A new report from supporters of a November ballot measure aimed at increasing property taxes on commercial and industrial property in California finds that more than 90% of the additional property tax revenue Proposition 15 would generate will come from just 10% of the highest value properties.

The measure would amend the California Constitution to create a so-called "split roll" by reforming the 1978 measure Proposition 13, which slashed property taxes across the state and placed a limit on annual tax increases for both residential and commercial property.

Prop. 13 was sold as a way to create stable and predictable property tax bills, especially for seniors on fixed incomes. But critics have long complained that large corporations have unfairly benefitted from those protections, allowing them to keep assessed property values at well below market rates, resulting in a loss of revenue to schools and local government.

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Opponents include the California Business Roundtable, the Chamber of Commerce and the California Taxpayers Association.

The measure will appear on the November 3 ballot.

The U.S. labor-market recovery is losing momentum as a surge in coronavirus cases triggers heightened employer uncertainty and consumer caution.

Job openings in July are down from last month across the U.S., and Google searches for “file for unemployment” are creeping up. Growth in worker hours is waning at small businesses after several weeks of gains.

The labor-market slowdown is widespread across industries and states, showing the economic turmoil isn’t limited to states in the South and West that are seeing the greatest increases in illnesses.

It also comes as Congress considers whether to extend $600 a week federal unemployment benefits that around 25 million workers are receiving through the end of July as part of a coronavirus relief package. Many economists say the benefits—totaling about $15 billion a week—have helped offset the impact of the pandemic on the economy. Critics say the funds, which pay many lower-wage workers more than if they were on the job, is discouraging people from returning to work.

The Federal Reserve formally unveiled terms Friday that will allow nonprofit organizations to borrow through its $600 billion loan program for small and midsize businesses disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic.

The central bank had earlier put forward a proposal to extend the Main Street Lending Program to schools, hospitals and other social-service organizations. The terms announced Friday will open the program to nonprofit organizations with at least 10 employees and as many as 15,000 employees.

The Fed also eased certain financial eligibility criteria to allow a wider range of nonprofit operating models. The loans will be available to nonprofits with endowments of no more than $3 billion and that have been in operation at least five years.

Under the program, the Fed is buying 95% of eligible loans made by banks. Loan terms under the nonprofit lending options are similar to those available to for-profit businesses. Five-year loans carry an interest rate of 3 percentage points above a widely used short-term lending benchmark rate; interest payments are deferred for one year, and principal payments, for two years.

Congress should consider automatically forgiving Paycheck Protection Program loans taken out by the smallest U.S. businesses—and offer a second helping of aid to firms hard hit by the pandemic, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Friday.

The comments came at a House Small Business Committee hearing, where lawmakers in both parties signaled they want to push out more small-business aid as the U.S. continues to grapple with the coronavirus.

Mr. Mnuchin, testifying before the committee, suggested the Trump administration would back a proposal from U.S. banks and others who have said the massive lending program should see loans under $150,000 automatically turned into grants.

That would account for 86% of the roughly 4.9 million PPP loans issued to date, and about 27% of the roughly $520 billion lent. Without a change to the law, all those businesses will have to apply to have their loans forgiven, documenting that they used the money on payroll and other qualified expenses.

U.S. consumers boosted spending at stores and auto dealerships in June for the second straight month as states reopened for business, but the recent increase in coronavirus cases could again damp job growth and retail spending.

The Commerce Department on Thursday said June retail sales—a measure of purchases at stores, at restaurants and online—increased a seasonally adjusted 7.5% on the month. Retail sales totaled $524.3 billion in June, up from $487.7 billion in May and nearly back to pre-pandemic levels.

A separate reading on the jobs market—new worker claims for unemployment insurance—held nearly steady at a seasonally adjusted 1.3 million for the week ended July 11, the Labor Department said, a sign the rise in Covid-19 infections and related restrictions on businesses is causing the labor market’s healing to stall. Weekly claims have declined from a late March peak of 6.9 million weekly claims, but remain historically high.

June’s increase in retail sales was driven by a pickup in sales of autos, furniture, clothing and electronics as consumers visited stores following reopenings.

Rising coronavirus infections across dozens of states are threatening the U.S. economic recovery, forcing businesses and consumers to freeze spending and keeping the unemployment rate stubbornly high.

The government reported Thursday that retail sales rose a sharp 7.5% in June, but the positive trend was undercut by more recent data showing that credit card spending has stalled. A separate report showed that more than a million Americans sought unemployment benefits last week – a sign that companies continue to cut jobs as the virus spreads across the heavily populated Sunbelt.

Economists fear that any positive momentum could come to a halt later this summer if infections and deaths rise and more businesses close.

A month into his stay-at-home order and under pressure to lift restrictions, Gov. Gavin Newsom drew a line in the sand: In order to safely reopen and suppress the coronavirus, California needed to be able to test everyone with COVID-19 symptoms and trace the contacts of confirmed cases.
“The most important framework is our capacity to expand our testing to appropriately address the tracing and tracking of individuals, the isolation and the quarantine of individuals,” the governor said of his thresholds for reopening at an April 14 news conference.

But three weeks later, Newsom began reopening businesses before meeting his own benchmarks.

Now, the governor has once again ordered closures as California surpasses 350,000 COVID-19 cases. Hospitalizations have more than doubled and deaths have nearly tripled since Newsom launched the reopening on May 8. Many Californians are still struggling to get tested amid new shortages and growing demand.

In late June, it looked like California might be turning a corner in the coronavirus recession. Unemployment had leveled off at a jarring 16.3%, but thousands of waiters, bartenders and hair stylists were going back to work.

Then came the surge in infections that state officials have been dreading — a record 11,000 new cases on Tuesday alone — and with it, a new wave of business closures.

“We are so sorry,” began the email to customers from San Jose’s Limón Salon this week. “After being open for only one day, we learned that our reopening will be short lived.” With appointments back on hold, the salon said any donations and product sales will go to pay employee health care premiums for next month.

If the reality is harsh for business owners and employees seeking stability, the public health rationale for the retreat to isolation is clear. Outbreaks continue to spiral at San Quentin State Prison and workplaces such as meat processing plants. Coronavirus testing backlogs have led to rationing. In some regions, hospitals are approaching capacity.

California added 558,200 jobs from mid-May to mid-June and state unemployment fell from 16.4% to 14.9% — but don’t start celebrating yet. The numbers don’t account for the resurgence of COVID-19 cases throughout the U.S. and in California in the last half of June or the retreat in plans to reopen the economy. The numbers were released Friday morning by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which slightly revised the earlier jobless figure from 16.3% to 16.4%.

Leisure and hospitality added the most jobs, at 292,500, benefiting from statewide reopenings of bars and dine-in restaurants, according to the California Employment Development Department. As of mid-June, that sector had regained more than a third of job losses from March and April. Construction jobs had the highest percentage gain, clawing back 68% of jobs lost during the pandemic. Government suffered the largest decline in jobs, at 36,300.

But the dial-back is bound to reverse a positive trend in rehiring as bars, restaurants, hotels, airlines and thousands of other affected businesses scale back already reduced operations or remain closed, said Michael S. Bernick, an attorney at Duane Morris and former head of the California Employment Development Department.

In a quiet corner of Elk Grove, where the maze of subdivisions and shopping centers gives way to open fields, Sharie Wilson has spent the last three years building her dream home.

It’s nothing like the neighborhood where she grew up in South Central L.A. But in this Sacramento suburb, her family owns a modern farmhouse set on 2.5 acres, with a stately U-shaped driveway and a Pan-African flag over the front door. In the backyard, there’s a basketball court inlaid with the logo of her hair care company, DreamGirls.

Still, Wilson has to justify her family’s success. Neighbors have asked her husband, who works at the local water district and runs his own apparel company, what sport he plays. Or how the couple really paid for their house.

“Hopefully once people keep seeing it, they stop seeing the color and start seeing us as humans,” said Wilson, a 41-year-old mother of six boys.

Wilson is one of around 275,000 Black Californians who have left high-cost coastal cities in the last three decades, sometimes bound for other states or cities, but more often to seek their slice of the American dream in the state’s sprawling suburban backyard. Many transplants pack up for the promise of homeownership, safety and better schools. Housing-rich Elk Grove has gained nearly 18,000 Black residents since 1990 — a 5,100% jump mirrored by increases around the San Joaquin-Sacramento Delta, Southern California’s Inland Empire and the Central Valley.

The greater Sacramento region is on a mission to fight climate change with a new effort called Green Means Go.

Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg said it's one of the most important initiatives on the table for the Sacramento region right now. The plan is to address the affordable housing crisis, create jobs while also finding ways to reduce greenhouse gases.

Dozens of lawmakers are sending letters to Gov. Gavin Newsom, urging him to support the Green Means Go pilot program.

Supporters said the money is already there, but it would need to be reallocated to local governments to improve districts that are economically disadvantaged like Stockton Boulevard and Del Paso Boulevard in Sacramento.

Steinberg said it would change the quality of life throughout this region by investing in communities and making them more desirable for people to live and work.

"What would these resources, $100 million a year for four years, mean to the greater Sacramento region? It would mean that we could invest in real infill in our sometimes forgotten commercial corridors and make them the center of our diverse business climate in Sacramento," Steinberg said.

The clean energy economy has regained some of the jobs it lost in the spring to the coronavirus. But we are, tragically, nowhere near a recovery.

U.S. clean energy industries gained 106,320 jobs in June, following three months of job losses, according to a report by BW Research Partnership. After the gains in June, the net loss since March is 514,270 jobs. The report looked at jobs in renewable electric power generation; energy efficiency; clean vehicles; clean fuels and “clean transmission, distribution and energy storage.”

California, the state with the most clean energy jobs, had the largest increase, with 19,800 jobs, or 5 percent of the state’s clean energy workforce, returning in June. But the state remains deep in a hole, with a cumulative loss of 89,881 jobs, or 16 percent, since March.

The Los Angeles metro area has lost more jobs than any other metropolitan area in the country, with a net loss of 42,384, or 29 percent, since March. The San Francisco Bay Area ranks fourth in job losses, with 22,302, or 18 percent.

The threat of chronic blackouts is sparking a rush to install battery backup systems as California homeowners try to avoid disruptive power cuts related to wildfires.

Blackouts are increasingly a part of life as Pacific Gas and Electric Co. strives to avoid igniting deadly blazes with aging equipment. At fault for some of the state’s worst wildfires, the utility shut off power nine times between June and October last year in Northern California. Some blackouts lasted for days, and at least one affected more than a million people.

The utility plans to use shut-offs for years as it upgrades its system (Climatewire, July 1). It’s pledged to reduce their scope and restore power more quickly.

But many residents aren’t reassured.

Nitsa Lallas and husband Ignacio Arribas, who live in the San Francisco suburb of Mill Valley, are getting two Tesla Powerwalls installed this week to store power from the solar panels on their 2,600-square-foot house.

Since the 2008 financial crisis, regulators each year have required big banks to prove they could keep lending through new calamities. The rules, so far, have focused on purely economic disasters: Do they have enough capital to keep their doors open when markets collapse, or if unemployment explodes?

But there’s another kind of risk that didn’t burst onto the radar during that crisis but could trigger just as much of an economic disaster: climate change.

With increasingly severe storms, floods and fires, many forecasters envision a crisis that pivots from the physical to the economic. Imagine back-to-back wildfires and floods devastating huge swaths of California, or an epic drought coupled with tornadoes in Oklahoma during an oil price dip. The growing fear is that widespread damage to property serving as collateral for loans and to assets underpinning other investments could cause devastating financial blowback to banks, not to mention insurers on the hook for the damage.

And as governments try to ratchet down carbon output, it could also threaten banks through their exposure to fossil fuel investments. Some see the global economy’s potential next "Minsky moment"—a reference to the economist Hyman Minsky, who warned of speculative business cycles that end in destabilizing crisis.

Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), California’s largest combined gas and electric utility, became the first dual-fuel utility in the country to formally support ending new gas hookups in buildings. In a letter to the California Energy Commission (CEC) in late June, PG&E endorsed efficient, all-electric new construction as part of the state’s Title 24 energy code process.

California’s building energy efficiency standards govern new construction in California and set a precedent for other states. The California Energy Commission (CEC) updates these codes every three years and is updating codes through the Title 24 process for the 2022 code cycle. This is a critical opportunity for California to ensure its buildings achieve lower energy costs, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and maintain healthy indoor and outdoor air quality.

By publicly supporting an ambitious new building code, PG&E indicates that it is willing to forgo future gas investments on behalf of its customers and the state’s climate goals. In its letter to the CEC, PG&E states it "welcomes the opportunity to avoid investments in new gas assets that might later prove underutilized as local governments and the state work together to realize long-term decarbonization objectives."

Gov. Gavin Newsom is expected to announce Friday that all public and private schools in California counties on the state’s  monitoring list for rising coronavirus infections would be required to close for in-class instruction and meet strict criteria in order to reopen.

Under the expected guidance, children in kindergarten through 2d grade who are being taught in classrooms would be encouraged, but not required, to wear masks. That’s according to several participants in discussions with administration officials and others familiar with the guidance. However, students in grades 3 to 12, along with staff, would be required to wear them. Those who refuse could be sent home to be taught exclusively via distance learning.

Students would be encouraged to stay as far apart as possible, but would not be required to maintain the 6 -foot distance expected of staff.

The guidance would represent a marked shift from leaving decisions over closing and reopening schools largely in the hands of local school district officials in consultation with county departments of health.  The California Department of Public Health would now play a stronger role in setting the criteria for reopening school facilities.

In grade school, Napat Maneerit was uncomfortable bringing his mother’s food to school. As a Thai American living in the United States, he went by Nathan to avoid feeling embarrassed when others mispronounced his name.

Now a student at California State University Northridge, Maneerit has taken classes in Asian American Studies and Chicano/a Studies, branches of ethnic studies that he says have benefited him.

“I shouldn’t be afraid of the name my mom gave me, I should embrace it,” Maneerit said. “A lot of immigrants and minorities are disenfranchised because they don’t have a lot to attach themselves to, so having ethnic studies courses, you really start to learn there’s a reason you’re feeling this way.”

When the leadership of CSU, the nation’s largest public university system, meets next week, they’ll have stories like Maneerit’s in mind when they decide on the first change to the system’s general education requirements in 40 years.

One does not have to look hard to find evidence that when you close schools due to a pandemic, students’ social, emotional, and academic needs are affected.

Despite heroic efforts to quickly shift to distance learning, achievement and equity gaps remain, and in most cases, are exacerbated. To address loss of learning and widening of achievement gaps, I recommend considering the following five key areas to assure schools are prepared to assess and address these gaps of inequity and subsequent impacts on student learning.

Address students’ social and emotional well-being first

Whether in school classrooms or at home, students need to feel emotionally safe, valued, and cared for. Although eager to determine loss of learning, schools must first prioritize the measurement of school climate, leveraging social and emotional learning to build important foundations for learning.

Calbright College’s board of trustees will offer Ajita Talwalker Menon, the online community college’s interim president, the permanent job Monday at its meeting.

Menon, a former higher education policy advisor for President Obama and adviser to California’s community college chancellor, would become the new online college’s second president.

According to its agenda, the board plans to offer Menon a three-year contract with a $285,000 a year base salary.

The decision to hire Menon arrives just as the online college has been revitalized. Calbright nearly faced elimination by the state legislature in May, but survived in the 2020-21 budget, albeit with less funding.

Calbright was seen as a bold initiative championed by former Gov. Jerry Brown to serve adult and underemployed populations of students working part-time or stuck in positions that don’t pay a living wage. Supporters said it would ultimately provide online skills for thousands of the state’s 8 million adults between the ages of 25 and 34, who were considered “stranded” because they were stuck in lower-paying, low-skilled jobs.

Millions of Americans who have missed rent payments due to the coronavirus pandemic could be at risk of being evicted in the coming months unless government measures to protect them are extended, economists and housing experts say.

Nearly 12 million adults live in households that missed their last rent payment, and 23 million have little or no confidence in their ability to make the next one, according to weekly Census Bureau data.

About a third of the country’s renters are protected by an eviction moratorium that covers properties with federally insured mortgages. That expires July 25. Many renters are jobless and depend on supplemental weekly unemployment benefits of $600 that are due to end on July 31.

A number of cities and states have broader protections that will remain in place longer. Boston has banned evictions from public housing through the end of the year. Pennsylvania recently extended its moratorium against evictions for nonpayment of rent until Aug. 31.

The White House is negotiating with Republicans and Democrats in Congress to pass another round of economic relief during the last week of July. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has said supplemental jobless benefits have created a disincentive to return to work as the economy starts to reopen and should be reduced.

The U.S. Census Bureau's Building Permits Survey is closely watched by economists and investors alike. According to Investopedia, "building permits are a type of authorization that must be granted by a government or other regulatory body before the construction of a new or existing building can legally occur." Investopedia further explains how building permit data is an indicator of other economic activities associated with building construction, such as financing and employment. Therefore, the data can signal economic stagnation or growth and can be an indicator of the state of the economy. For instance, a rise in building permits for single family homes can reveal that more citizens have improved their financial situation and are able to afford their residences.

A study by Apartmentguide.com states that the number of building permits issued hit a high in 2005 with 2.2 million building permits. After dropping to a 26-year low in 2009 with fewer than 600,000 building permits, the market trended toward recovery with 1.3 million building permits issued in 2018.

At Data Z, we compile city-level and state-level building permit data on the total number of building permits, building permits for single-family homes, and building permit data for single-family homes indexed to 2005.

Last month, the State of California released the Bay Area’s next Regional Housing Needs Determination (RHND) which says our region must plan for 450,000 new homes over the next eight years. That’s about 2.3 times larger than the current RHND.

We organize in two different places in the Bay Area—one suburban, one urban—yet both face a housing crisis that disproportionately impacts low-income communities of color and is exacerbated by the COVID pandemic.

We are concerned that the eye-popping total RHND will conceal the most important goal: that 57% of those homes (256,500) must be truly affordable for the hundreds of thousands of people and families left behind in the last three decades.

Let’s work together to ensure that they have stable, affordable homes. We can do it if we make true affordability the goal of planning and development processes in every city.

One in five people in Los Angeles County is out of work, according to California's latest unemployment numbers. And that means a lot of people can't pay the rent.

This week, the city of Los Angeles rolled out its Emergency Renters Assistance Program. It will provide a total of $103 million in assistance to LA renters in the form of temporary subsidies of up to $2,000 per household.

In order to qualify, renters of multifamily units must show how COVID-19 has affected them financially and earn less than 80% of the area median income — for example, $83,500 for a family of 4.

Nury Martinez, president of the Los Angeles City Council, helped devise the program. During an interview with All Things Considered, she notes that more than 100,000 people registered on Monday, the first day applications were accepted.

But after the application period closes on Friday, only 50,000 families will be randomly selected to receive subsidies.

The year is scarcely half over and California is experiencing an unprecedented wave of traumatic events, to wit:

—A pandemic that has infected hundreds of thousands of Californians and already has claimed more than 7,000 lives;

—A very severe recession, spawned by the pandemic, that has erased millions of jobs and has hammered state and local government budgets; and

—Civil and political unrest over how people of color, 60%-plus of the residents of this politically blue state, are treated.

All three matters congeal in something else that’s happening, albeit in less dramatic fashion: the decennial census that not only counts Californians but sets the stage for divvying up political power for the next decade.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom pressed the panic button on Monday and locked down his state again. The causes of California’s Covid-19 “surge” are complex as they are elsewhere, but most areas have ample hospital capacity. Mr. Newsom and other politicians will do more long-term harm to their citizens if they sedate the economy whenever and wherever there’s a flare-up.

Mr. Newsom was the first Governor to impose a statewide shelter in place order, though to his credit he allowed counties to begin to reopen in early May. Santa Clara and San Francisco counties have kept restaurants, bars and salons closed, but they have nonetheless experienced a surge in cases and hospitalizations like other areas of the state. (See chart nearby.)

Since June 22, hospitalizations have increased 90% in Los Angeles, 95% in Orange County, 190% in San Francisco, 250% in Santa Clara County, 230% in Fresno and 260% in San Joaquin County. Some of the biggest increases have occurred in rural areas and Hispanic communities, as they have in Texas, Florida and Arizona.

Consider: Hospitalizations over the last three weeks have increased 435% in Texas’s Lower Rio Grande, 250% in San Antonio, 140% in Houston and 90% in Dallas. Mexico has a serious Covid problem, and tens of thousands of U.S. citizens go back and forth across the border each day.

The national press won’t forgive Ron DeSantis for winning the 2018 election, but the Florida Governor and the GOP Legislature are building a record of significant reform. We’ve told you about the big expansion of school choice, and now the state is proving to be equally innovative in building a post-coronavirus economy that will provide more opportunities for more citizens.

The Occupational Freedom and Opportunity Act, which the Governor signed on June 30, is the largest licensing deregulation in the state’s history. It’s all about removing unnecessary barriers that make it harder for people to enter certain professions.

These range from landscape architects and cosmetologists to barbers and hair braiders. The bill makes it easier for people to fill these jobs by removing the need for duplicative business licenses, reducing the training hours needed for licenses, increasing reciprocal recognition of licenses from other states, and eliminating some licensing and registration requirements outright.

Much of this is common sense. For example, the bill waives the requirement for a commercial driver’s license for people who had training or experience driving heavy vehicles in the military. Whole categories—e.g., nail technicians, body wrappers and makeup artists—will no longer have to get a license at all.

How can we rebuild California’s job base? The latest employment numbers released last week should provide the sense of urgency. An additional 267,123 new unemployment claims were filed just for the one week ending July 4, bringing the total to over 7.4 million claims filed in California since mid-March, and $41.5 billion paid out in unemployment insurance. Our California economy has now reached a position that it survives in good part on unemployment insurance payments.

To understand how to respond to the current predicament, Californians might turn to the front lines of employment: California’s network of 45 Local Workforce Development Boards. Though these Boards are not well known, they represent the heart of the public workforce system in California. Overseen by business and labor representatives appointed by the local Mayor or Board of Supervisors, they administer the bulk of the federal and state job training/placement funds in the state, totaling over $1 billion. They interact daily with job seekers and local businesses.

The Fresno Board is one of the larger Boards, with a budget of nearly $19 million, 31 direct staff and over 200 contractors involved in job training and placement. It serves an area population of just under one million, with unemployment and poverty rates well above the state average. Blake Konczal, the Executive Director since 2002, started his career during the economic downturn in 1992, providing placement services to laid-off Southern California aerospace workers. He has experience with several other downturns since then, and is actively now in Central Valley recovery efforts.

President Trump often gets itchy to sign some giant public-works spending bill. Here’s a much better gift to America: The White House on Wednesday finished its renovations to the process for environmental reviews. This might sound as dry as old cement, but it’ll help big projects get built for years to come—that is, if President Joe Biden doesn’t use an expedited procedure next year to undo it.

A 1970 law called the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, mandates an environmental study if a major project involves federal funding or permitting. In 1981 the expectation by the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) was that even for “large complex energy projects,” the whole review process “would require only about 12 months.”

Today that seems heavenly. In recent years the average review involving an environmental impact statement took 4.5 years, and the final document ran to 661 pages, before appendixes. In a quarter of cases, the process burned at least six years and 748 pages. Those timelines don’t necessarily count any subsequent lawsuits over whether the NEPA review was faulty. One sadly spectacular outlier was a 12-mile highway expansion in Denver that took 13 years to get through environmental review.

The Trump Administration’s reforms, which are the first comprehensive update to NEPA rules since 1978, establish presumptive limits. A full environmental impact statement, the new rules say, should take no more than two years and 300 pages. An environmental assessment, which is less intensive, should max out at a year and 75 pages. Going longer will require written permission by “a senior agency official.”

These days there is a cruel disconnect between the economic news, which is looking up, and the pandemic news, which is wretched. But if the U.S. doesn’t bend the pandemic curve soon, the economy may slip back into recession.

While it’s a very low bar, developments on the economic front look better than they did a few months ago. No one should be happy with June’s 11.1% unemployment rate, but it’s notably better than April’s 14.7%. Payroll employment soared by record-breaking amounts in May and June: 7.5 million net jobs created in two months. Though that’s only a dent in the 22.2 million jobs lost in March and April, it’s a sizable one, especially for those who got the jobs. Consumer spending, which cratered by 18.4% in March and April, has now regained a bit more than a third of that drop. All this and more is to the good.

Developments on the pandemic front, however, are looking bad. The curve of confirmed daily infections for the U.S. has been rising since the middle of June, and the corresponding curves for some states are absolutely frightening. Since the beginning of this horror show, I and many other economists have said that the economy’s path would probably shadow the path of the pandemic. If the virus crested through quickly, and once, a V-shaped recovery was plausible. But if the pandemic returned for a second wave, we could easily suffer a double-dip recession.

Last month, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a 2020-21 state budget he described as “balanced, responsible and protects public safety and health, education, and services to Californians facing the greatest hardships.”

Whatever its other virtues may be, the budget is far from “balanced,” at least as most folks outside the Capitol would define it.

The 2020-21 budget spends far more — at least $20 billion more — than projected revenues, even including billions of dollars from the state’s emergency reserve.

The gap is closed, at least on paper, by running up the state’s credit card with debt of one kind or another, the most spectacular example being how it treats the budget’s largest single expenditure, state aid to school districts for the education of about 6 million kids.

Throughout her childhood, Samantha Galindo remembers how her dad would come home exhausted from working multiple jobs.

For five years, she worked with him cleaning offices from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m., doing her homework on the bus, in between breaks or after returning home. They had few options. Without the work, they couldn’t afford rent and other necessities in the converted garage where they once lived.

Samantha’s situation is not unique. Millions of Black, Indigenous and People of Color – BIPOC – are overrepresented in low-wage sectors which are more likely to not offer sick leave or health benefits. The situation is even more dire now. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated social, economic and racial inequities plaguing Black and Brown families.