How might the GOP tax plan affect the economy in the Golden State? How Chinatown has changed over the years, the fires have made Santa Barabara a "ghost town."
California and the GOP tax plan
The final Republican tax bill passed the House today, and is now moving to the Senate for a vote. President Trump has said he wants to sign the tax cut bill by Christmas.
While the effect of the bill varies person to person, economists say the effects multiply greatly statewide. To find out how, exactly, Take Two's Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Kevin Klowden, with the nonprofit Milken Institute in Santa Monica, and Chris Thornberg, with the LA-based consultancy Beacon Economics.
Which California companies stand to benefit most from the tax revision
"Big winners are probably going to be the tech companies," Klowden said. "They're getting to see their corporate tax rate cut significantly. Even if a number of them were not paying 35 percent, they're using deductions to bring it down even further. They're definitely going to gain."
Which citizens will see gains from the new tax plan
"Obviously the wealthiest Americans," Thornberg said. "The folks who own those tech companies and so much more of the equities in the United States. I like to say this is not policy. This is a pillage and payback, if you will. What you have is a tax plan that does lob a few hundred dollars at most Americans. But they do so on the basis of this enormous tax cut for the wealthiest among us and that in the context of an economy that is already seeing a record number of wealth and equality."
4D Summit details dangers of impaired driving
More than 13 million Californians will be traveling this holiday season. That puts roughly a third of the state's population at risk they for encountering impaired driving or even doing it themselves.
On Tuesday, the Auto Club of Southern California is holding something called the 4D Summit in downtown LA. It's a day-long discussion looking at the latest research into drugged, distracted, drowsy and drunk driving.
Doug Shupe is a spokesman for the Auto Club of Southern California. He joined Take Two's Meghan McCarty Carino to talk about the different types of impairment, including drugged driving -- a major focus for the 4D Summit.
Traffic safety experts expect an increase in drugged driving once the legal sale of recreational marijuana begins in California on January 1.
"People must know that getting behind the wheel after ingesting or smoking marijuana is still illegal and it is very dangerous," Shupe said. "And also a very alarming recent survey by the Colorado Department of Transportation found that 55 percent of people surveyed said they believed it was safe to drive under the influence of marijuana. The same percentage of people -- about 55 percent in the survey -- also said they had driven high about a dozen times within the last month in Colorado. We don't want that happening here on our roadways in California."
The closure of this Chinatown hospital is the latest blow in the gentrifying neighborhood
One of the oldest hospitals in Los Angeles has closed its doors. After 157 years serving the community in and around Chinatown, the Pacific Alliance Medical Center quietly shut down and laid off all 638 of its employees.
It had been a major hospital for that part of town, with a staff that spoke Mandarin and Cantonese, among other dialects, and became a fixture in the community. Frank Shyong, who wrote about the closure for the L.A. Times, had this to say:
"Chinatown for a lot of years and even going into today has been this area where immigrants just kind of land and figure things out. Having a hospital there, with a bunch of immigrants who couldn't speak English and didn't understand the American medical system and insurance, the hospital basically evolved services to fit that."
The hospital's closure is a symbol of the irreversible changes happening in the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, Shyong added. The change has been happening slowly over decades. As more and more Asian Americans moved to the San Gabriel Valley, it would seem that there is little left for Asian Americans in Chinatown. Yet, Shyong explained that the cultural and generational connection to the neighborhood remains strong.
"There are still lots of people who drive past the San Gabriel Valley from Redlands or wherever to go patronize the businesses that they're familiar with. And of course there's Little Tokyo and lots of these ancestral connections that are still maintained by the people and the generations left over."
Streaming war erupts with Disney's purchase of 21st Century Fox
If you thought Game of Thrones was a compelling TV drama, how about a nazi, handmaid and demogorgon all battling it out? Those are the characters in some of the most popular shows available through streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime.
But with Disney's purchase of 21st Century Fox, it could soon have majority control over one of these streaming platforms – Hulu. That could accelerate the race to be on top.
"This is the new network war, and it's taking place online," says Dominic Patten, senior editor and chief TV critic at Deadline Hollywood.
Disney has had its lucrative movies like "Moana" and "Captain America" on Netflix, but if it shifts those kinds of programming over to Hulu, it could create its own online behemoth.
"Streaming is a little bit of the niche marketing game where you win by a thousand paper cuts," says Patten. "Get a little bit of an audience for this one, get a little bit for this, and pretty soon people are paying that $11.99."
And for consumers, it can still pay off have all of these separate services.
"Even if you add those up, you're still not paying anywhere what you'd be paying for a cable bill," he says.
Patten spoke about all of this Tuesday with Take Two's Meghan McCarty-Carino.
Santa Barbara's plans to bounce back from the Thomas Fire
While Santa Barbara residents are trying to stay safe during the Thomas fire, local businesses like hotels, retailers and restaurants are also trying to cope.
With its stunning seaside and lush forest views, Santa Barbara is a prime tourist spot for many Angelenos. But air filled with smoke and ash is keeping tourists away.
To find out how the area's pre-holiday tourist traffic been affected by the fires, Take Two's Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to Santa Barbara local, Lindsey LeBlanc. She's a supervisor at Backyard Bowls, a smoothie and fruit bowl shop in downtown Santa Barbara.
Interview highlights
How are things where you are?
LEBLANC: I had started to reconsider leaving [Saturday]. I made the decision to close the store for the day. I just didn't think it was safe because it ended up getting really smoky that day. They put out the fires that evening. They had said that the winds were in their favor...so that was good.
What's your sense of other businesses in the area?
LEBLANC: The streets are like ghost towns, so you can definitely tell that there are a lot people who aren't in town anymore. Over the weekend and late last week, there were a lot of people packing up their cars. You can tell there aren't a lot of tourists in town.
McCarty Carino also spoke to Ken Oplinger, president and CEO of the Chamber of Commerce, Santa Barbara region. He wants tourists to know that despite the fires, Santa Barbara is thriving and tourists should keep any plans to visit.
For a lot of Angelenos, Santa Barbara is a getaway spot. What is the traffic normally like this time of year and how has the fire affected that?
OPLINGER: It's the off season, but for the couple of weeks before Christmas, we generally see an uptick. Hotels and restaurants are full. The last two weeks have been disappointing. For the retail industry, this is the time of year they make or break it. So it's disconcerting.
Some hotels have been evacuated, and others are asking guests to stay indoors. How do you describe the situation with Santa Barbara hotels right now?
OPLINGER: Most of the hotels in town have remained open throughout this incident. Many are hosting folks that are evacuated. But we still have guests in the area. I think hotels know they can get through a time like this which is finite and the fires will be put out, but so many people in the Los Angeles metro area, Orange County, San Diego who are thinking about January/February plans are making cancellations. The message to those folks are, 'We're open for business here, the fires are essentially put out.' So we encourage them to rethink that and come back.
How have retailers been dealing with this during the holiday season?
OPLINGER: What they're hoping is that we have one more shopping weekend, that they can recover somewhat. Many of them have brought in a tremendous amount of inventory to meet the needs of the holiday shoppers. You've seen the downturn across the board that they're going to be strongly looking at how to recover.
What's the game plan for Santa Barbara businesses to bounce back?
OPLINGER: We're going to have to put some effort in. There's going to be in the next week to ten days, we'll begin a pretty substantial marketing campaign in L.A. We're going to really work to encourage folks to come back to Santa Barbara and let them know that we're open for business and things are as wonderful as they always are here.
Interviews have been edited for clarity
Tuesday Reviewsday: Inara George, the Reverend Shawn Amos and Ella Fitzgerald.
Every week we get a fresh new list of great music for Tuesday Reviewsday. This week music journalist
stopped by and gave us his take on three new albums from Inara George, the Reverend Shawn Amos and Ella Fitzgerald.
Ella Fitzgerald
Album: Ella at Zardi’s
More than six decades ago, on February 2, 1956, Ella Fitzgerald took the stage at Hollywood Boulevard's Zardi’s Jazzland.
The show was two-and-a-half weeks into a multi-week run, coming just as she’d signed to the new Verve Records label, created by producer Norman Granz in large part to spotlight Fitzgerald’s considerable talents. Granz recorded the show, but it was left in the vaults as the artist and label put full attention on launching her essential, comprehensive, definitive series of “Song Book” collections.
So now, capping off releases marking the 2017 centennial of her birth, we get a real treat.
The performance reveals an artist already having had many peaks now on the verge of moving to even greater heights. But even without that context it’s a delightful ride, the full 21 songs, in brilliant sound, capturing every swoop and slide of her incomparable vocal artistry, starting with the 1926 song “It All Depends on You,” a hit for Doris Day, Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra, and recorded by dozens more, but never before released by her.
Inara George
Album: Dearest Everybody
A song cycle about self discovery, about reckoning with one’s past, one’s legacy, starting with something she’s never before grappled with in song, at least explicitly: being the daughter of Lowell George, leader of the band Little Feat and an essential figure in the ‘70s L.A. rock scene, who died in 1979 at age 34 when she was just a child. His wake, which she attended, fell on her fifth birthday. But here, in the first lines of the first song, “Young Adult,” she spells it out:
“I was the daughter of my father, I was the color of a half lit moon.”
And with that, she gives herself permission to explore the big questions left in her life, quickly running through different phases and stages, a summary of how her life moved from then to now, and counting.
Well, the light is with her. She brings it to every song she sings here, every alleyway of life she explores, some in great need of it. It’s something that has marked all her work, in solo albums, collaborations with composer-arranger Van Dyke Parks, her Bird and the Bee partnership with producer-musician Greg Kurstin and the charming Living Sisters with Eleni Mandell, Becky Stark and Alex Lilly.
On “Dearest Everybody,” her first solo album since 2009, to be released in January, she carries that light with confidence into matters most intimate, the balance of life with loss in particular.
All of the songs commemorate deaths of people close to her, and it’s loving and heartbreaking in the best ways, her lilting melodies carried by her clear, unaffected voice and an almost easily creative command of a sweeping array of classic pop forms, shaped expertly with longtime producer Mike Andrews.
And if in “Young Adult” she gave herself permission to open doors of her life, in “Release Me,” a wistfully romantic ballad that could have been from the 1950s, she does the same for her mother, taking her voice as she grapples with grief all these years later.
The album comes out in January, but already she’s shining the light between the joy and the sorrow.
The Reverend Shawn Amos
Album: The Reverend Shawn Amos Breaks It Down
As we stand on the verge of 2018, the Reverend Shawn Amos tried to make some sense of what we experienced in a confounding 2017. It’s tough going, but with some bluesy fire he has a good go of it, holding on to some level of faith in humanity, but knowing that we have a lot of work to do to get back on track.
The groove and his tone draw on some classics of socially conscious artists: a bit Staples Singers, a bit Curtis Mayfield, a bit Marvin Gaye. There’s a righteousness to it — he took the Reverend title as a performer with purpose — but it’s preachy in the best sense of the word. And it fulfills what L.A. native Amos — his dad was cookie man Wally “Famous” Amos — has been building toward since he moved from successful music business exec to focus full time on his own music a while back.
The full album, “The Reverend Shawn Amos Breaks It Down,” is due for February release. This single is a tantalizing preview, looking back on the year but with a mind on building a better future.