Picture this: an entrepreneur wants to open a yogurt shop.  She has a business plan, has secured the operating capital and has a location picked out for the new small business.  However, before she can hire employees and open her doors for business to sell her product and contribute to the local economy, a state bureaucrat has to certify that the people who will come to get yogurt are not adding to vehicle congestion in that neighborhood.  Huh?

If this sounds too outlandish to be real, think again.  It’s just the latest in a series of crazy legislative proposals in the state of California.  Legislative proposals which, if passed, add one more burdensome, impenetrable layer of business strangling state regulation that California businesses struggle with every day.

Let’s move past the practical application of such a proposal – How are earth do you calculate and quantify where people will come from to purchase a cup of yogurt?…How is this in any way beneficial to California’s struggling economy? – and say that regulations like these are killing businesses every single day, contributing to the sluggish economy and persistent joblessness and thrilling the economic development departments in states like Nevada, Texas and Colorado who work hard to provide incentives for businesses to locate in their state.

Californians are well aware of the costs of income, property and sales taxes.  However, sometimes the hidden costs of regulation go unnoticed.  These regulations are present every single day in every Californian’s life: what kind of light bulbs we can buy, what age our children must be in a car seat while driving, what food we buy and how we cook it, right down to the volume of our television commercials.  The costs of regulations are imposed upon businesses and passed directly to the consumers in the form of high prices and limited choices.  It is difficult to quantify the total costs of regulations; suffice it to say the cumulative burden is staggering. And the cost of complying with excessive government mandates on businesses are directly borne by every man, woman and child.

In the extremely challenging economic environment, it is absolutely crucial that lawmakers stop proposing and passing crazy job-killing legislation.  Instead, take a page from the playbook of states like Texas and Nevada:  create incentives for businesses to locate, contribute and prosper in our California communities.

California is still the ninth largest economy in the world.  To continue to have a chance to compete in the global economy, we need to reform the sheer number and types of regulations that are killing businesses, and California jobs.