Dan Walters misses what’s important in California’s Economy
The Sacramento Bee’s Dan Walters opined on Monday that there is no evidence of job-migration out of California and generally that any concern over our business climate is unfounded. He focused on the following two points:
- A 2008 PPIC report that found limited amount of job migration out of California.
- The notion that California’s business climate is unchanged from many years ago when the state experienced an economic boom. I assume he meant the 90’s.
At this blog, we focus on the massive opportunities that come from high paying manufacturing jobs for workers, the economy and the state budget — and how manufacturing employers can succeed in California. It should always be noted that a manufacturing wage pays approximately $20,000 more than a service job and provides the needed tax base for bold state government programs. Here are three facts that should be considered in response to Walters’ piece:
Main Street Menace of the Week: AB 1000 (Ma) – Mandatory Paid Sick Leave
While the legislature is in session, the National Federation of Independent Business/California will be profiling anti-small business bills and the adverse effect they would have on California’s job creators. This is the third column of that series.
It seems that our state legislators continue to experience a chronic case of short-term memory. It would be the only logical reason that they continue to propose bill after bill every year that add additional burdens and mandates to small businesses in California. The latest in the string of these “Menaces” is Assembly Bill 1000, by Assembly Member Fiona Ma.
This is an identical twin of last session’s AB 2716 by the same author – same bad policy, new bill number. It would require every California employer to provide each employee with paid sick leave. Once an employee works only seven days in California, they would start to earn paid sick leave benefits, and within 90 days they would be able to begin taking time off for themselves or relatives. This mandate covers seasonal and part-time employees and would be required regardless of an employer’s ability to pay. Furthermore, as a “gimme” to the trial lawyer lobby, it would include fines, penalties and the right to sue if an employer is unable to comply with this one-size-fits-all mandate.
They’re Going to Do It Again
Michael Hirsch’s recent story “Wall Street Digs In,” in Newsweek, is unsettling, to say the least. He warns that Wall Street has not learned their lesson from the economic debacle last year which continues this Spring amid a stock market rebound of sorts – if you can call leveling off at a mark some 40% below the highs of several years ago, a “rebound.” Specifically, he reports that some of the Wall Street Heavyweights have banded together in a new lobbying effort under one of those charming newspeak names that usually mean the opposite of the title: “Coalition for Business Finance Reform.”
Hirsch says this new lobby with the misleading name, comprised of Citigroup (whose stock has finally cleared 4 iTunes’ songs in value per share and who announced a profit, based on some accounting tricks), Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, has now dedicated itself to the mission of opposing the kind of regulation that would corral, reign in and tame, for once and for all, those dangerous and wholly inscrutable collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps which swamped and crashed the world’s economies in the first place. In Hirsch’s words: “Its goal: to stand against heavy regulation of ‘over-the-counter’ derivatives, in other words customized contracts that are traded off an exchange,” which, if achieved, virtually insures a repeat of the nightmare we have all been living through.