Amador County – California for the seventh year in a row ranked last among all states in terms of how they are seen as home to businesses.
“Chief Executive” magazine last week released results its annual survey of 550 company Chief Executive Officers, who considered “taxation and regulation to workforce quality and living environment.” J.P. Donlon, executive editor of “Chief Executive” in a May 3 article, “Best/Worst States for Business” said the annual ranking shows “how each state fares on the factors most essential for a business-friendly environment.”
Texas ranked Number 1, according to the survey, and California, “to no one’s great surprise” ranked the worst, 50th out of 50, Donlon said. Both states have held those respective rankings seven years straight.
California, “once a business friendly state, continues to conduct a war on its own economy,” Donlon wrote. “According to the Pacific Research Institute, it has the fourth largest government of all U.S. states, with spending equal to 18.3%” of its Gross Domestic Product. (In Texas, that number is 12.1%). Survey respondents uniformly said California regulators are hostile,” including one California CEO, who said: “No one in his right mind would start a new manufacturing concern here.”
California “seems uniquely oblivious to the effect its labor and other regulations are having on its innovative and growth-oriented Silicon Valley,” Donlon said. “Job growth in the Valley has flat-lined. Firms keep their headquarters there, but pursue growth in friendlier states. Google, Intel, Cisco and other companies locate new plants in states such as Arizona, Utah, Texas, Virginia or North Dakota.”
“Sacramento seems to take perverse delight in job-killing legislation,” Donlon said, such as the “Green Chemistry Initiative” of 2008, which mandated that “manufacturers seek safer alternatives to toxic chemicals in their products, and create tough governmental responses for lack of compliance.”
Chapman University Law professor Hugh Hewitt, in the Washington Examiner, wrote: “Take whatever you think is the worst regulatory regime out there, and expand it exponentially.” He said “California’s new rules will mandate testing and labeling changes on tens of thousands of products, likely triggering product recalls.”
Donlon said according to the Small Business Roundtable, the California carbon emission law (AB 32) will costs the state 500,000 jobs in 2011, and 1.3 million jobs by 2020.
One CEO responding to the survey said: “We need some political backbone to control spending, address out-of-control debts, and use common sense on environment … Quit demonizing businesses. Who do they think provide real jobs?”
Source: ChiefExecutive.net.
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