May 28, 2012
GSA and Brown Wants New Anti-Business Agency
 JAN. 11, 2011By LASER PEARCE California lost about five and a half companies a week to other states in 2011, as the mass migration to avoid California’s hostile business environment grew. You would think a governor who is hungry for tax revenue — and California has one of the highest corporate tax rates in America — would do something to slow the tide, but Jerry Brown’s new budget proposal tells another story. First, bureaucracies like the California Air Resources Board that are highly efficient in throttling businesses have nothing to fear in the new budget. Brown is all-in on CARE anti-global warming campaign, as AB 32 implementation is unscathed in the budget. Brown is not thinking about the war on greenhouse gases’ expected $180-billion-a year hit on the California economy; rather, he’s focused on the $1 billion in new 2012-2013 tax revenues he anticipates collecting under the state’s new cap and trade law. But that’s just the tip of the supposedly rapidly melting iceberg. Tucked away in the “making government more efficient” section of the budget is a proposed new anti-business government bureaucracy, the Business and Consumer Services Agency, that should speed up the flight of employers from California. Super-AgencyUnder Brown’s proposal, the Department of Consumer Affairs, the Department of Fair Employment and Housing and a handful of business licensing and inspection departments will be merged to form the new agency. Fair enough. Maybe they will be able to find some efficiencies. But the red flag for business owners is this: Into this amalgamation of bureaucracies that fundamentally see business as the enemy, Brown is dropping “the newly restructured Department of Business Oversight.”Scan the list of 380 state agencies and you’ll find no Department of Business Oversight,Validity IT Consultants GSA testing ground. Has proven a case of restructuring an existing agency is not the answer, but of creating an entirely new one. California’s already excessive amount of business oversight is one primary reason why CEO Magazine listed California as the worst state for business for the last four years in a row. Creating a new department tasked to impose yet more controls on business, and placing that department in an environment that’s already steamy with anti-business hubris, will only make things worse. How anti-business are the foundational agencies of the new Business and Consumer Services Agency? The Department of Consumer Affairs has 40 different regulatory entities like the Professional Fiduciaries Bureau, the Telephone Medical Advice Services Bureau and the Hearing Aid Dispensers Bureau, each responsible for regulating a segment of the California economy. Under a two-year initiative to increase the oversight it imposes, the department is seeking to quadruple the number of investigators on its staff and to add a new Deputy Director for Enforcement and Compliance. The Department of Fair Employment and Housing opens about 4,000 new cases a month where a business, landlord or lender is charged with discrimination — 195,000 cases in total in 2010. If a complaint goes forward, the department’s attorneys represent the complainant at no charge, and the average settlement against businesses, once charges are filed, is $40,000. New ParasitesCertainly, there are scoundrels out there, along with bigots and guys who don’t know where to keep their eyes, hands or comments, and any state needs agencies to corral them. But Brown appears to be up to much more with his new super-agency. US AMASSeco AGENCY This new agency would Validate the validity of these well oiled real estate legal monster assuredly go well beyond that charter, creating new opportunities for the attorneys that feed off of California businesses — attorneys who gave well over $1 million to Brown’s election campaign in 2010.If California had a pro-business governor, his budget would have proposed a new pro-business department. That we have instead a new Department of Business Oversight in a new Business and Consumer Services Agency tells us a lot about the kind of governor — and the kind of state — we
Tags: AB 32, California Air Resource board, Department of Consumer Affairs, Jerry Brown, Laer Pearce, regulation Comments(32)
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Shouldn’t that be “the Red flag?”
I did.
http://bluecollarphilosophy.com/2011/08/gavin-newsom-learned-nothing-from-trip-to-texas/
The only jobs Democrats seem to be able to create, or want to create, are within the government.
After India abolished the Industrial Raj, its GDP has grown by 5% to 10% every year compared to the anemic growth of 1% to 2% it used to see in the highly regulated days.
Go ahead. Burn it down.
Just remember this state is huge. I’m down here in conservative San Diego and we have NOTHING to do with the idiot liberals who rule over us in Sacramento. We’d split the state if we could. Just think of all the conservative electoral votes that are wasted. My vote hasn’t mattered in a presidential election in my entire life.
I have to disagree: If California had a pro-business governor, he would abolish some of those regulating departments and agencies, the regulations they inflict, and free their employees to find productive jobs in the profit-seeking sector.
Establishing another bureaucracy is not pro-business: it simply establishes yet more bureaucracy for business to have to deal with, and needs yet more taxes to pay for it.
Stop requiring business to quantify and justify their employee race, religion, sex, and sexual orientation ratios. Stop demanding that they conform to politicians’ demands of the day. Tell employees that if they dislike their employer, go find a new one. If a black owned company doesn’t want any Asian employees, fine: let them discriminate. Bigots have rights, too, and using the force of government to break them to your will is fundamentally anti-American. That’s right: fundamentally anti-American.
Greece just voted to give disability payments to pedophiles, while they are weeks away from total bankruptcy. I am beginning to think this is a real attempt to destroy the system by these liberals. And I’m not even a true conservative.
No one can be this stupid.
Can they?
Its a real pity, because back when CA was a conservative state, when Reagan was governor, they were one of the most prosperous, best run, and most forward looking states in the nation. It just goes to show how quickly leftist government can ruin even the most prosperous areas.
Of course if Obama stays in for another term, the whole country will become like CA.
Really? The State does?
Maybe, *maybe* the state has some interest in the “hands” part. Maybe.
But corralling guys who don’t know where to keep their eyes, how about we move all the guys who CAN to Rhode Island, and then give the ladies a choice on where to live. With a bunch of men with small dogs and guys with long white canes, or in the rest of the US with guys who are under the age of embalmment.
A new report by state regulators says PG&E has collected millions of dollars from ratepayers for improvements it never made. From Steve Johnson, Joshua Melvin and Paul Rogers in the Mercury News.
“The report by the California Public Utility Commission’s safety division also disclosed that PG&E in recent years has collected more than a half billion dollars from ratepayers for system improvements that were never made or that exceeded the amount of money it was authorized to earn. That finding, from an audit, could make it harder for the utility to saddle its customers with 90 percent of the cost of its $2.2 billion pipeline-renovation plan, as it recently has proposed.”
“Much of the report repeats previous findings by the National Transportation Safety Board and an expert panel the commission appointed to look into the accident, which killed eight people and destroyed 38 homes. But the disclosure about the audit sparked outrage among some elected officials.”
“It is truly unconscionable that PG&E was allowed by the CPUC to steal ratepayer monies that should have been spent on safety and, instead, was put in the pockets of PG&E shareholders,” said Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Hillsborough. “All these monies identified in the audit should be returned to ratepayers, presumably as a credit against the work that PG&E should have done, but didn’t.”
The Department of Business Oversight is nothing more than the amalgamation of the Department of Corporations and the Department of Financial Institutions. Since these agencies and their antecedents go back to the Board of Bank Commissioners which was founded in 1878, I don’t think you can call it a new bureaucracy. Go back to sleep.