Coyote Blog

There is some chance this may be apocryphal (I don't see any evidence the reporters confirmed this with the FDA), but as someone who has had government inspectors show up on our property demanding to see our license to sell eggs, it wouldn't surprise me if true.  I am bombarded with government insanity of this genre every day.

Apparently, a children's magician who was forced to obtain a government license for his stage rabbit is claiming

My USDA rabbit license requirement has taken another ridiculous twist. I just received an 8 page letter from the USDA, telling me that by July 29 I need to have in place a written disaster plan, detailing all the steps I would take to help get my rabbit through a disaster, such as a tornado, fire, flood, etc. They not only want to know how I will protect my rabbit during a disaster, but also what I will do after the disaster, to make sure my rabbit gets cared for properly.  I am not kidding–before the end of July I need to have this written rabbit disaster plan in place, or I am breaking the law.

The bizarre government requests like this one at least give us a laugh around here.  Less funny are the zillions of other pieces of waste paper that must be supplied to various agencies every month -- for example the 9 different permits which took 3 years to accumulate from Ventura County just to remove a dangerous and rotting deck  (not coincidentally, we are closing all our business in Ventura County at the end of this year).  Just in the last several days the Department of Labor asked for new, more onerous monthly reporting of headcounts and payroll by state (I declined) and the census bureau asked for quarterly rather than annual detailed reports of our lodging business (I declined).

One piece of advice I would give to harried small business people is to say "no" as often as possible to these data requests.  Obviously, you will need to turn in your monthly sales tax reports or you will be going to jail, but do you really need to feed the census?  The department of Commerce?  The Department of Agriculture?  The Labor Department?  Much of this data they gather is used either 1) to craft regulations that will just make your life as a business owner harder in the future or 2) to subsidize academics and economists in the form of free data.  As I told the Labor Department the other day, I am happy to fill out their survey if they want to pay me, say, $100 a month to compensate me for my time.  Otherwise they are just stealing free labor and proprietary data from me to help some grad student write her PHD or help some Wall Street hedge fund manager better call the market.

From the Thin Green Line:

So much for criticism that California's environmental leadership "” notably AB 32 "” kills jobs: The state has the most green-collar jobs of any in the nation, and San Francisco leads the Golden State with 42,000 positions. For a city with a population of 809,000, that's pretty impressive.

I think of my father-in-law when I read something like this.  He was a lifelong environmentalist as well as a PHD physicist and a researcher at MIT's Lincoln Labs.  While we often disagreed on various issues, he always tried to bring both science and the scientific method to environmental issues.  I wonder what he would think about this bozo.

Not that this quote really deserves further attention, but here are a couple of random thoughts:

• While AB32 has been law for a number of years, the CARB has made only limited progress actually setting up the enabling regulations and carbon trading schemes.  In effect, AB32 is largely un-implemented at this point, making its lack of effect on job growth fairly unsurprising
• Wow, what a surprise -- the state with the largest number of workers has the largest number of workers in a particular employment category.  My guess is they have the most car mechanics in the country too, and the most SUV owners.  So what?
• The whole definition of a "Green collar job" is total BS.  Basically it means you work in a job that has been deemed to be in a politically correct energy related field.  But why are solar executives green jobs but hydro plant workers not?
• The implication in the post is that this is some kind of public policy victory, but of course there is no evidence at all of why these jobs exist or are located in California
• Even if these jobs are the result of some kind of California public policy initiative, how much did they cost?  How many jobs were lost when the government shifted resources around by fiat?  In Spain, its been calculated that more than 2 jobs were lost for every green job created.

There used to be a joke in Texas during the 80's oil bust -- "How do you make a million dollars in oil?  Start with $10 million."  The same likely applies here -- "How do you create 42,000 green jobs?  Start with 100,000."