Daily Business Report: Wednesday, August 27, 2025
If County Dips Into Reserves, Millions Would go to Employee Bonuses
By Lisa Halverstadt| Voice of San Diego
If county supervisors vote Tuesday to change the county’s reserve policy, they’ll also trigger bonuses for county employees.
County supervisors in June signed off on then-tentative three-year deals with three county labor unions. The now-finalized deals include raises and call for $1,000 lump-sum payments this year if supervisors approve changes to county reserve policies. The deals also call for $500 bonuses in 2026 and $250 ones in 2027. Supervisors are set to vote Tuesday on two tentative labor contracts with the same terms.
County employees will welcome these likely payouts at a time when county residents, including local government employees, are grappling with the region’s skyrocketing cost of living. Yet the lump-sum payments to roughly 17,000 employees, including some non-union workers, could also leave the county with fewer reserve funds to shield its budget and vulnerable county residents from federal cuts.
Niall Ferguson: Our Own Gilded Age
By Niall Ferguson | The Free Press
“History never repeats itself, but the kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends.” The quotation, often given wrongly as “History never repeats itself, but it rhymes,” comes from chapter 47 of The Gilded Age by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner. Published in 1873, this seldom-read novel gave its name to an epoch of American history. The current popularity of HBO’s television series of the same title prompts the question: Are we living in a new Gilded Age?
As columnist Peggy Noonan noted last week in The Wall Street Journal, HBO’s series has struck a chord. It is not just that it captures “the clang, clash, and fire of industrial America being born and high society being invented.” It’s that it offers a vision of an American elite apparently free of our modern neuroses.
Rather than “the freakish glamour of the Met Gala,” Noonan observed, the show’s creator, Julian Fellowes, gives viewers a costume parade that is “secure in the values it asserts, confident in its definitions.” The talented cast—Christine Baranski as the snobbish Agnes van Rhijn, Carrie Coon as the scheming Bertha Russell—make the best of scripts that sometimes sound like episodes of Downton Abbey translated into American English by ChatGPT.
Can We Get Ready for the Senior Population Boom?
By Will Huntsberry| Voice of San Diego
Reporters are well known for their hysterics and exaggeration, but this is the plain truth: San Diego is not even close to ready for the coming population boom of seniors.
Some of the statistics are starting to find a place in our consciousness. The share of old people is growing much faster than other groups. In just a three-year period, between 2020 and 2023, San Diego’s 65-plus population grew by 9 percent, while every other groups shrank, as Axios reported. Very soon we’ll have more old people than young. American society has never been proportioned in such a way and the proportions are only going to get more and more lopsided. We are in the early days.
The people retiring today don’t have as much money and assets as they did 20 years ago. Home ownership, which grants stability and equity to the old, is declining more rapidly in California than most places, because homes here cost so god-awful much. Among those lucky enough to own a home, the percentage of people who have paid it off by the age of 65 is also going down.
