Is Los Angeles Addicted to Taxes and Red Tape?

Los Angeles - Los Angeles City Council President Eric Garcetti wants to wean the city off of excessive taxing. He says it's time for Los Angeles to take a long view.

Eric Garcetti
"Our city is one of the worst in the country in terms of our taxes and in terms of our bureaucracy."

Producer
"How did L.A. become so toxic?"

Eric Garcetti
"I think it's the tale of good intentions gone awry. It's not that anybody said, 'Let's go out and kill businesses'... but, little by little, nobody noticed why the businesses were slowly eroding away.

"We have to change the culture from a culture that rewards bureaucrats from finding violations and fines, to a culture that rewards them for opening businesses and the speed they get them opened in and how many jobs we create."

"There's a very long term cost to living cheap in the short term. Right now as I'm trying to abolish this gross receipts tax, I've got a lot of budget guardians here saying, 'We can't afford to not collect those taxes, we can't afford to have that tax.'"

Producer
"Are we addicted to our taxes? Is that what's going on? Some of these taxes you're talking about were supposed to be temporary?"

Eric Garcetti
"Absolutely. A study that we had in the city showed we could have 119,000 jobs in Los Angeles if we got rid of our gross receipts tax. That's how many businesses that would come here and be a part of L.A."

"If we wanna save the California dream now here in this city, we should be reducing and soon thereafter eliminating our city's business tax. We should also make sure that if someone wants to open up a business, we should have a set number of days where we have to deliver. With 14.8 percent unemployment, isn't it time?"

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Garcetti, who's thrown his hat in the ring for the mayor's race, says there have been bright spots.

From 2001 to 2009, he's worked on 40 developments in the Hollywood area, which resulted in 7,000 permanent jobs and about 16,500 temporary jobs in construction.

That said, even Hollywood continues to lose jobs to bureaucratic red tape so there's a lot of work still to be done.