Recently in Economy Category

Chairman and CEO of Kimco Staffing Services Kim Megonigal has these tips to offer anyone looking for work.

OC Weekly staff writer Gustavo Arellano is the man behind the "Ask A Mexican" column. He visits our show to share a personal tale of unemployment.

In this tight economy more homeowners are trying to get their homes in the movies--or in commercials, or on TV. Production companies will pay several thousand dollars a day to use houses for location shoots.

Jennie & Ken Bulow made nearly $10,000 last year renting their home out for commercials. SoCal Connected's Val Zavala visited them on the day a Dairy Queen commercial was shooting inside their living room.

The economic downturn has hit California hard and left millions without work. Some who have lost jobs have found new employment. But for many, that's meant a step down, and sometime a very big step down. LA Times columnist David Lazarus looks at how some people are coping with this downward mobility, and has some tips for jobs seekers of all kinds.

A lot of people will be interested in renting out their house after watching our story on Locations for Rent. But remember, supply exceeds demand. So here's some additional information and advice from the Bulow family, who were in our story and who've rented out their house. Also, advice from David Hatfield of CAST Locations.

What happens when a production crew comes in?

Who should NOT rent their home out?

Why do you think your house has been chosen several times?

What do you look for when deciding whether to include a house in your listings?

Unemployment By State, Dec. 2009

While the president stumps campaign-style to convince the public that his $787 billion stimulus package has averted another Great Depression, millions of people are still out looking for work.

To be fair, President Obama acknowledged that the high unemployment rate, which dipped ever so slightly from 10 to 9.7 percent in January, is still unacceptably high. And some economists argue the loss of jobs would be even higher without the stimulus.

But the official unemployment rate does not account for a significant number of people who want to work but for one reason or another are unemployed. This group, sometimes referred to as the "underemployed," includes those who have been forced to work fewer hours because of the down economy and those who've simply quit looking out of despair.

If you add in the underemployed, at least 10 million more people are stinging from the employment pinch than official numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicate. The BLS is the agency charged with tracking employment; the monthly unemployment rate you hear or read about comes from them.

But how do they get those numbers, what do they mean, and how bad is it?

One common misconception holds that the BLS simply tallies the people collecting unemployment checks or otherwise seeking help from state employment offices. In fact, the BLS collects data through a pair of monthly surveys administered to the members of 60,000 households and 160,000 employers, respectively. From these statistical samples, BLS then estimates the total number of unemployed and the overall size of the labor force.

In the household survey, anyone reporting to have a job is considered employed, while those who do not have a job but want and are actively seeking work count as unemployed.

But not everyone fits into one of these categories. If you stop looking for work for more than a month, you're no longer considered unemployed—in fact, you're not part of the labor force at all. That's fine for children, seniors in retirement homes, and stay-at-home husbands or wives, since they truly aren't part of the workforce. But what about those who can't find more than part-time work because of the economy, or those who had been searching unsuccessfully for six months and had given up even though they still wanted a job?

To catch the workers who fall through the cracks, the BLS began tracking several alternate measures of unemployment back in the '70s. Today it publishes six measures, neatly dubbed U1 through U6. The lower the number, the more restrictive the definition of "unemployed."

Unemployment: A Complete Picture? Charting the unemployment rates from all six BLS measures yields a range indicating how many might be out of work (in blue). The pink line shows the official unemployment rate. For reference, the orange line indicates how bad it was estimated to be during the Great Depression.

For instance, U1 only counts as jobless those who have been out of work for more than 15 weeks. The most inclusive, U6, counts anyone who has even casually looked for a job during the past year, along with "discouraged workers," or those who still express a desire to work but have given up the search. U6 also includes people who are working part-time only because they can't find full-time employment. For the official count—the one you'll read in the paper—the BLS uses U3.

Though not everyone agrees the U3 measure most accurately reflects true unemployment, the BLS maintains it is the most objective. Debate will likely continue into the foreseeable future, especially considering the vast discrepancies among the final counts from each.

Calif. Unemployment By Measure, 2009

For January, the U3 number was 14.8 million unemployed. According to the U6 measure, the number is closer to 25.7 million. That's 16.5 percent unemployment instead of 9.7 percent. In California, the difference is even more dramatic—21.1 percent as opposed to 11.3 percent, or nearly double. (That state data, the most recent available, is for December.)

As a point of comparison, the rate of unemployment in 1933, at the deepest point of the Great Depression, has been estimated at 25 percent.

It should be noted that as a tool for tracking economic health over time, none of the measures shows a marked difference from the U3 measure. The line graphs all track the same course.

But for the here and now, being told by anyone—president or otherwise—that unemployment is actually only 9.7 percent and that we're far from the numbers seen during the Great Depression is small consolation to the approximately 25,692,000* Americans who are struggling to find and keep a decent job.

* The BLS appears not to publish the actual U6 number, but we followed their instructions by adding the total number of unemployed, "plus all marginally attached workers, plus total employed part time for economic reasons" to come up with our figure.

$200 million and counting. That's the estimated size of the city of LA's current budget deficit, and it's growing - by more than third of a million dollars - every day.

Meanwhile, the City Council has decided to study what to do. The clock keeps ticking. The deficit grows.

Correspondent Judy Muller says we've heard about city budget shortfalls before. But this one is different. And very serious. She wonders, is this LA's moment of truth?

Just six or seven years ago fully two-thirds of all features films shot in the US were filmed here in Southern California.

Now that percentage has dropped to a third. So-called runaway production has been fueled by a host of incentives and tax breaks offered by other states. And that's costing California.

LA Times columnist David Lazarus investigates the reasons behind the Hollywood exodus, and looks at what local and state officials are trying to do to reverse it.

So, not surprisingly perhaps, the vast majority of states - and many local governments - now offer some sort of incentives to lure film-makers into shooting in their jurisdictions. They range from breaks on hotel room taxes, to generous income tax credits that can run into the tens of millions.

But some are questioning the value of such incentives, pointing to studies that indicate tax credits and other incentives for film companies do little to spur the local economy and may actually be hurting it.

ITEM: Struggling with a major budget deficit, the state of Wisconsin drastically scaled back its film tax credit this fall. The state had offered film companies a 25% tax credit, with no cap. That was replaced with a single, half million dollar grant designed to support a local film industry.

ITEM: Iowa had perhaps the most generous incentive of all the states - a 50% tax credit for qualified productions, which is advertised as "1/2 Price Filmmaking." But facing an almost one billion dollar revenue shortfall, lawmakers put a lid on the program, capping total credits awarded each year to no more than $50 million.

ITEM: Louisiana is another state with an aggressive incentive program, and critics have charged that it is subject to waste and corruption (a claim echoed by skeptics of film incentive programs in other states.) Last year, a producer, Malcolm Petal was sentenced to five years in federal prison after being convicted of bribing the head of the Louisiana film commission. The feds had been investigating the state's film office for years. Among the items of interest - a check for $27 million that the state wrote to repurchase tax credits earned by the producers of the film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

ITEM: A Missouri think tank, called the Show-Me Institute, concludes that "film productions don't promote lasting job growth or bring in significant tax revenue. Many productions can cost more in state funding than they generate in temporary economic activity." Like other observers, the Show-Me Institute concludes that too many states are vying for film productions, and that newcomers such as Missouri simply should not try to compete with states that have established film workforces and infrastructures.

It's not clear how many states may eventually cut or eliminate their film incentives. But it seems clear that the combination of an economic downturn, and a record that often reveals little or no economic benefit will almost certainly curtail the stampede to offer movie companies incentives to shoot in almost every place imaginable.

It's never been easy to succeed as a producer in Hollywood. But these days, you have to be a lot more than just an impresario.

The virtual epidemic of states offering tax credits and other incentives to film production companies means that a good producer might not just need an MBA, he or she also might need to be a CPA

We've created a little narrative diversion - a game of sorts - that illustrates just how arcane the business can be.

Give it a shot. See if you can avoid the pitfalls, and produce a blockbuster.

States hoping to cash in on a share of Hollywood production dollars have scrambled over the past decade to create incentive programs that could lure film studios both big and small.

States and some local governments issue the incentives, which include cash rebates, tax credits and deductions. In exchange, film companies are required to spend a certain amount of the budget within the state. That includes things such as hiring local production crews, using local banks to pay employees, and contracting with local businesses for services such as catering and transportation.

While not everyone agrees such incentives make good economic policy, the trend is indisputable: the number of states offering such programs has exploded.

Below are maps showing, for 2002 and then for 2009, the states which offer some kind of financial incentive to movie production companies. Further explanation follows.

The data come from two organizations, each more or less falling into opposite camps. The 2002 map uses information from a report by the Tax Foundation, which represents itself as a nonpartisan tax research group based in Washington, D.C. According to the organization, five states and the territory of Puerto Rico already offered some sort of incentive that year.

The 2009 map relies largely on data from Entertainment Partners, an industry organization that offers, among many other services, assistance to production companies in navigating and maximizing the numerous incentives now available (and which, it should be disclosed, processes some KCET employee paychecks).

In its report, the Tax Foundation argued that production incentives are unlikely to generate much wealth in the long term. States are taking "unnecessary risks with taxpayer dollars" in return for which "they attract mostly temporary jobs that are often transplanted from other states," the author claimed. You can read that report here.

In response to our inclusion of the Tax Foundation data, a representative of Entertainment Partners sent along several links to articles and reports defending the effectiveness of the incentive programs. You can find those here, here and here.

It should also be noted that the two organizations applied slightly different standards in accounting for incentives nationwide.

The Tax Foundation lists any state that offered any kind of incentive, down to simple sales tax relief or a break on hotel occupancy tax for visiting film crews. Entertainment Partners lists only those states which had formal programs enacted through legislation. We used the same standard as EP for the 2009 map, but despite the difference in methodology, the numbers are almost identical.

Since last fall, SoCal Connected has been investigating a revised flood map project instituted by FEMA.

The agency's actions meant homeowners throughout Southern California, and the entire nation, suddenly found their neighborhoods designated as flood zones. That meant they needed to purchase flood insurance, at a cost of hundreds and even thousands of dollars per year.

Our investigation showed that FEMA's maps were based on often flawed data, and since we began airing a series of stories, the agency has backed off, removing flood zone designations for some areas, including two we reported on - in South LA, and in Ventura County.

Here's a reference to our reporting on this story, presented in chronological order:

Hung Out to Dry
Long-time residents say there's never been any standing water, but some homeowners in South Los Angeles are paying thousands for flood insurance. Find out why in a special SoCal Connected investigation.

Hung Out To Dry: The Documents
If you like being a nosy reporter yourself, do the legwork. Check out these primary sources used to produce our segment "Hung Out To Dry?"

Update: Ventura Country
Residents of Ventura County also face steep insurance rates due to changes in flood maps prepared by FEMA.

Am I In A Flood Zone?

Check out this interactive map, and then visit Floodsmart.gov to get your flood risk profile. (Requires Google Earth.)

Hung Out To Dry: Victory In Ventura
Our investigation pays off for some Ventura County residents. After we found some holes in FEMA's plan to declare some neighborhoods as flood zones—and require the residents to pay big insurance premiums—FEMA backed down and now says it will revisit its decision.

FEMA Backs Down in South LA
Following SoCal's coverage, hundreds more homes the agency at first put in high-risk flood zones are suddenly safe.

How can you tell if the owner of your favorite car wash is underpaying the workers who clean your car?

The people, mostly men, who work in car washes are, by all accounts, some of the most likely workers to suffer so-called "wage theft." Many are paid less than minimum wage, receive no additional pay for overtime, and are sometimes not paid at all, with tips as their only compensation.

These workers are protected by various federal and state laws regulating minimum wage, overtime pay and other labor standards. Still, violations are rampant. So much so, that California created a special law, popularly known as the California Car Wash Workers law, to regulate the business that employ such workers.

Under the law, car washes and car polishing businesses are required to register with the state, or face fines of up to $10,000. The businesses must provide proof they have worker's compensation insurance, and they must post a surety bond that can be used to pay workers in the event the operator is found to owe extra wages. Finally, they must document all hours worked by and wage paid to employees.

According to records kept by the state's Dept. of Industrial Relations there are 337 car washes registered in LA County, and another 109 in Orange County. Still, compliance remains a problem. In the past two years, car wash operators were fined more than $10 million for labor violations, and the bulk of that - some $6 million - was in fines for businesses that had failed to register with the state.

Is there any way to tell if the place where you get your car washed is exploiting its workers? Insiders say one almost sure bet is any place that is charging significantly less than the competition.

You can check this list which we prepared using data from the California Dept. of Industrial Relations to see if the car wash you frequent is registered with the state. That's no guarantee that its operators don't violate workers' rights, but it's at least an indication that they are making an effort to comply with the law.

They're oversized and extravagant. Just a few years ago sprawling houses, known as MacMansions, were all the rage. Now many are sitting, unoccupied, their owners unable to find buyers.

Correspondent Lisa Ling went house-hunting, and found some remarkable bargains - if you have a remarkable bank account.