Whenever a company is acquired, you can expect layoffs. But I don’t know that anyone expected such a tall stack of pink slips to be delivered last week to workers at Kythera Biopharmaceuticals in Westlake Village.

The buyer said 117 of Kythera’s 212 employees would be let go. That’s 55 percent. Workers at Kythera, which makes a drug to dissolve double chins, took it on both chins.

That’s a stunner and a disappointment, sure. But if there is such a thing, this is a good time to get laid off in the bioscience field, as one life sciences executive recruiter said in the article on page 8 of this issue. Lots of local companies are looking for good people with experience in that field.

But it’s also important to remember that whenever a lot of talent gets released into the economic sphere, entrepreneurship often results. At least some of those 117 who were cozy in their jobs may figure that this is the best time to start that business they were thinking about. For them, this is now-or-never time.

As one source pointed out in the article, Alan Auerbach created Cougar Biotechnology and sold it in 2009. Rather than spending the rest of his life surfing, Auerbach created Puma Biotechnology to search for and develop cancer-fighting drugs. Puma now employs 134 and was so successful it made Auerbach a billionaire, albeit briefly.

All it would take is one Puma-like company to be created, and the loss from Kythera would be offset. But who knows? Maybe two or three Pumas will start. If you want to dream, maybe an Amgen will get rooted; it employs 17,000.

For the individuals laid off from Kythera, this may well be a troubling and dark time. We all get that. But for the city as a whole, we may look back on this moment as the point at which L.A.’s biopharmaceutical sector got a shot in the arm.

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Presidential candidate Jeb Bush’s tax reform proposal includes a provision that would whack high-income people in California unusually hard. He calls for eliminating the federal tax deduction for income and property taxes paid to state and local governments.

Those who itemize their federal tax returns have always been able to deduct their state taxes. Otherwise, it would amount to double taxation, and that would be fundamentally unfair.

But those in the nine states with no income tax (such as Bush’s Florida) make a different argument. They claim that the lowered federal tax money coming from the high-tax states results in a kind of deficit that everyone else has to make up. In other words, the low-tax states are being forced to help cover for the high-tax states, and that’s fundamentally unfair.

Since California is among the highest-tax states, wealthier folks here would feel a big wallop in the wallet if this proposal becomes reality. But so would those in New York, New Jersey and other high-tax states.

Now, you can point out that the proposal is coming from just one candidate, and one who doesn’t seem to be going anywhere anyway. But it’s a provision that’s bound to gain popularity, at least among Republicans. After all, it would be the blue states that get hit.

In short, if a Republican wins the presidency, be braced to lose that deduction.

Charles Crumpley is editor of the Business Journal. He can be reached at [email protected].