Vranich Report: 254 Companies Left California in 2011

Crossposted on Orange County Register In 2011, 254 California companies moved some or all of their work and jobs out of state, 26% more than in 2010, according to Irvine business consultant Joe Vranich who has been tracking these departures since 2009. Twenty-eight of these companies were in Orange County. Seven of them moved or […]

Blue State, Red Tape — California is Shedding Residents and Businesses

A Sacramento Bee headline from late October, “How liberal politics, COVID-19 and a high cost of living are fueling a new California exodus,” could have been written, without the virus reference, a year ago. Or ten years ago. The flight from California kicked off long before this year’s pandemic. Eight years ago, an Investor’s Business […]

Hewlett Packard packs up — Will California ever get fed up with losing to Texas?

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), the California firm that literally kickstarted Silicon Valley in a garage in 1939, is moving to Texas. The low-key announcement was made via an SEC filing on Dec. 1. If California’s anti-jobs policies, its high taxes, capricious regulatory enforcement, and blackout-inducing energy policy can chase out the company that launched Silicon […]

Tax Raisers Target Businesses—How Long Will Businesses Stay in CA?

Businesses, particularly corporations, are the targets of tax raisers in the legislature, at city hall and on the ballot. Piling on business taxes in a state notorious for its poor attitude toward business, one wonders how long businesses will put up with it before leaving. As Jim Wunderman, the president and CEO of the Bay […]

No Surprise: Tesla May Move Out of California

Dear Elon Musk: I almost never write open letters, but I’m doing so here to applaud your comments about the difficulty in doing business in California.   You stunned many people by saying you might move Tesla’s headquarters and vehicle manufacturing out of California when Alameda County refused to permit your Fremont factory to re-open in […]

Triumph of the Woke Oligarchs

Like the rest of the country, although far less than New York, California is suffering through the Covid-19 crisis. But in California, the pandemic seems likely to give the state’s political and corporate elites a new license to increase their dominion while continuing to keep the middle and working classes down. Perhaps nothing spells the […]

The Golden State is on a path to high-tech feudalism

“We are the modern equivalent of the ancient city-states of Athens and Sparta. California has the ideas of Athens and the power of Sparta,” declared then-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2007. “Not only can we lead California into the future . . . we can show the nation and the world how to get there.” When a movie […]

Is There a California Tipping Point

Circa of America got its start more than a half-century ago, during San Francisco’s Hippie heyday, when Ronaldo Cianciarulo began making and selling leather belts out of his van in the city’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. During several changes of ownership and names, it continued to make belts in a factory in San Francisco’s Bayview District, the […]

California Companies Look East for Affordable Housing

The other day I received a call from a small business owner in California who wants to relocate his business. He named five states that he’d like me to review with two stipulations: “I’ve got to know how friendly their business climates are, and I want you to look at the cost of housing.” The […]

California’s Doomsday Clock Getting Closer to Midnight

In 1947 a group of scientists unveiled the Doomsday Clock to show how near civilization was to a man-made catastrophic end. Maybe California should have its own doomsday clock, since it seems headed for a wreck. Today’s official Doomsday Clock reads 11:58 pm, two minutes before disaster. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which manages the […]