(The Center Square) – A new report aims to show why Arizona legislators should avoid “job killers.”
In partnership with the Arizona Chamber Foundation, the Common Sense Institute’s “Job Killers” report analyzed bills in 2025 that could have harmed Arizona economically if they were passed and signed into law. The bills would have cost billions of dollars and cost more than 600,000 jobs, according to the report.
Glenn Farley, CSI director of policy & research, was succinct with his explanation.
“Policy matters,” Farley told The Center Square.
In any given year, approximately 1,500 bills are introduced in the Arizona Legislature. Most of those will not make it to the governor’s desk and become law.
In its latest report, CSI points to 88 bills that “would have raised taxes, added labor and regulatory mandates, or otherwise increased operating costs” for businesses in Arizona.
If the state had adopted them, measures would have cost $30 billion in new labor costs by repealing the Right to Work law and significantly increasing the minimum wage.
Legislation also would have cost $8 billion in energy and environmental mandates by adopting California’s vehicle emission standards and requiring half of electricity in the near future be generated by renewables.
And the bills had a nearly $4 billion price tag for new legal and administrative burdens such as rent control, along with $3.7 billion in new or higher taxes.
Had these bills been approved and signed into law, CSI determined that 660,000 jobs would have been lost while gross domestic product would have seen a $64 billion annual reduction. Real personal income per capita would also be $4,600 less.
Farley said Colorado has experienced these things in recent years, due in part to its passage of similar bills.
CSI considers Colorado and Arizona to be peer states. They grew at roughly the same rates, are comparable in size nd are neighbors.
“We’ve seen environmental regulations. We’ve seen jobsite regulations, transportation and logistics regulations,” Farley said about Colorado. “Over time, we think this regulatory burden has compounded, and it has sort of slowed economic development and driven industry to other states, which explains both the slowdown in Colorado but also potentially the speed up in Arizona.”
