This is what Arnold is going to face. If Californians are smart, they'll recall their socialist legislature next...
msnbc.com
...For many California businesses, the central focus of their anger is the high cost of doing business and the tax burden that is sending jobs out of state. And one of the most unusual things about this unusual election is that it has highlighted an often overlooked but critical part of the California economy — small businesses. Rarely has such a small group of people received so much airtime.
Case in point: Ed Laird is CEO of Coatings Resource Corp. in Orange County. In three years, he has let go half of his employees. But it hasn’t saved him much money.
“We had three years ago, 100 employees; and our workers compensation rate, now that we have 50 employees, hasn’t gone down,” Laird said.
Laird says workers compensation costs have doubled in the last 12 months, and are up 300 percent in the last few years. Much of his business has moved to Chicago, and he says if he wakes up Wednesday morning and sees Gray Davis still in office, “I think we’ll all be in Chicago.”
JOB FLIGHT
Out in the forest of California’s El Dorado County you don’t see many rallies for or against the recall. In the nearby saw mill, you don’t hear many of the campaign speeches. But it is here where Cecil Wetsel sees the forest through the trees, economically speaking. His family has run Wetsel-Oviatt Lumber Co., an environmentally friendly forestry business, for more than 40 years. But he’s losing money and next week he’s shutting down. He blames the state.
“I kind of equate it to the patient who sees the doctor and the doctor gives him or her medication and the doctor is starting to feel better,” he said.
The doctor in this case is state government, overmedicating businesses with regulations and taxes, Wetsel says. As imports flood the market, Wetsel’s workers compensation costs have shot up 400 percent in the last few years. Energy surcharges are as high as $30,000 a month. And health care costs per employee equal the entire salaries for South American lumber workers. That’s not even getting into the regulatory hurdles they must jump through to cut down a tree.
“Everything is an endangered species — the owl, the mushroom,” said Lupe Molina, a supervisor at Wetsel’s lumber yard. “My family is an endangered species.”
As many small businesses have watched candidate Schwarzenegger deal with accusations of groping women, they say the state government has been groping them for years. The current business climate is one reason bigger companies are staying out of California, including Consolidated Restaurant Operations Corp. in Dallas, Texas, with 6,000 employees in 17 states.
“We would like to be in the market,” said John Harkey, Jr., Consolidated Restaurants CEO. “The climate in California needs to become more pro business.”... |
