The Daily Citizen, Dalton, GA

Opinion

Discussion

Welcome to our online comments feature. To join the discussion, you must first register with Disqus and verify your email address. Once you do, your comments will post automatically. We welcome your thoughts and your opinions, including unpopular ones. We ask only that you keep the conversation civil and clean. We reserve the right to remove comments that are obscene, racist or abusive and statements that are false or unverifiable. Repeat offenders will be blocked. You may flag objectionable comments for review by a moderator.
comments powered by Disqus
January 24, 2012

Licensed for ill

The Daily Citizen

Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp wants to decrease the amount of time that people have to wait to receive a state occupational license.

His proposal sounds good, but it doesn’t go far enough.

Georgia currently has 43 boards licensing everything from accountants to water and wastewater treatment plant operators.

Kemp wants to create yet another board, a seven-member panel that would issue all professional licenses for the state. He said that could cut the average waiting time for a license from a month to about a week. Since his staff already handles most of legwork on licensing applications, he said his plan would not cost the state more money.

His plan would keep the 43 professional boards to set policies and standards for their occupations and to act as advisers for the new licensing board.

Kemp said he expects to find a lawmaker to sponsor a bill that would enact this proposal next week. But we hope the Legislature goes beyond Kemp’s proposal to consider whether the state really needs to require licenses from so many professions.

Do interior designers, barbers and landscape architects really need licenses?

In the 1950s, most states licensed only a handful of occupations — typically doctors, dentists and the like. Today, states require licenses to practice more than 1,100 professions, according to the Council on Licensure, Enforcement and Regulation.

Georgia seems to be relatively laissez faire considering that it, unlike some other states, doesn’t mandate that florists or sellers of frozen desserts have a license.

University of Minnesota economist Morris Kleiner has literally written the book on licensing. His “Licensing Occupations: Ensuring Quality or Restricting Competition?” found little evidence that licensing improves quality of service. He did find that it increases costs to consumers. Kleiner said licensing costs consumers more than $116 billion a year.

Kleiner also found that job growth in various professions was 20 percent greater on average in states that don’t license those professions than in those that do.

So if Georgia lawmakers want to help create jobs and save residents money, they should look at not only making it quicker to get a license but cutting the number of occupations that require a license.

Text Only
Opinion