Investor’s Business Daily notes:

At one time, California was truly the land of opportunity. But the business climate has turned hostile.

According to Jon Coupal, president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, and John Kabateck, executive director of the National Federation of Independent Businesses, the state’s business tax climate is the second worst in the nation. The corporate income tax rate is 8.84%, the highest west of the Mississippi and eighth highest in the country.

California’s income tax, which is the tax many small-business owners pay, is the nation’s third highest; the 9.3% rate kicks in at $46,349 in annual income for those who file as individuals, and the 10.3% rate applies to income over $1 million a year.

Then there’s the highest sales tax (7.25%, plus local levies in some areas) in the country, the fourth-highest capital gains tax (9.3%) and the second-highest gasoline tax (an average of 65 cents a gallon).

There’s also the vicious regulatory environment that businesses have to negotiate.

► California: The Sick Man Of America

This trend has actually been going on for most of my life, and I remember seeing the signs of it back when it first began—though I was at the time only a politically aware, and still learning, middle junior-high-schooler.

In the intervening years it was not unheard of for some California pol to dismiss concerns about tax hikes or new regulation by claiming that business owners would have to be insane to quite their “economic paradise.”

Well, it’s taken a few decades, but that’s exactly what they’re doing—and if they had been willing to do it, say, 20 years ago, California and the rest of the country would certainly be in better shape today.

When did this rot first set in? I put it, believe it or not, in the mid-1970s.

Around the time Gov. Jerry Brown first assumed the office of Governor.

But nobody listens to me.
 

Corrupt Bastards Theftists So Right, It's Embarrassing