Posted on by Californiacontrarian

Hope Springs Eternal

It was just confirmed that Toyota and Mazda are joining together to develop a $1.6 billion factory in the US. Whether President Trump has been instrumental in this decision is not known at this time, but this is certainly in keeping with his promise to generate more blue collar jobs in the USA. It is estimated that this combined venture will provide about 4000 new jobs.
Where will this new factory be built? I hoped in California.
Reportedly many states are in the running including Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, and Michigan. Where is California on this list? I hope that this list is not complete. How come the Golden State is not in the running for this pot of gold?
Could it be that California has historically never been much into the car-making business? No, in fact, that is far from the case. Whereas now Tesla has a plant in Northern California that provides about 6,000 jobs, in the past there have been multiple such auto-assembly factories in this state including: Long Beach Assembly (Ford, closed 1958), Ford Richmond Plant (closed 1989), Fremont Assembly (G.M., closed 1982), Maywood Assembly (Chrysler, closed 1971), Los Angeles Assembly (Ford, closed 1980), Oakland Assembly (Chevrolet, closed 1963), San Jose Assembly Plant ( Ford, closed 1983), South Gate Assembly ( Buick-Plymouth-Oldsmobile, closed 1982), Van Nuys Assembly (G.M., closed 1992), and TABC of Long Beach (Toyota subsidiary, closed 2004).
In addition to these lost blue collar jobs at these now closed factories, California has also lost white collar auto industry jobs when Nissan moved its headquarters to Tennessee in 2004, and most recently (2014) when Toyota relocated its headquarters from Torrance, California to Plano,Texas (3,000 jobs).
Wow! Why this auto industry abandonment of California? Certainly my first instinct is to blame the usual suspects – high wages, high taxes, high cost of living, increased regulations, making this state more business unfriendly by the day, etc.
However, Jim Lentz, CEO of Toyota, blamed the politicians in California when he recently said, “Here in Texas it’s always do what’s best for Texas. That was not the experience in California where there were truly two sides on most issues, and it was not necessarily what’s best for California. Here in Texas, you guys have the formula down.”
That formula used to be California’s, but it seems that the Democratic politicians have allowed other states to steal it from us. I surmise that the only way to regain that formula is to get rid of these politicians. One can only hope!

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