Riverside-San B. Jobless Worst in US

John Seiler:

I keep pointing out that the biggest crisis in California is not the state budget deficit of $26 billion, but the state’s staggering 12.4 percent jobless rate. Only Nevada is worse at 14.2 percent.

Jobs First, I say: put California back to work.

More evidence comes from new U.S. Labor Department numbers showing that, for areas with more than 1 million population, the worst is Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, at 14.2 percent. That’s even worse than Las Vegas’ 13.7 percent.

And according to USA Today: “Twelve of the 16 cities with unemployment rates above 15 percent in January were in California.”

So, California doesn’t have a budget problem, it has a jobs problem. The budget deficit can be solved by cutting the immense waste from government, as Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a good liberal Democrat, is doing in New York — with no tax increases.

But Gov. Jerry Brown, the Democrats who run the Legislature and the turncoat Republicans who join them just don’t care about California’s jobless. They care only about the special interests that fund their campaigns; and about their ideology of extreme government control over our lives.

The tax increasers and hyper-regulators refuse to allow jobs created the only way they can be: by reducing California’s immense tax and regulatory burdens on businesses.

As a result, the unemployed will continue to suffer. And their ranks will be swelled by others laid off by businesses destroyed by the state government.

March 20, 2011