Walters: California Stagnating

John Seiler:

CalWatchDog.com has been online now a little more than a year. If there’s one theme we’ve had, it’s that California is stagnating due to too much regulation, taxation and general foolishness by an out-of-touch government. For example, here’s my California Jobs Gap article from a year ago, about how California’s jobless numbers widened under Gov. Schwarzenegger’s misrule to about 30% more than in the rest of America.

Here’s my article, “CA Economy Holding Back Nation,” from a month ago. And in December, I warned that “during the Great Recession, innovation capital leadership has shifted from America and California to China.”

The dean of California journalists is Dan Walters. Unfortunately, for years he’s called for tax increases to supposedly close the state budget deficit. That only would make things worse by killing more jobs and businesses, thus eroding the tax base.

Now, he might be coming around. In a column today, he writes:

So what, really, are California’s prospects of recovery, even on a five-year time frame? Brown’s forecast is more realistic than the wishful thinking that has dominated the Capitol of late but, as noted above, may still be too optimistic.

It’s entirely possible that California, with its high taxes, dense regulatory underbrush, poorly performing schools, congested and crumbling highways and water supply issues, may have become noncompetitive in a global economy.

If the rest of the nation emerges strongly from recession and California is left behind, we’ll know that something is more fundamentally amiss.

Those of us who write here at CalWatchDog.com, and you our faithful readers, long have known that something is more fundamentally amiss.

Jan. 16, 2011