Dear Governor Schwarzenegger –

The 12+% California unemployment rate has been on all of our minds, but an idea occurred to me as we drove home from visiting our kids in the Seattle area over Christmas.  You see, when I pulled into a filling station in Oregon a nice young lady wearing an international orange vest came up to the car and asked what kind of fuel I wanted.  In no time at all my tank was filled up and we were on our way, and I didn’t even have to get out of the car.

In case you didn’t know, in Oregon it’s against the law to fuel your own vehicle.  Filling stations have to hire extra people to pump gas like they did when you and I were younger.  I think Oregon passed the law to provide jobs for the laid off workers when their timber industry collapsed some years back.  To tell the truth, that young lady didn’t look like any laid off lumberjack I’ve ever seen, but she looked like she enjoyed the work.  So it seems that the Oregon plan provides extra jobs for everyone.  Then it hit me square between the eyes.

Why can’t California do the same thing?  We have more than 9,000 filling stations in the state, and requiring each station to hire at least one gas pumper would put a lot of people back to work.  My wife and I got quite excited talking about that prospect, and she suggested there is no reason why we couldn’t also have a law that required the cleaning of windshields and rear view mirrors with every fill-up.  And that could be a job for another person; this would double the number of people back on the job.  All kinds of other similar ideas then came pouring into our heads.  I tell you sir, we were on a roll.

One of the many advantages of this idea is that we don’t need to apply for any of those stimulus funds from Washington to make it work.  We can take care of the whole thing right here in Sacramento, and watch with pride as our unemployment rate plummets.

But in reality, even the best of ideas needs that first step to get going.  It occurred to us that since you switched parties, it wouldn’t take much for you and our forward-thinking Democrat legislators in Sacramento to get together and have such a law on the books in no time.  And doubling the number of people for each filling station would put California back in the leadership position for these kinds of ideas – I can already see it being called the California Plan and quickly copied by like-minded states across the nation.

Finally, the best part of all is that, once we get started on this, it isn’t hard to think of a lot of other areas that could be used to boost the state’s employment in a similar manner.  And to think that those folks in Oregon were doing this all along and keeping quiet about it.  I’m not sure why we didn’t think of legislating employment opportunities sooner, but now there’s nothing to hold us back on the road to economic recovery.  And thanks to California, the rest of the country will soon follow.

Sincerely yours,
George Rebane