IAN LOVETT WRITES IN THE NEW YORK TIMES:
LOS ANGELES — As Wisconsin residents voted on Tuesday not to recall Gov. Scott Walker — who has become an enemy of labor unions nationwide — two California cities dealt blows of their own to organized labor.
In San Diego and San Jose, voters overwhelmingly approved ballot initiatives designed to help balance ailing municipal budgets by cutting retirement benefits for city workers.
Around 70 percent of San Jose voters favored the pension measure, while 66 percent of San Diego residents supported a similar measure.
“This is really important to our taxpayers,” Mayor Chuck Reed of San Jose, said Tuesday night. “We’ll get control over these skyrocketing retirement costs and be able to provide the services they are paying for.” READ MORE.
Greater Los Angeles is the 13th largest metropolitan area in the world and second in the United States, with a population of 16.5 million. LA LIGHT is a time lapse video by Colin Rich showing the city at night. It has been shortlisted for the 2012 Vimeo Awards Lyrical category.
A new report by John Pitkin and Dowell Myers from USC’s PopDynamics Research Group argues that the population of California will grow at a lower rate than was estimated by the state’s Department of Finance in 2007. The authors believe that growth in each of the next four decades will be of the order of 3 to 4 million people. This constitutes a return to normality and is in line with each of the past five decades, with the notable exception of the 1980s when the state’s population grew by a record 6.1 million. The new figures imply a decline in the rate of growth. As elsewhere in the developed world, the number of seniors will rise sharply. read the summary or the full report.
Heather Mac Donald writes in City Journal:
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If the upward mobility of the impending Hispanic majority doesn’t improve, the state’s economic future is in peril.
California is in the middle of a far-reaching demographic shift: Hispanics, who already constitute a majority of the state’s schoolchildren, will be a majority of its workforce and of its population in a few decades. This is an even more momentous development than it seems. Unless Hispanics’ upward mobility improves, the state risks becoming more polarized economically and more reliant on a large government safety net. And as California goes, so goes the nation, whose own Hispanic population shift is just a generation or two behind. read more.
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