The California
economy is struggling to recover, so what are the top public policy
priorities of legislative Democrats and the regulatory bureaucracy?
- Increasing taxes by billions to maintain an unsustainable spending appetite.
- Raising the cost to hire new workers by mandating new employee leave benefits, restricting the use of credit checks and credit reports, criminalizing employment disputes, and increasing litigation expenses in employment cases.
- Creating new health insurance rate regulation and mandating new health care benefits and services – even after landmark health care reform was approved by Congress.
- Implementing a multi-billion dollar cap-and-trade tax increase on energy produced and used only in California.
It is baffling that public policy continues to drive higher costs on a
struggling economy when the clear message of the past two years is …
restore growth. California has enormous untapped economic potential
that the recession has dampened, but that capacity will remain shackled
during our economic recovery unless the Legislature adopts growth as a
key public policy.
California simply cannot afford to recover at a leisurely pace, or it
will never fully recover. We may have turned the corner on the
recession, but our pace of recovery must quicken.
Based on a conservative baseline growth trend, California’s personal
income now stands nearly 10 percent below where it would otherwise be.
This is a tremendous amount of untapped economic capacity that we
cannot afford to let atrophy.
The gap in employment is even more stunning. Had our economy continued
on its prior trajectory, California would have more than two million
more payroll jobs today than currently exist – or 15 percent of our
workforce. It will take years to recover from this economic collapse –
exacerbated by counterproductive state economic policies.
The election is over; growth should be at the top of the policy agenda.
(These charts were inspired by the continuing excellent work on the national economy by Keith Hennessey)