Blogs of the LA Area Chamber

For the students of Los Angeles, holiday presents came early this year. Despite difficult financial times — including California's mid-year budget cuts to education last week — two recent developments show that it is still possible for public institutions to get their act together when addressing the future of our children. 

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From the days the Santa Fe Railroad opened Southern California to the Midwest and East Coast by connecting Chicago with Los Angeles, through the silver screen glamour years of Hollywood's golden era, and up through our latest role as a global center for entertainment, culture and restaurants, Los Angeles has a long and proud history as a worldwide tourist destination and is the preferred gateway for international travelers into the United States.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Millions of Muggles will be coming to Los Angeles to visit Hogwarts and they won’t need to take a special train from platform nine and three-quarters for wizards only. Warner Bros. Entertainment and Universal Parks and Resorts announced today a partnership that will bring The Wizarding World of Harry Potter to Universal Studios Hollywood and create a major new tourist attraction for Los Angeles and Southern California.

 

 

 

 

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With 38 million people and the eighth largest economy in the world, California has the resources to achieve great things for its citizens. But we don't always use those collective resources to our advantage. Besides the obvious political differences between Republicans and Democrats in Sacramento and Washington, D.C., we allow long standing geographic differences to undermine the development of plans to maximize the vast and diverse human and physical resources of our great State. These regional divisions go unchallenged, in part because we do not take the time to understand the resources and aspirations of the rest of the State and how we can all benefit by working together rather than rallying the troops to compete with each other.

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Last week, a group of Loyola Marymount University (LMU) students tried their hand at solving our nation’s budget deficit. At the West Coast launch of Budget Hero 2.0 — a web game sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Public Insight Network at American Public Media — teams of LMU students in economics and political science were tasked with eliminating $1.2 trillion of federal deficit. With free reign to make decisions on federal budget items, including defense, education, social security, Medicare and the Bush tax cuts, the teams deliberated on the real world impacts of cuts and expenditures. They all reached the same conclusion. Reducing the deficit is a daunting task, but it can be achieved with courage and compromise.

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Three weeks ago, Governor Jerry Brown laid out a fair and comprehensive plan to address California’s growing public employee pension liability crisis. The governor’s 12-point plan received widespread and positive news coverage from taxpayers, pension experts and media.

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Walk to End Homelessness on November 19 Each night 51,000 people are homeless in Los Angeles County. This population, which is the size of a small city, makes Los Angeles ...

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Last week, Gov. Jerry Brown released a forward-looking pension reform plan that will apply to current and future public employees, including state, local and school employees. His 12-point plan is aggressive and comprehensive, and deserves the support of the taxpayers and the state Legislature. It acknowledges the runaway and unsustainable costs of public employee pensions that have been staring the state in the face for far too long and can no longer be ignored.

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A local contract dispute and its resolution will greatly impact the lives and futures of Los Angeles' 700,000 schoolchildren. The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) Board of Education and the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) are engaged in negotiations toward a successor agreement to a contract that expired in June and remains in place until a new agreement is negotiated.

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President Barack Obama is signing three historic free trade agreements (FTAs) this week that will bode well for American companies and their employees. No state or its citizens will benefit more from these three agreements with Korea, Panama and Colombia than California. And for that we thank the U.S. Congress for passing the measure last week. Our agricultural products, computer technology and manufactured goods will now be more attractive to consumers in these nations because the existing tariffs on American products will be eliminated over time. Estimates are that the FTA with Korea alone will generate an additional $13 billion in economic trade for U.S. companies each year. 

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