GUEST COMMENTARY-Worse than Detroit?
Really?
Despite the date, April 1st, the prestigious UCLA Anderson Forecast is not known for either pranks or hyperbole. With Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti in attendance, the economists charged with crunching the numbers on the LA economy dropped a couple of doozies on us last Wednesday.
From December 1993 through December 2013, Los Angeles failed to produce any new jobs. That’s “any.”
Zip. Nada. As in none.
In fact, we lost 3.1 percent of our jobs, ranking Los Angeles dead last in job growth among the top 32 largest metropolitan areas in the United States.
Worse than Cleveland.
Worse than Detroit.
That’s 23 consecutive years of failure. Would Lakers fans put up with a record like that?
“It’s really shocking” says Edward Leamer, Ph.D, director of the Anderson Forecast. “It’s a real emergency.”
An emergency nearly a quarter of a century in the making.
The Anderson report points to the usual suspects, a local government that repels job growth with onerous regulations and a byzantine permitting process along with a public school system that fails to produce a workforce qualified for jobs in the high tech economy of the 21st century.
This should come as a surprise to no one.
The consequences of decades of dysfunction at the LAUSD have been well documented. The question is what are we going to do about it?
The same week the Anderson Forecast was published, David Binkle, the LAUSD’s director of food services, reported students throw away a minimum of $100,000 worth of food every single day. That’s $18 million taxpayer dollars a year literally thrown away.
But the real shocker came when Binkle reported in a radio interview on KABC-AM (790) 80 percent of the students enrolled in the LAUSD system qualify for “free or reduced” priced meals at school. That’s 521,000 of the system’s 655,494 students come from homes that meet state and federal poverty threshold for food subsidies. If that isn’t a canary in the coal mine for LA what is?
As documented in the recent City Council commissioned LA 20-20 Report — and in every other demographic study — America’s second largest city has become a poverty factory. We import poverty through our sanctuary city laws and we manufacture poverty by forcing our poor to compete with newly arrived immigrants who are even poorer.
Sadly, poverty is just about the only thing left that is manufactured in Los Angeles.
We’ve chased away the aerospace industry, the automobile industry, and countless other businesses that once made the Los Angeles basin a Mecca for the middle class. Hollywood types might smugly mock Texas and Florida as backward hellholes but job creators disagree.
The good news, and I had to dig to find it, is this; our problems were not visited upon us from another planet. We got into this mess through bad policy and we have it in our power to turn LA around any time we want.
Mayor Garcetti acknowledged at UCLA that Los Angeles has suffered a crisis in leadership at City Hall; remember when his predecessor told Valero Energy to leave LA? I would quibble with Garcetti only on his choice of tense. Rather than “has” suffered — the past tense — he should have said “still suffers from a leadership crisis,” the present tense.
A fresh example arrived last week.
The City Council voted to create exclusive trash-hauling franchises throughout the city to service large office and apartment buildings.
By creating territories open only to the highest bidder, the City Council will crush small mom-and-pop carting companies while creating monopolies for a handful of large corporations — and let’s not kid ourselves — create a rich new source of campaign cash for future election campaigns.
How’s that Time/Warner cable monopoly working out for Dodger fans?
This is exactly the kind of job-killing policy that has made Los Angeles the least business-friendly major city in America.
Poised on the Pacific Rim and blessed with the nation’s best weather, Los Angeles has remarkable public and private resources that should make us the most desirable place to start a business.
That we’ve fallen behind Detroit in job growth should be a source of shame on Spring Street. While the mayor seems to understand the problem and is saying the right things, the City Council continues to drive down the same wrong road that put us into the ditch.
(Doug McIntyre is morning radio host at KABC and writes for the Daily News … where this column was first posted.)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 29
Pub: Apr 8, 2014