California’s economy has been increasingly struggling over the past several years as regulations, high taxes and poor governance have dampened business opportunities and sent citizens running, according to experts who spoke to the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The unemployment rate in California jumped to 5.3% in February, the highest out of any state and Washington, D.C., according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. California employs some of the strictest labor laws, regulatory regimes and tax burdens in the nation, which has increasingly stifled economic growth and led businesses and citizens to flee, experts explained.
“You can look at the unemployment numbers, and those really flag some severe underlying problems,” Will Swaim, president of the California Policy Center, told the DCNF. “California overregulates businesses and underregulates public safety. And those two things may seem unrelated, but when you allow people to engage in organized theft from stores or break into cars, for instance, it reduces the ability of markets to function.”
Retail theft, such as shoplifting, has exploded over the past few years, mostly in cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco, according to The Associated Press. Criminals are incentivized through relaxed crime policies like Proposition 47, which was passed in 2014 and reduced certain theft and drug offenses from felonies to misdemeanors.
The state’s economy has only increased the number of jobs in the state by 82,000 in the last year as of February, with 61,100 of those being government positions, according to the California Employment Development Department. California’s struggling employment market puts it last in terms of job growth over the last year out of all other states and D.C., according to the Orange County Register.
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