California: More jobs wanted but companies pay too little taxes?

On the same day the Sacramento Bee lamented that Google and Apple paid too little in taxes an unfailingly progressive columnist in the same paper said jobs were a concern.

Well, which is it?  Decades of business hostility have driven real jobs from the state, and even the country – now we would like them back because ‘service’ jobs have turned out to be not all that great.  They’re basically fake.

Revenue is actually ahead of projections n 2011; the second highest state income tax in the nation has yielded more money than expected, as have sales taxes because – shock – a paralyzed legislature was unable to renew onerous ‘temporary’ sales tax increases so sales taxes dropped and revenue from sales taxes went up.  Exactly what big tax proponents said could not happen, yet did.

Because Democrats are in power the discussion is only about evil Republicans who want to cut spending in a bad economy, like real people have to do – but instead of the obvious agreement with cutting spending, we need to ‘increase revenue’, which corporate media lovingly coos at the public every chance it gets. That is doublespeak for raising taxes.

Yet what never gets discussed, at least in California, is the obvious – outlays are unsustainable.  No one who negotiated contracts with the worst leader in California history, Grey Davis, wants to give anything up.   Taxpayers are on the hook for $100 billion in pensions alone – all negotiated, all law and all designed to reward constituents who voted for the right party in power.  Prison guards have the best contract in the history of union negotiations, one that will be taught by labor negotiators for decades, and the California university system tripled employees in a few short years for little reason other than to create more Democratic voters and because capital gains taxes during the Dot Com boom were seen by the government as annual revenue.  Now those people and their families have to be furloughed because the state has run out of businesses to blame.

Marcos Breton, who is something of a running joke because he seeks to be all things to all people – he is Mexican or French or American, depending on whatever issue he is writing about, so he can make himself part of the story, said the most un-progressive thing I have ever read from him, basically an acknowledgement that evil business cannot be blamed any more, when he wrote “it’s hard not to notice a hostility here toward business and people who make money.”

Really?  Anyone who read your column for two decades knew fell well business was evil and it was only the graciousness of California’s legislature that allowed any business in the state at all, now you recognize a hostile climate and that it is a problem?

Even Science 2.0, which should be a wonderful feather in the cap of the state, is instead a Delaware corporation that is located in Nevada.  Why be in California?   To pay an $800 fee for what exactly?  The privilege of existing in California.   How can a poor person who wants to start a business pay an $800 fee just to have a bank account?  And that’s without the lawyers it takes to wade through the mountain of regulations.

The solution for California’s revenue issues is simple, since its obligations are either Constitutionally limited (education costs) or not worth the lawsuits (every other union that controls the Democrats in California and has plump contracts) – become friendly again. Stop the crazy fees, stop the hostility toward small business while giving special deals to Google because they are good donors to Democratic politicians.  Help the people who can’t get jobs in a hostile climate for business create their own jobs.

The fake unemployment number is 12.5%.  We all know it is much higher than that because some people have basically given up looking.  In reality, we’re already at Bulgaria levels of unemployment and it’s only going to get worse unless there is a reason for business to be here.   If no new business comes to the region and the bloated public sector rolls are cut (somehow), Sacramento will be a ghost town.