Hiaasen column misleading: Florida bests California for business

Liberal Hit Man (or Who's California Dreamin')?

You have to admire Carl Hiaasen's timing with his May 11 piece in the Herald attacking our Florida governor on doing his job and going to California to recruit jobs. Mr. Hiaasen is one of the many liberal "journalists" who will write anything (including flat-out lies) and make things up to attack Republicans (see NY Times).

Case in point. He states "California employers have added twice as many new jobs as Florida employers have." Not quite. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, California added 420,800 jobs and Florida added 234,300 jobs (since March 2015).

Mr. Hiaasen misleads the gentle reader, however. If you look at this as a percentage of all jobs (and population), Florida actually increased their workforce by 2.9 percent where California increased theirs by 2.6 percent.

Spectrum Location Solutions performed a study looking at the last eight years and found 9,000 companies have picked up and moved out of California.

Checking current articles on the Internet, some are estimating that number to be approaching 10,000 today.

But to get back to Mr. Hiaasen's wonderful timing. Chief Executive magazine just published their annual survey of the best and worst states to do business. Florida came in second behind Texas.

From the CE magazine report, "Each year, Florida steadily edges up in the qualitative measures. The Sunshine State added one million private-sector jobs over the last five years, cut taxes 50 times and got rid of 4,200 burdensome regulations. In 2014, it surpassed New York as the third-biggest state for companies to flourish."

Unfortunately, California came in dead last as the worst place to do business. Don't you hate facts? Carl Hiaasen is the only one that is "California Dreamin'."

Mike Kantor

Bradenton

This story was originally published May 16, 2016 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Hiaasen column misleading: Florida bests California for business ."