a “no” ballot.
That result is good news for the availability of rental housing in California, given rent control’s well-documented history of reducing rental housing supply and quality.
It is nevertheless a somewhat surprising result. California has a much higher proportion of renters than most other states and polls consistently find that rent control is supported by a wide majority of respondents. Dozens of cities already have rent control policies on the books.”
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“Prop. 36 asked California voters if they wanted to increase legal penalties for certain drug and theft crimes. With roughly 70 percent of ballots counted, some 70 percent of voters said yes they do. Prop. 36 has earned majority support in every single county in the state.”
“it’s not true that shoplifting less than $950 is no longer illegal—it can still be charged as a misdemeanor. “What Prop 47 did is increase the dollar amount by which theft can be prosecuted as a felony from $400 to $950 to adjust for inflation and cost of living,” Alex Bastian, who co-authored the proposition, told the Associated Press in 2021. “But most shoplifting cases are under $400 to begin with, so before Prop 47 and after Prop 47, there isn’t any difference.”
And even after being raised to $950, California’s felony threshold is lower than more than half of all other U.S. states: Deep red states like Montana and Kansas set theirs at $1,500, while Texas’s is set at $2,500.
“Under current law, prosecutors can already add together thefts that are demonstrably related, for example multiple thefts from the same store in the same week or skimming small amounts from your employer every day,” notes the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit research and policy advocacy organization that supports criminal justice reform (and opposes Proposition 36).
In fairness, evidence indicates that certain crimes did increase after Proposition 47. “Driven by larcenies, property crime jumped after Prop 47 compared to the nation and comparison states,” according to a September 2024 report by the Public Policy Institute of California. At the same time, it wasn’t the biggest contributor: “Evidence is clearer that retail theft increased due to pandemic responses by the criminal justice system, and the increases were of greater magnitude than increases due to Prop 47.”
Similarly, a 2018 study in Criminology & Public Policy found “that Prop 47 had no effect on homicide, rape, aggravated assault, robbery, or burglary. Larceny and motor vehicle thefts, however, seem to have increased moderately,” but the rates of increase were both minor and had other potential causes.”
“The law, Assembly Bill 2839 makes it illegal for an individual to produce “knowingly distributing an advertisement or other election communication, as defined, that contains certain materially deceptive content,” within 120 days of an election and up to 60 days after. Affected candidates can file for a civil action enjoining distribution of the media, and seek damages from its creator.”
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“content creator Christopher Kohls filed a lawsuit arguing the law was overbroad, violating his First Amendment rights to make parody content. Kohls has a YouTube channel with more than 300,000 subscribers, and his videos often consist of political parodies featuring political candidates seemingly mocking themselves.”
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“Judge John A. Mendes, a judge on the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California, sided with Kohls, ruling that the law doesn’t pass constitutional muster because it does not use “the least restrictive means available for advancing the State’s interest.”
“Counter speech is a less restrictive alternative to prohibiting videos such as those posted by Plaintiff, no matter how offensive or inappropriate someone may find them,” Mendez’s opinion reads. “AB 2839 is unconstitutional because it lacks the narrow tailoring and least restrictive alternative that a content based law requires under strict scrutiny.”
Mendez’s ruling argues that the law, which is aimed at cracking down on “deepfakes” and other forms of false speech intended at misrepresenting an opponent’s views and actions, ends up making illegal a much wider range of speech than these specific statements.
“While Defendants attempt to analogize AB 2839 to a restriction on defamatory statements, the statute itself does not use the word ‘defamation’ and by its own definition, extends beyond the legal standard for defamation to include any false or materially deceptive content that is ‘reasonably likely’ to harm the ‘reputation or electoral prospects of a candidate.'”
While the law did contain a provision exempting parody content that contains a disclosure, the requirement was onerous, mandating that it be “no smaller than the largest font size of other text appearing in the visual media.”
Just one part of the law was found to pass constitutional muster—a requirement audio-only media be disclosed at the beginning at the message, and every two minutes during the duration of the content.
“While the Court gives substantial weight to the fact that the California Legislature has a ‘compelling interest in protecting free and fair elections,’ this interest must be served by narrowly tailored ends.” Mendez writes. “Supreme Court precedent illuminates that while a wellfounded fear of a digitally manipulated media landscape may be justified, this fear does not give legislators unbridled license to bulldoze over the longstanding tradition of critique, parody, and satire protected by the First Amendment.””