NC economy

The NC Republican focus on an economic plan for the state was on full display Monday night in Raleigh. The House, led by Thom Tillis, was moving forward to slash UI benefits and cut off 80,000 workers laid off through no fault of their own.
The Senate, led by the always arrogant, venal, and avaristic Phil Berger, was showing it's contempt for low income NC citizens by denying 500,000 of them access to health care.
In the right wing nut fever swamp these two exist in, removing 600 million dollars in Federal money provided by UI actually helps NC's economy.
According to a recent study by the Institute of Medicine, the Affordable Care Act would bring 15 billion dollars into NC hospitals and create 23,000 jobs. The Federal government pays 100% of the cost for the first three years and 90% after that.
In the upside down bizarro world of NC GOP economics, this is called growth, to the rest of us, it is Orwellian doublethink.

Back when I ran a business, I marveled at the short-sightedness of competitors who used cost-cutting as their primary lever to drive profitability. In the face of threats or risk, their first move was to slash costs, usually by laying off people. It is a loser's strategy.

That's not to say a business should never cut costs. Sometimes you simply have to in order to survive. But once you begin down that road, once you adopt an austerity mindset, the game is over. In the long haul, you cannot cut your way to sustainable profitability.

By now, everyone is probably aware at least at some level of the massive rock slide that has closed Interstate 40 near the Tennessee border in Haywood County. What is the fastest way to get the slide cleaned up and traffic flowing again through this vital east-west artery?

Please join us next week for a public forum on job creation and North Carolina's potential leadership in the emerging clean energy economy.

Wednesday, September 23, 2009
7:00 - 8:30 pm

at
The Mint Museum of Art, Van Every Theater
2730 Randolph Road, Charlotte, NC 28207

Keynote Speaker:
The Honorable Walter H. Dalton, North Carolina Lieutenant Governor

Panelists:
Olee Joel Olsen, O2 Energies
Joseph J. James, Corporation for Economic Opportunities
Terence Fagan, Central Piedmont Community College
Alina Johnson, Conservation Council of North Carolina

Sponsors:

I'm encouraged that BusinessWeek concurs with my opinion regarding our economy:

The great job bust of 2008 is being felt keenly in communities across the U.S. Few may be suffering more than Greensboro, N.C., one of the South's most scenic and livable cities and no stranger to disruptive economic change. Greensboro's local economy has been stress-tested by global outsourcing since the early 1990s, when jobs tethered to its two once-dominant industries, textiles and furniture, began to move to Asia.

Of course, anyone who's been paying even the slightest attention around here knows this quite well. Do not miss the comments. Hat tip to Ed Cone.

Guess who wants to give YOU some real tax relief?

If you're a $50-$100k/year household -- You, the middle of the middle class, the folks among us who spend money at local stores, eat in local restaurants and who usually spend a chunk of vacation money every year right here in the US of A, feeding our economy and keeping it moving -- Obama and the Democrats see the strain on your income and they'll do something to help.

WACHOVIA BANK CORP - Riches for CEO, Unemployment for workers -

Wachovia CEO gets $18 Million March 10, 2007. CHARLOTTE - The chairman and chief executive of Wachovia Corp., Ken Thompson, received compensation that the company valued at nearly $18.4 million in 2006, according to a regulatory filing yesterday.
http://www.journalnow.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=WSJ%2FMGArticle%2FWSJ_BasicArticle&c=MGArticle&cid=1173350135956&path=!business&s=1037645507703

AND, SOON TO OUTSOURCE NORTH CAROLINA PROCESSING JOBS TO INDIA

Businessweek JANUARY 30, 2006

Wachovia will have outsourced 500 to 1,000 jobs, with plans to move an additional 3,000 or so by the end of 2007. ..Most, but not all, of those jobs are going to India....

Of all the reasons to lament the pathetic Child King in the White House, one that resonates most with me is his complete shredding of our country's reputation throughout the world. One of my favorite publications, The Chronicle of Higher Education spells it out.

. . . as of October 2001, weeks after 9/11 and just before the U.S. war against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, a massive Europewide resentment of America commenced that reached well beyond American policies, American politics, and the American government, proliferating in virtually all segments of Western European publics. From grandmothers who vote for the archconservative Bavarian Christian Social Union to 30-year-old socialist Pasok activists in Greece, from Finnish Social Democrats to French Gaullists, from globalization opponents to business managers — all are joining in the ever louder chorus of anti-Americanism.

Friday Follies at NC Policy Watch has a lot of good stuff this week, including a bit about the North Carolina economy. Here's the punchline:

The 2007 Economic Forecast Lunch this week sponsored by North Carolina Citizens for Business and Industry and the North Carolina Bankers Association presented some mixed messages. The prediction from economists was that North Carolina’s economy would grow faster than the nation’s as a whole in 2007 and that the state’s rapid population growth would continue.

The state gained 133,000 jobs in 2006. Knight Kiplinger, one of the keynote speakers, told the crowd that North Carolina was one of 11 states that will grow more than 30 percent in jobs and population in the next 20 years. In other words, the state’s economy is faring well overall and future prospects look bright as well.