Talking Jobs and California

AWB president Don Brunell's blog post on the continued travails of the once-Golden, now Pyrite, state merits addition attention here.

Since 2001, California has lost nearly a third of its manufacturing base, a 32 percent decline in just eight years. The impact has been devastating: 600,000 lost jobs, $75 billion a year in lost wages and $5 billion annually in lost tax revenue, money that once helped balance the state's budget. 

He quotes Jack Stewart, head of the California Manufacturers and Technology Association.

Manufacturing and other companies are leaving California or failing to expand, in large part, because of the state's notoriously expensive and uncertain regulatory environment. Businesses are afraid to invest here because the rules keep changing while the cost of compliance spirals ever higher.

As Washington Roundtable president Steve Mullin wrote in this Seattle Times op-ed last month, our legislators should look south.

Tempting as it might be to balance the state's budget with significant tax increases, the employers I represent urge restraint. Now is not the time to stifle job creation. Businesses can send money to the state in the form of higher taxes or invest it in the form of new jobs. California's experience is applicable here. (Don't forget that the aerospace industry was one of the first to flee that state.)

We don't need to guess what might happen if business costs get too high. South of us, the evidence is all too clear.