CALIFORNIA COMMENTARY : Small Business, Set Free, Can Soar : The state economic summit meeting will succeed only if it results in swift legislation to preserve and create jobs.

Leaders from government, business, labor and education are coming together in Los Angeles today for an “economic summit” on what we can do to create jobs in California. Californians desperately need jobs--jobs to support our families and jobs to generate the revenues to support the services we want and need from government.

Summits like these are useful because they put leaders on the line. And if this summit is to be judged a success, it must lead to more than just speeches and reports. It must produce results.

Experts have studied our economic ills from every angle and there is already substantial agreement about what should be included on a list of needed remedies. Participants in this two-day summit will undoubtedly have more good ideas. But we need more than ideas. We need action.

These issues have been debated to death. This summit cannot hope to achieve its purpose unless debate today leads to action tomorrow.

When Franklin Roosevelt addressed the nation in a much darker hour, he said, “This nation asks for action, and action now . . . (our crisis) can never be helped merely by talking about it. We must act and act quickly.”

California in 1993 should settle for no less than America in 1933. Those of us in elected office must set aside partisan posturing and work together in common pursuit. The fact is, there is much we can do to bring jobs back into California. But we must begin now, reforming workers’ compensation, trimming excessive regulation, fixing laws that encourage a plague of lawsuits and lowering taxes that are higher than those imposed by our competitors.

The most promising areas for action are offered by those issues on which there is broad agreement across party lines. Here are four initiatives that already enjoy bipartisan support:

Promote investment. From statehouses to the White House, we’ve heard that we must do more to promote investment in America’s small business.

In California, small business pulled us out of our last recession by creating the vast majority of new jobs. They can lead us from austerity to prosperity again, if we give them the tools to get the job done.

That’s why I’ve proposed that first, we hold the line against new taxes. We need to find reasons to attract businesses and jobs into California, not drive them out. But simply holding the line isn’t enough. To create jobs, we must cut taxes. We must offer incentives for investment in job creation.

We should enact a small-business investment tax credit to encourage more people to invest in these small but powerful engines of job growth. To encourage all businesses to pursue big ideas, we should enhance and make permanent the research and development tax credit. And to allow small businesses the time they need to get off the ground and prosper, we should keep the bargain we made two years ago and reinstitute the net operating loss carry-forward, a tax incentive that helps employers survive their lean start-up years by allowing them to carry forward early losses, reducing their tax burden in later years.

Drain the regulatory quagmire. California deserves a regulatory system that is designed to achieve a clear and rational purpose with as little delay as possible.

Today, we have a tangled web of rules and regulations that force business people to spend their time doing paperwork instead of productive work. This is burdensome for all businesses, but especially for small-business people, who cannot afford high-priced lawyers and lobbyists to navigate the bureaucratic maze.

An individual trying to open a small business here in Los Angeles faces a bewildering 80 federal, state and local regulatory agencies with which he or she might have to file forms. This type of regulatory overkill is killing our jobs. We must put a stop to it now.

Reform workers’ comp. ABC’s “Prime Time Live” did an expose on it last week, “60 Minutes” devoted a segment to it before that, even Readers’ Digest has chronicled the absurdity of California’s workers’ compensation system. This system has rightly been called a “national embarrassment.” But even more important, it’s a California hardship. This system, meant to help workers injured on the job, today is costing us jobs. It cheats genuinely injured workers of decent benefits and drives jobs out of California.

It’s estimated that the flaws in this system cost California at least 60,000 jobs a year. California can’t afford to lose those jobs, and we can’t afford to waste time in reforming this system.

Repeal the immigration tax. California is home to nearly half of the new immigrants and refugees coming to America every year. We have benefited from their contributions and helped these newcomers assimilate in their new country. But immigration policy is set and implemented exclusively by the federal government. It is the responsibility of the federal government to pay the cost of immigration. By shirking that responsibility, Washington is imposing an “immigration tax” on those states, like California, that have a disproportionate share of newcomers. Like any other tax, this puts California at a disadvantage in the global competition for jobs. It is imperative that the federal government repeal this immigration tax on California by paying its share of these costs.

Of course, making California well again will require action on many more fronts then I have outlined here. But these four bipartisan initiatives are critical if California is to share in the nation’s nascent economic recovery.

Today’s summit will only be judged a success if the state Legislature sends to my desk a package of real economic reform. That’s the benchmark by which Californians will judge whether this summit represents real progress toward a great California Comeback or just another political gabfest.