via issuesinsights
Angered at having his company shut down by local bureaucrats, fed-up California billionaire entrepreneur and Tesla founder Elon Musk says he might move his signature electric-car factory to Texas or Nevada. California’s progressive politicians beware: You can’t spend money if you have no companies left to tax.
California has gone through waves of corporate out-migration as local regulatory burdens, high tax rates and a generally unfriendly business environment spur disgusted owners and CEOs to head for more-business-friendly states, including Nevada, Idaho, Utah, Colorado and Texas.
Musk is a good example of this thinking.
He’s angered, as are many business owners, by the high-handed local mandarins who have decreed his factory must remain shut indefinitely due to the coronavirus pandemic. This has become a serious problem as states struggle to reopen and get their economies moving again. With 33 million people now jobless nationwide, it’s an open question whether the economic damage done by the outbreak will exceed the human toll of the virus.
Musk has had enough. He’s defying the law. As he tweeted Monday, “Tesla is restarting production today against Alameda County rules. I will be on the line with everyone else. If anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me.
Yet, California’s political class has been singularly unsympathetic to the companies that pay the bills. It often lands at or near the top of lists ranking states for business unfriendliness.
California’s ultra-smug Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who calls California a “nation-state,” last week warned the state’s businesses and workers that life is “not going back to normal” until a vaccine for virus is found. That could be as long as later this year or even in 2021.
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Related: As a wise community organizer likes to say, get in their faces, and punch back twice as hard:
h/t ED