Commentary
Among the
2,632 new bills introduced this year in the California Legislature by the Feb. 17 deadline, there actually are some good ones. Here are three:
Assembly Bill 1128 is by Assemblymember Miguel Santiago (D-Los Angeles). It’s a bipartisan bill co-sponsored by Assemblymember Tom Lackey (R-Palmdale) and state Sens. Bill Dodd (D-Napa) and Lena Gonzalez (D-Long Beach).
The child income tax credit currently only applies to children up to the age of 6. This bill would extend that to age 18, and for students to 23. About 700,000 families would benefit. Santiago
explained:
AB 1128 offers hope for Californians who are struggling to make ends meet by providing much-needed financial relief that puts money back in their pockets to reduce the risk of children falling back into poverty while promoting greater economic stability. California must take action before families are forced into more and harder, impossible tradeoffs.
According to an
analysis by Center Square:
In California, a salary of $35,000 can be taxed over $6,000 reducing the take-home pay to just below $29,000 at an average tax rate of 17.8 percent….
The bill aims at providing a social safety net to the 67 percent of families with annual incomes under $35,000 who struggled last year to make ends meet.
This high cost of taxation is something I
detailed in The Epoch Times last December: how the state’s income tax gouges not just the wealthy, but those at lower-middle and middle income levels, largely due to 50 years of inflation. Which once again has returned.
Of course, for someone making only $35,000, it’s impossible to live in this wildly expensive state without government benefits, including Section 8 housing, CalFresh for food, Medi-Cal, and as public education for those with children.
Unfortunately, the recent years of record budget surpluses were not used to reform the state’s tax system. But on AB 1128, as Nobel Economics Laureate Milton Friedman liked to
say, “I never met a tax cut I didn’t like.”
Senate Bill 703 is by Sen. Roger Niello (R-Sacramento). It would allow employees a “flexible work schedule providing for workdays up to 10 hours per day within a 40-hour workweek,” without paying overtime.
Current law rigidly mandates time-and-a-half overtime for salaried workers putting in more than eight hours per day. But what if someone wants to work four, 10-hour days? This will would allow that without mandating overtime.
Especially with today’s hectic lifestyles, antiquated, industrial-era policies on work hours are a bad basis for compensation. Workers are juggling jobs, children, charity, and other responsibilities. If the worker needs, for example, to work six hours on Monday to take a child to a ballgame, why now allow that, with 10 hours on Tuesday?
According to a CalChamber
analysis last year on a similar bill:
California is one of the only states that requires employers to pay daily overtime after eight hours of work in addition to weekly overtime after 40 hours of work.
Even other states that impose daily overtime requirements allow the employer and employee to essentially waive the daily eight-hour overtime requirement through a written agreement. …
Employees want flexibility in their work schedules. In a recent CalChamber poll, 88% of voters agreed (49% of them strongly) that the state’s overtime laws should be changed to make it easier for employees to work alterative schedules, such as four 10-hour days.
A survey by the Society for Human Resource Management revealed that 91% of human resources professionals agree that flexible work arrangements positively influence employee engagement, job satisfaction, and retention.
Assembly Bill 1700 is by Assemblyman Josh Hoover (R-Folsom). In the bill’s language, it “would specify that population growth, in and of itself, resulting from a housing project and noise impacts of a housing project are not an effect on the environment for purposes of CEQA”—the California Environmental Quality Act.
Of course, as housing is built to alleviate the state’s twin crises of sky-high rents and homelessness, there will be more population growth and the resultant noise. But neither directly affects the “environment,” the goal of CEQA, which was
enacted back in 1970.
Comprehensive CEQA reform is long overdue and has been backed by Gov. Gavin Newsom and former Gov. Jerry Brown. Just last week, Newsom again endorsed reform after the 1st District Court of Appeals Court
upheld an absurd lawsuit blocking more housing at the University of California, Berkeley, for 1,100 UC students and 125 homeless people.
Newsom
tweeted:
A few wealthy Berkeley homeowners should not be able to block desperately needed student housing for years and even decades. CEQA needs to change and we are committed to working with the legislature so California can build more housing.
It was followed by this image:
Until comprehensive CEQA reform is enacted, AB 1700 is a necessary stopgap. Newsom is right: Blocking reform is “selfish.”
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
