Posted by
Playful Walrus on Monday, December 27, 2010 7:13:50 PM
California Treasurer Bill Lockyer and Stephen Levy had a commentary in the
Los Angeles Times that claimed "California Isn't Broken".
Letter writer Donald Orr of Phoenix
calls their commentary absurd:
As an employer operating in 12 Southwest states, I experience firsthand the cost of doing business in California. The employee and facility expenses are the highest of any state in which we have employees. As a result, my employee head count is half of what it was before 2008.
I have closed one facility in 2010 and will close a second by June 2011. Soon the Panama Canal will handle larger ships, and California's commerce will drop significantly.
Unless the state addresses the cost of doing business and employment, California will look a lot more like New York than the Golden State in the next decade.
California is driving away productive, independent, law-abiding, taxpaying Americans who are being replaced by unskilled, uneducated, code-violating, dependent, tax-taking Americans and illegal aliens and their children. The state simply can’t survive this way, especially with an increasingly large state government and a growing pool of tax-draining government retiree pensioners.
We have high tax rates, higher unemployment than the national average, a wildly disproportionate percentage of the welfare cases in the country, overcrowded prisons, and a higher cost per prisoner. We have more and more Nanny State regulations, and we have elected leaders who are unwilling and unable to make necessary changes. The state IS broken.