In the States

As we’ve been saying for many years, America faces a retirement savings crisis. We think Congress has a good opportunity to address the crisis, which is why we recently sent comments to the House Ways and Means Committee recommending ways to fix the nation’s retirement system. However, we’ll freely admit that there’s more than one way to skin a cat.

Today, the Asset Building Program is releasing a new issue brief about an innovative, state-level response to the retirement savings crisis – the California Secure Choice Retirement Savings Program. Currently, over six million private sector workers in California lack access to a retirement savings account through their employers; nationwide, only about half the private workforce has access to such accounts, and low-income workers have particularly low rates of access. California Secure Choice (“CSC”) would automatically create an account for all private sector workers in the state who lack coverage through their workplace, thus enabling a much broader swath of the population to accumulate essential savings to supplement their Social Security benefits. Below are some key features of the program:

Paul Misener, the vice president for global public policy at Amazon.com, appeared before members of Congress Wednesday to urge it to pass a proposed bill that would require online retailers — including Amazon itself — to collect state sales tax on the goods they sell through their websites.

“Congress should help address the states’ budget shortfalls without spending federal funds, by authorizing the states to require collection of the billions of revenue dollars already owed,” Misener said.

Change is never pretty. And the change that results when 50 states step in to take on a job Washington has tried and failed to do can be especially messy. This is what's happening -- with a vengeance -- on immigration. In the past five years, there has been a virtual revolution in immigration lawmaking. And the result is not just chaos -- it's a lot of bad policy.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA), if implemented as passed, will improve the financial security of Californians, and in particular that of low and middle-income Californians. While reducing the strain of medical bills and health insurance costs on family budgets is a major aim of the legislation, it also offers tools to individuals and communities as they attempt to reduce the “upstream” cost of poor health.

The ACA bridges the health-wealth connection in four major ways:

This is an idea so terrible and without merit that one has to wonder if some of its backers are simply trying to make money by taking short positions on municipal bonds.

(Okay, that might be hyperbole. Or it might not.) Sometimes things that should be simple are instead incredibly complex.

Like getting a bank account, or saving a little of your paycheck or tax refund. Or, for instance, the sharing of best practices in local financial empowerment innovations by the people who have become leaders in the field.

Our program’s webinar today was not exactly simple to execute—450 registered participants, 200 active users within the webinar’s chat room, five speakers in different time zones—but neither is the field being addressed.

The California Asset Building Program's Banking Development Districts measure, AB 38, and no-cost philanthropic Financial Education Fund measure, AB 597, have again cleared policy hearings in the Assembly.

Two of Wall Street's savviest value investors, Bruce Berkowitz and David Einhorn, pride themselves on their rigorous analysis. Now they're locked in a scorched-earth dispute over the value of some Florida real estate. How could they look at the same facts and reach such wildly different conclusions, and what does that say about the “value” of value investing?

The struggle in Wisconsin over the future of collective bargaining by public employees is the most dramatic battle in a war being waged on many fronts over the future of public sector unionism. In other states and cities, the issue is whether states whose revenues have collapsed because of the recession should fund the promised pensions of public employees like police officers, emergency responders and school teachers.

Three years after the stock market cratered in 1929, American schools suffered their own crash. School districts had managed to ride out the early years of the Great Depression; in fact, because many districts depended on property taxes, which didn’t crash as fast as income taxes, more than a few managed to increase spending.