LETTERS
Job Losses
In his nonsensical Nov. 24 reply to Howard Fine’s Nov. 10 article on the unemployment costs businesses face, Bill Thormahlen of the Employment Development Department asks, in the plaintive wail of a Keynesian bureaucrat, “Who drove up the cost of living?”
Of course, the writer asserts the perpetrators are evil corporate titans, unable to see the flaw in his own reasoning as he simultaneously decries employers’ outsourcing of labor to overseas markets, which inherently lowers the cost of goods.
Throughout time, there has been but one answer to your question, Mr. Thormahlen: Only government can raise the cost of living.
It is not business but government that has the most powerful inflationary tool at its disposal: the ability to expand the money supply at will. But our elected officials have so many other tools at their disposal.
Why, for example, do companies move jobs overseas? Because government creates exploding costs through minimum wage laws, expensive environmental regulations, health and workers’ compensation insurance mandates and by fostering a runaway tort system, to name a few.
Only the government can tack on endless fees to your monthly utility bills and cause the price of certain consumer goods to skyrocket through “sin” taxes, raising the level of many of life’s routine costs.
It is only your elected officials who can erect trade barriers, forcing each of us to waste capital by buying more expensive goods manufactured here.
And leave it to the government to actually create unemployment while claiming to solve it by taxing employers like me to pay for a job like yours. In fact, I have one simple way to lower costs: Let’s eliminate the EDD and leave those dollars in the hands of our producers to invest or employ.
Chip Hanlon
Chief operating officer
Euro Pacific Capital Inc.
Newport Beach
