Interactive California Budget Tool ~ You Decide!

Next 10 is inviting all Californians to take the California Budget Challenge, a nonpartisan Internet tool that lets you roll up your sleeves and create your own state budget. You call the shots on how much to spend on schools, the environment, healthcare, prisons and other state programs – and how to pay for them.  Should we levy a carbon tax?  Restructure Prop 13?  Cut income taxes?  YOU DECIDE!

By Michael Rugnetta, Jonathan Russell and Jonathan D. Moreno

The world stands on the brink of a genome-based personalized-medicine revolution, with individual Americans poised to be the greatest beneficiaries. An international research consortium that includes our country’s National Human Genome Research Institute recently announced its $50 million plan to sequence the genomes of at least 1,000 individuals from around the world. According to NHGHRI Director Francis Collins, this project will increase the sensitivity of disease discovery efforts across the human genome five-fold, and within gene regions (the portions of a chromosome on which a particular gene is located) at least 10-fold.

What’s more, Harvard University geneticist George Church has also embarked on the even more ambitious “Personal Genome Project.” He aims to sequence 100,000 genomes at a cost of about $1 billion, and possibly expand the project until it reaches 1 million sequenced genomes.

For individual Americans, this growth of genomic data means more accurate personal genetic information will become available to them, their physicians and, yes, their insurance companies, to make perhaps monumental health care decisions. This new information could well be a blessing or a curse, depending on how it is handled by patients, their doctors and their insurers. That’s why legislation based on the best bioethical principles needs to be enacted by Congress this year. Genetic testing will become increasingly more accurate as more research is done.

But more importantly, in the meantime many genetic tests remain highly inaccurate. The results of genetic testing today are hardly reliable, yet they are already part of the medical marketplace. Congress’s failure to enact federal genetic testing laws is one reason for this problem. A U.S. Department of Health and Human Services panel estimates that over the past decade over 1,100 genetic tests have become available. The website GeneTests reports that there are currently 1,546 diseases for which testing are available (see graph on page 2). However, some of these are only research tests; the number of clinical tests that are available is 1,258. But until recently most tests were for very rare conditions. That percentage is beginning to rise, however, as genetic variants are being identified that increase risk for common complex diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease and macular degeneration.

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By Christian E. Weller

America’s families are caught in a perfect storm. Massive amounts of debt, falling house prices, disappearing jobs, flat wages, lower benefits, and skyrocketing costs for the most important consumer items are quickly emptying the pockets of middle class America and bringing many families to the edge of financial ruin.

The fact that policymakers have for years ignored large economic imbalances only exacerbates threats to the economic well-being of American working families. Massive trade deficits pose a drain on our national resources, slowing innovation means that we are generating less of what we need, and long-term budget deficits due to tax cuts for the rich are preventing the government from addressing the economic needs of America’s families.

1. Job losses mount. The already weak labor market has taken a turn for the worse. Employment declined by 80,000 jobs in March 2008—the largest loss since March 2003. Over the past three months, the economy lost 232,000 jobs. Average monthly job growth was only 44,700 jobs over the past 12 months, compared to 138,600 jobs in the previous 12 months, and 236,900 jobs in the 12 months before that.

2. Wages remain flat. Factoring in inflation, hourly wages were only 2.3% higher and weekly wages were only 1.1% higher in February 2008 than in March 2001.

3. Fewer people have pensions and health insurance. The share of private sector workers with a pension dropped from 50.3% in 2000 to 43.2% in 2006, and the share of people with employer-provided health insurance dropped from 64.2% to 59.7%.

4. Family debt hits record highs. Household debt averaged a record 133.7% of disposable income in the fourth quarter of 2007. In the fourth quarter of 2007, families spent 14.3% of their disposable income to service their debt, up from 13.0% in the first quarter of 2001.

5. The housing crisis deepens. New home sales in February 2008 were 28.9% lower than a year earlier, and existing home sales were 23.8% lower. The median sales price of existing homes was 8.2% lower in February 2008 than a year earlier, and the median sales price of new homes dropped 2.7%. The average monthly supply of homes for the six months ending in October was 9.4 months, the highest since January 1982.

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New figures from the Employment Development Department show that the unemployment rate in California jumped to 6.2% in March, the highest rate since July 2004, when the rate was at the same mark. California is now only behind Michigan (7.2%) and Alaska (6.7%) in unemployment. Counties with high numbers of jobs in housing-related employment appear to have been hit hardest, with Riverside County the worst affected (7.4% unemployment).

What you won’t see on fantasy TV shows: a cratered real estate industry, few jobs, foreclosed homes, and empty office space

by Christopher Palmeri of Business Week

The sun still sets magnificently on the cliffs of Laguna Beach. The Angels are slugging away on another could-be-the-champs baseball season. Over in Disneyland —the self-proclaimed Happiest Place on Earth—a new attraction debuts in June. The Innovations Dream House will show off high-tech gadgetry from Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard while allowing guests to interact with the fictional Elias family as it prepares to attend a soccer tournament in China.

If they weren’t make-believe, the Eliases would probably be postponing that trip and worrying about their jobs. They might even be fighting foreclosure on their Dream House. That’s life in Orange County these days as the subprime disaster comes home to roost.

A 1,000-square-mile swath of well-heeled suburbia just south of Los Angeles, the “O.C.” was the main headquarters for dozens of mortgage companies that have now gone bust, among them Ameriquest, once the nation’s largest subprime lender, and New Century, once among the top 10. As a result the region is one of the hardest hit by the collapse of the housing market. Big builders such as Lennar are putting new construction on hold. The Orange County Register calculates that 43 local mortgage outfits laid off some 7,200 workers last year.

Orange County still looks like a sunny, can-do place, with an $8 billion-a-year tourism industry and shopping malls the size of small cities. It is home to 3 million people, whose $58,000 median annual household income is $10,000 higher than that of the U.S. as a whole. There are shiny new office towers and subdivisions filled with Spanish-style homes. But like native son Richard Nixon (born in Yorba Linda, wintered in San Clemente), the O.C. has a dark persona that seems to rear its head every so often. In 1994 the county became the largest municipality in the country to declare bankruptcy, done in by bad investments in dicey securities. Now it’s the subprime mortgage fiasco.

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Commentary

By Frank D. Russo of the California Progress Report

Remember the great story from February 7, “California Coastal Commission Rejects Toll Road: Shows a People-Powered Coalition Can be Effective on Transportation and Land Use Issues” that extolled the workings of our democracy in the Golden State and the effects of a record 3,500 people attending the hearing can have on public policy?

The Coastal Commission, embedded in our California Constitution by a vote of the people, voted 8-2 to reject the idea of building this toll road through a state park. This included the votes of state elected officeholders. The Commission’s actions were taken after its staff issued a scathing report saying “It’s difficult to imagine a more environmentally damaging alternative location. No measures exist that would enable the proposed alignment to be found consistent with the California Coastal Act.”

Apparently that was a little bit too much of democracy for those who want to pave over paradise, the Transportation Corridor Agency. Not only do they want the Feds to overturn our state’s decision and to order the building of this toll road and destruction of a state park—but they don’t want the public to be allowed to participate in an open and public hearing. Check out the letter their attorney has written to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Silver Springs, Maryland they have written that tries to turn history on its head with Orwellian logic:

“Throughout the decades of environmental review, all of the many local, state and federal agencies who have endorsed the Project have provided the public with extensive and unrestricted opportunities to comment on the Project and on Project alternatives….

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