California politicians visit California jobs … in Texas

California politicians visit California jobs … in Texas
posted at 3:35 pm on April 22, 2011 by Ed Morrissey

When California politicians want to visit California jobs, they increasingly have to leave California to do so. That’s why Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom traveled with a small entourage of other Golden State politicians to Texas, the biggest beneficiary of California’s economic policies. So many jobs have fled California to Texas, John Fund writes for the Wall Street Journal, that the governing class needed lessons from Texas Governor Rick Perry on how not to repel business:

“We came to learn why they would pick up their roots and move in order to grow their businesses,” says GOP Assemblyman Dan Logue, who organized the trip. “Why does Chief Executive magazine rate California the worst state for job and business growth and Texas the best state?”

The contrast is undeniable. Texas has added 165,000 jobs during the last three years while California has lost 1.2 million. California’s jobless rate is 12% compared to 8% in Texas.

“I don’t see this as a partisan issue,” Mr. Newsom told reporters before the group met with Texas Republican Gov. Rick Perry. The former San Francisco mayor has many philosophical disagreements with Mr. Perry, but he admitted he was “sick and tired” of hearing about the governor’s success luring businesses to Texas.

In fact, those jobs are moving so quickly that the politicians can’t keep up with them. While California’s delegation visited Texas, another major business announced its intention to move. Fujitsu Frontech, a major high-tech company, will move its manufacturing facilities from Foothill Ranch, California to New York. The announcements of the move didn’t indicate how many jobs this entails, but it’s probably not minimal, and California can hardly stand to lose any at the moment.

Newsom wants to position himself as a “pro-jobs Democrat,” but that’s been an oxymoron in California for decades. If Newsom wants to reverse that trend, he’ll have to start eliminating the red tape that forces business owners to take as long as two years to build and launch locations, as Carls Jr/Hardees executive Andy Pudzer told the group. The state needs to rid itself of its penchant for regulation, especially demonstrated in the episode concerning the California Air Resource Board’s use of a questionable study authored by an academic fraud that not only threatens to put independent trucking companies out of business, but also honest scientists that blow the whistle on the unseemly relationship between state-based Academia and regulatory boards such as CARB.

And that doesn’t even start to address California’s ridiculously high taxes, and the overly progressive nature of its income tax system that guarantees revenue crashes during economic downturns.

Until Californians come to grips with the fact that they have overregulated the state into non-competitiveness, taxed it to the point of overwhelming investor risk, and continue to spend far beyond its means, jobs will continue to disappear from the Golden State at a rapid pace. Their only other hope is that the NRLB decides to enforce the Anti-Dog-Eat-Dog Law they discovered when dealing with Boeing.
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To read more about dog-eat-dog-law, click here.