This State puts a lot on the taxpayers and businesses...most are of the opinion that if you own and operate a business you must have money which is not true in any sense....most have no idea how many businesses are failing and losing money but choose to keep their doors open...you can't just lean on businesses as a means to pay for your bureaucratic nonsense...why people of this State continue this is baffling...people can't see how the giving and giving id leaving the State broke...when you have leaders going on TV in one instance and saying we have a surplus or money, which is a blatant lie, and then weeks later saying we have a deficit it should make one wonder but if you keep giving the masses free stuff then it's a nice way to deflect...CA is broke as all get up but it creates flashy shit with its designer handbags and fancy cars enough to fool the masses....I wish people would open their eyes and see what is really going on as the leaders are pulling the wool over many peoples eyes out here....clueless people we have in this State...
California May Budget Revision for May Released
Governor Newsom announced his strategy to address an estimated $27.6 billion deficit for the upcoming budget year, and a $28.4 billion projected deficit for 2025–26.
The Administration normally updates its revenue estimates and spending plan in May to reflect final income tax payments and new economic data. One of the reasons for the large budget deficit was the lack of access to this data last year because federal and state income tax deadlines were postponed to accommodate taxpayers affected by natural disasters.
The Governor’s strategy comprises a mix of spending reductions and delays, the elimination of frequently used tax credits, fund shifts and dipping into rainy day reserves. Recognizing the multi-year dimension of the budget shortfalls, he tagged many of his proposed revenue increases and spending reductions to solve for two or more years of anticipated budget deficits.
The Governor’s major proposed solutions to eliminate budget deficits include:
• Withdrawing about $13.1 billion from various budget reserve accounts, and another $8.4 billion from the public schools reserve account.
• Potentially increasing revenues by $5.5 billion by suspending net operating loss (NOL) deductions and limiting tax credits that businesses currently rely upon to manage costs. The change would affect tax years 2025, 2026 and 2027, unless revenues are sufficient without the suspension.
• Tens of billions in additional program reductions and delays, such as cutting $510 million for the middle class scholarship program, $500 million for preschool and kindergarten facilities, $80 billion from correctional facilities by closing housing units, reducing health care workforce programs by $846 million over the next five years, and delaying child care program expansions, totaling $1.3 billion over two years, and $60 million from the extension of the California Competes grant program for next year.
• An across-the-board reduction in state operations of about 8%, affecting nearly all departments.
• Shifting billions in General Fund obligations to special funds.
Proposed Suspension of Important NOL Tax Credit
The Governor resisted proposing general tax increases to address the multi-year budget shortfalls, but resurrected a temporary, targeted tax strategy affecting businesses.
Similar to a proposal adopted by the Legislature for the pandemic-stricken budget in 2020, the Governor has proposed suspending the carryover of net operating loss tax deductions for businesses with California income greater than $1 million, and limiting business credit usage to $5 million in tax years 2025, 2026 and 2027.
A “trigger” would be included to restore these tax strategies if sufficient revenues are available next year. The carryover periods for NOLs and credits would be extended by three years, and the credit limitation would not apply to the Low-Income Housing and Pass-through Entity elective tax credits.
After these tax incentive suspensions were enacted in 2020, the anticipated budget shortfalls did not materialize. As a result, the Legislature and Governor terminated the suspensions one year early.
Buoyed by the success of the Rainy Day Reserve, approved by voters as Proposition 2 in 2012, the Governor will be proposing amendments to allow even more excess revenues be added to the reserve during years with windfall capital gains tax revenues, which are notoriously volatile. Receipts from capital gains taxes that soared to $349 billion in 2021–22 dropped to $137 billion in 2023–24.
This would both provide a cushion for state spending when revenues decline, and prevent the Legislature from spending those excess revenues in the first place.
The next move is the Legislature’s, which will negotiate an overall compromise to meet the June 15 deadline to approve a budget. The Governor must give his final approval before July 1, the beginning of the fiscal year. Further action on many of these budget items will doubtlessly transpire throughout the summer.
More political garb by Newsome and his Oligarchs....
the State has been trying to put together an indoor heat policy to coincide with its outdoor heat regulations...only, this is some 8 years in the making and at the 12th hour when it was up to vote the State pulled but they voted on it anyway...what halted it? The prison system. These geniuses are halting this because of the costs it will put on the State run prisons...so it affects there own business they will halt it but if it affects other businesses they have no problem pushing it through....look at the costs they are predicting it will take to cover this new guideline if implemented for the prison system...
California workers have waited five years for the state to adopt regulations protecting them from indoor heat. Today, they were staring at another delay.
The rule was expected to be finally voted into place by the Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board at a meeting this morning in San Diego. But Wednesday night, state officials ordered that it be pulled from the agenda after Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration suddenly withdrew a required stamp of approval, saying it learned the rule would cost state prisons much more money than anticipated.
The eleventh-hour move infuriated workers, their advocates — and the safety board itself, which faced a brief protest by the rule’s proponents during the meeting.
Then in an equally remarkable rebuke, the board unanimously voted to approve the indoor heat rule anyway.
The six-member board, an independent part of the state’s labor agency, is appointed by the governor. Members said during the meeting that they had been “blindsided,” that the move to pull the agenda item was “a slap in the face” and that workers in numerous other industries such as warehouses, manufacturing and restaurants had waited long enough.
“Why, at 48, or 24, or 18 hours before this vote is happening, did this happen?” said board member Laura Stock. “It’s completely outrageous … This is an urgent public health issue.”
Lorena Gonzalez, chief officer of the California Labor Federation, had called the administration’s delay “shameful” and later described the board’s vote as “amazing” and “unprecedented.”
“The workers didn’t relent and this board shows humanity. Now we have to force implementation,” she wrote on social media.
Still, the future of the rule is uncertain.
Approved regulations cannot become law without the sign-off from the state’s Department of Finance, which it withdrew Wednesday night. Department spokesperson H.D. Palmer told CalMatters it had received a late estimate “in the last few weeks” from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation that it would cost the state billions more dollars to comply with the rule in state prisons than the state’s workplace safety agencies predicted. He did not explain why the information came so late, but said after the vote that his department has been meeting with the board’s staff in recent weeks.
And today’s meeting was only nine days before a deadline in California administrative law to approve the proposed rule — with a sign-off included — for it to take effect this summer.
Workers’ advocates have pleaded for a rule to be made official before temperatures rise again, but it’s not clear how that would happen this year unless the board or state lawmakers take emergency action.
Board members said they hoped their move would spur the administration to resolve its concerns with the proposed rule with more urgency.
They also asked Cal/OSHA, which enforces workplace safety laws and which initially drafted the heat rule in 2017, to prepare to re-introduce the rule as an emergency regulation this year, which allows faster approvals. Cal/OSHA’s deputy chief of health Eric Berg told the board his agency, too, was caught by surprise by the administration’s move.
“We’ve gotta leave all our options open,” board chairperson Dave Thomas said. “And I don’t know what kind of dance it would have to do … (The administration) had plenty of time to give us warning, and not set us up. And that’s exactly what they did.”
Newsom’s spokesperson declined to comment, directing questions to the finance department.
A spokesperson for the Department of Industrial Relations — which oversees both the standards board and Cal/OSHA — said today it was “evaluating options to strengthen protections as soon as possible” and would continue assessing workers’ complaints of indoor heat under a general rule requiring safe workplaces. The agency received 549 safety complaints related to indoor heat in 2023, and 194 the year before.
Cal/OSHA and the standards board have been developing the rule for years amid rising concerns about the health effects of climate change on workers. A 2016 law directed the agencies to create an indoor workplace heat rule by 2019 — five years ago.
The proposed rule would require employers to either try to cool workplaces that get hotter than 87 degrees indoors or take other measures to reduce the risks of heat illness. California faces a budget deficit projected at as much as $73 billion. Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democratic leaders in the Legislature announced Wednesday that they would try to reduce the shortfall by $12 billion to $18 billion before passing a full budget.
A 2021 RAND Corp. economic impact report estimated the costs of the indoor heat rule on employers statewide to total $215 million in the first year and about $88 million annually afterward, mostly for employers to install AC or fans or provide cool-down areas. The analysis also stated employers would save money because the rule would cut indoor workplace heat injuries by 40% by 2030.
For state government, the standards board last year estimated the Department of Corrections would need to pay less than $1 million in the rule’s first year and less than $500,000 annually after that to comply. About half of the state’s 1,500 correctional institutions are either already climate controlled or located in areas that won’t be hot enough to trigger the heat rule, the Department of Industrial Relations stated. That was after finance officials told the department in 2021 that it underestimated prison costs; the department said its updated analysis resulted in double the cost to the state.
But Palmer told CalMatters the finance department received more updated information in recent weeks that costs to the corrections department would be in the billions of dollars instead. He could not explain what could account for such a drastic difference in estimates in just one year, saying “we’ve been trying to get an understanding of that.”
CalMatters has asked the corrections department for comment.
At the beginning of today’s meeting, Thomas announced the rule “has been pulled.” He encouraged those who came to comment on the rule to still do so.
“We don’t really have an explanation as to why, and it certainly wasn’t us,” he said.
Advocates blasted the state. “The indoor workers in California are facing hotter and hotter temperatures every year and clearly don’t have any protections,” Sheheryar Kasooij, executive director of the Warehouse Worker Resource Center, said before the meeting. “It seems like the state is at a point where that seems to be just fine with them.”
The proposed rule was first drafted by Cal/OSHA in 2017 before going to the independent standards board for official rulemaking in 2019. After the board finally officially proposed the rule in March 2023 and held the public hearing, it also revised the rule three more times.
The rule has been subject to wide-ranging employer pushback and a lengthy economic impact analysis. The COVID-19 pandemic diverted attention from an understaffed state labor agency, CalMatters reported last month.
Stephen Knight, executive director of the advocacy group Worksafe, said he got a Wednesday night call from a state official, whose department Knight did not disclose, explaining that there was “late objection from the Department of Finance to the description of the cost.”
“How does a state agency withdraw a rule the day before the vote, that’s 10 years in the making, and backed by state legislation?” Knight asked. “We’re laying this at the feet of the governor. This is an enormous blow to Newsom’s claim to climate change leadership.”
The proposed rule would require warehouses, factories, restaurants and other workplaces to cool workplaces down if the temperature reaches 87 degrees. If installing air conditioning isn’t feasible, employers would be required to take other measures such as adjusting schedules, allowing longer breaks or providing personal fans or cooling vests.
Bertha Servin, who said she works at Mission Linen, an industrial laundry facility in Chino, told the board today that the heat at her job is exacerbated by steam from the machines and by extra protective clothing that workers must wear.
“In the Inland Empire when it’s 100 degrees, inside is worse because we are touching all the hot products,” she said. “And the process doesn’t stop because we need to send (the linens) to all the customers waiting for it.”
Business groups said many of the requirements would be costly and impractical, and that some provisions conflicted with the state’s nearly 20-year-old outdoor heat rules.
But speaking at the board meeting, Mitch Steiger, legislative representative of the California Federation of Teachers, said advocates were told by the administration the reason was “compliance costs tied to an unspecified state agency.”
Steiger said any concerns about the costs were already addressed in an economic impact report the industrial relations department prepared between 2020 and 2021, and which the finance department reviewed for years afterward.
“It doesn’t say much about how much we value the lives and the health of those workers who suffered during those years that the (analysis) was being developed, that all of a sudden at the very end of the process, the (analysis) is just yanked away,” Steiger said. “Because why? Because some employer doesn’t want to comply with the law.”
The rule was on the board’s agenda for at least a week. Even employers’ groups, speaking to CalMatters in February with complaints about the proposed rule, said they expected that it would be approved this month.
Legislators passed the 2016 law calling for an indoor heat rule in response to reports of workers falling ill in what was a newly booming warehouse industry in southern California’s Inland Empire.
Many warehouses are not air conditioned, and some employees carry packages in and out of metal shipping containers that workers say easily surpass 100 degrees on warm days. But workers in many industries have advocated for heat protections in California for decades. In 2005, the state required outdoor heat protections after the deaths of four farmworkers.
Excessive heat can cause nausea, vomiting, fainting and, in the most extreme cases, heat stroke leading to organ damage or death. In California, seven workers died from indoor heat from 2010 through 2017, during what was the hottest decade on record, while about 200 a year claimed injuries from indoor heat through the workers’ compensation system. These figures are considered by experts to be undercounts because not all workers make those reports.
In recent years, summer temperatures across southern California have continued to break historical records.
At the meeting, Megan Ortiz, executive director of a southern California nonprofit that supports day laborers and domestic workers, said she visited a day laborers’ center in Van Nuys this week.
“What I heard from the workers was, ‘Ya viene el calor,’” she said. “Here comes the heat.”
Pretty Boy Newsom is on the move.....
Today he just released an executive order to clean up homeless encampments....one two, he is looking at you, three four, he is knocking on your door, five six, he is waiting for his picks, seven eight, he thinks he's really great, nine ten, he's coming for the white house pen...
By the way, where these alleged 11,000 homeless encampments state removed, what it doesn't tell you is that although they removed these encampments, the homeless just set up shop in other places, often times in or near neighborhoods...and the behavioral health services....he fined Kaiser 50 million and is requiring Kaiser to address their behavioral health care enrollees...essentially forcing Kaiser to do more than other insurance carriers in the state...according to California law, it says that enrollees must be offered a first mental health or substance use disorder treatment or support appointment within 10 business days of request, and a follow-up appointment, if needed, within 10 business days of the prior appointment.....
We offer Kaiser as a group health care option to our employees and our rates are through the roof....in the last 2 years the rates have gone up nearly 35%...no other carrier we offer coverage for has had anywhere near these increases....most we had was about 7-8% over the same 2 year period....
Newsom, coming to Federalize all this for you soon....maybe sooner than expected, who knows...
Oops, California did it again....another major business mogul leaves the State and heads for Texas after 140 years...Yup, Chevron is leaving the State over regulations involving climate control and fossil fuels..."Crippling Cali Newsom" at his best....another blunder by the bumbling french laundry master....
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/chevron-moving-its-headquarters-from-california-to-texas/
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