Tilly: Curing L.A.'s Budget Woes

Chris Tilly, LERA member and director of the UCLA institute for Research on Labor and Employment, writing in a July 25 Los Angeles Magazine first-person op-ed suggests ways the City of Los Angeles can solve its budget woes without eliminating public services and making life more difficult for "the most vulnerable property owners, such as lower income homeowners, laid-off workers" and elders on a fixed income." Tilly diagnoses LA's budget problems as stemming from the economic slump, growing economic inequality "politically imposed limits on local taxation." Tilly's prescriptions for a budgetary cure: increasing short-term municipal spending as stimulus; direct spending to creating good jobs for "historically excluded populations": and improving local tax collections by expanding property, not sales, taxes. Click here to read Tilly's op-ed. The Institute for Research on Labor and Employment is a LERA organizational sponsor.

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