Obama’s Bus Tour: Don’t Forget ‘Bottom-Up’ Job Creation
This morning President Obama begins a three-city bus tour in the Midwest. His first stops will take him to prairie communities in Minnesota where he will likely talk about such broad-stroke job-creation proposals as payroll tax relief for employees and extended unemployment benefits, all of which is welcome. READ MORE >>
Albany: The Surprising Clean Economy Capital
Metros Turn Up the Heat on Addressing Climate
As the heat and humidity settle into Washington for the season and the hope that Congress might one day take action to prevent a warming climate melts away, readers can find some relief in a recent spate of reports emanating from across metro America. READ MORE >>
Budget 2012: Innovation Despite Everything
With budget chaos deepening in Washington and the politics of gesture ascendant, it’s hard to know how seriously to take President Obama’s FY 2012 budget proposals--released against the backdrop of budget melodramas and the massive proposed program cuts being pushed by th READ MORE >>
The New Push for a Federal Government Re-org
One surprising passage in Tuesday night’s State of the Union speech was President Obama’s sudden embrace of government restructuring. About 43 minutes into the speech, the president placed the federal bureaucracy’s institutional anachronisms on center stage, and declared the issue not just a matter of efficiency but of national competitiveness. READ MORE >>
Lessons in Budgeting from the Beehive State
Fiscal trainwrecks that state lawmakers and local governments have to clean up are everywhere this year, especially out West. However, one state that does not contend with massive budget problems is Utah--and Western neighbors in search of a sounder fiscal footing would be wise to study why. READ MORE >>
Local Government Fiscal Crisis Mounts
On Friday my colleague Mark Muro showed us “four different styles of [fiscal] trainwreck” from Western states, which is the subject (along with a few suggestions for improving budgetary processes) of a report we released last week with the Morrison Institute in Arizona. READ MORE >>
Too Little Too Late?
In November 2009 we and the National League of Cities (and many others) warned that steep state and local public sector cuts loomed on the horizon, and that these cuts could undermine any nascent economic recovery just as the federal government’s unprecedented stimulus spending wound down. Well, from the looks of July’s disheartening jobs report, this prognosis is now the new reality. READ MORE >>
Export West: Utah is the Place!
Utah’s three large metropolitan areas generated more than $10 billion dollars worth of exports in 2008. At 11.2 percent of the metros’ total production, this equated to an export intensity almost one full percentage point higher than that of the nation’s top 100 metro areas. READ MORE >>
Job Creation Has Left the Building
Where are the jobs? That question pervaded last week’s edition of the MetroMonitor index of recession and recovery and is becoming acute in the Intermountain West, where the companion Mountain Monitor reported that that employment actually fell slightly in the first quarter of 2010 in most of the region’s metros. READ MORE >>
