This is a tale of two states. One is run by sane politicians running the government, who are, of course, mostly conservative Republicans, in North Dakota.
Good paying jobs are being created there, which is why the unemployment rate is the lowest in the nation, 3.8%, thanks in part to energy development, mainly drilling for oil, but also from coal mining and even wind energy development.
Even high tech companies are realizing the advantages of investing in, relocating to, or opening facilities there, due to less regulation and low taxation, which promotes business growth, and heaven forbid, profits(!!!), all of which create thousands of jobs.
The other state is about as lost a cause as we have in the USA.
And that state is, of course, the once great state of California, which is being run into ditch by insane liberals elected into office by millions of insane voters who happily send them off to Sacramento, CA, to destroy what was once, as I said, a great state.
These moronic lib clowns posing as legislators never saw a regulation, tax increase, or fee hike they didn’t not just love, but salivate over. To them, taxpayer money is the meth, and they’re the addicts.
Here’s two excellent articles about how North Dakota is prospering, thanks to conservatives running the state, while California is on the verge of defaulting on paying its bills, and headed towards bankruptcy, due to the stupidity of dimocrats/liberals and liberalism run amok.
This is the reason that every state that is in an extremely dire financial situation are, or were, run into the ditch by the imbeciles in the dimocratic party.
The citizens of a few states, like Wisconsin, Ohio, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, finally saw the light, and realized that their state could not sustain this out of control spending.
So they finally woke the hell up, and elected Republicans to clean the libs’ mess, which goes to prove, that like a lot of their constituency, liberals also need help from the government, but from a government made up of sane people (conservative Republicans, not RINO’s) who want to run their states like most of us run our own homes.
We live within our means. If we can’t afford something, we don’t buy it, or we save for it, or wait until we can afford it. What a novel idea, huh?
How anyone, with a functioning brain, could read both of these articles, and not see that liberals really are the stupidest and most ignorant people in the civilized world, must be a liberal themselves.
Everywhere liberalism and socialism has been tried, it’s been a colossal FAILURE!
And it always will be, because once politicians start buying votes by promising to take from the haves, the successful businesses and people who produce the jobs that sustain the middle class, and give it to the have nots, who sit on their dead asses all day watching Oprah, Judge Judy, and Jerry Springer, all the while complaining that they’re not getting enough welfare, and those leeches become a viable voting bloc that can sway elections one way or another, that city/county/state/country is doomed.
by Joel Kotkin
Living on the harsh, wind-swept northern Great Plains, North Dakotans lean towards the practical in economic development. Finding themselves sitting on prodigious pools of oil—estimated by the state’s Department of Mineral Resources at least 4.3 billion barrels—they are out drilling like mad. And the state is booming.
Unemployment is 3.8%, and according to a Gallup survey last month, North Dakota has the best job market in the country. Its economy “sticks out like a diamond in a bowl of cherry pits,” says Ron Wirtz, editor of the Minneapolis Fed’s newspaper, fedgazette. The state’s population, slightly more than 672,000, is up nearly 5% since 2000.
The biggest impetus for the good times lies with energy development. Around 650 wells were drilled last year in North Dakota, and the state Department of Mineral Resources envisions another 5,500 new wells over the next two decades. Between 2005 and 2009, oil industry revenues have tripled to $12.7 billion from $4.2 billion, creating more than 13,000 jobs.
Already fourth in oil production behind Texas, Alaska and California, the state is positioned to advance on its competitors. Drilling in both Alaska and the Gulf, for example, is currently being restrained by Washington-imposed regulations. And progressives in California—which sits on its own prodigious oil supplies—abhor drilling, promising green jobs while suffering double-digit unemployment, higher utility rates and the prospect of mind-numbing new regulations that are designed to combat global warming and are all but certain to depress future growth. In North Dakota, by contrast, even the state’s Democrats—such as Sen. Kent Conrad and former Sen. Byron Dorgan—tend to be pro-oil. The industry services the old-fashioned liberal goal of making middle-class constituents wealthier.
Oil also is the principal reason North Dakota enjoys arguably the best fiscal situation in all the states. With a severance tax on locally produced oil, there’s a growing state surplus. Recent estimates put an extra $1 billion in the state’s coffers this year, and that’s based on a now-low price of $70 a barrel.
North Dakota, however, is no one-note Prairie sheikdom. The state enjoys prodigious coal supplies and has—yes—even moved heavily into wind-generated electricity, now ranking ninth in the country. Thanks to global demand, North Dakota’s crop sales are strong, but they are no longer the dominant economic driver—agriculture employs only 7.2% of the state’s work force.
Perhaps more surprising, North Dakota is also attracting high-tech. For years many of the state’s talented graduates left home, but that brain drain is beginning to reverse. This has been critical to the success of many companies, such as Great Plains Software, which was founded in the 1980s and sold to Microsoft in 2001 for $1.1 billion. The firm has well over 1,000 employees.
The corridor between Grand Forks and Fargo along the Red River (the border between North Dakota and Minnesota) has grown rapidly in the past decade. It now boasts the headquarters of Microsoft Business Systems and firms such as PacketDigital, which makes microelectronics for portable electronic devices and systems. There are also biotech firms such as Aldevron, which manufactures proteins for biomedical research. Between 2002 and 2009, state employment in science, technology, engineering and math-related professions grew over 30%, according to EMSI, an economic modeling firm. This is five times the national average.
While the overall numbers are still small compared to those of bigger states, North Dakota now outperforms the nation in everything from the percentage of college graduates under the age of 45 to per-capita numbers of engineering and science graduates. Median household income in 2009 was $49,450, up from $42,235 in 2000. That 17% increase over the last decade was three times the rate of Massachussetts and more than 10 times that of California.
California Moves Closer Toward Default
by Chris W. Street
California tax payers just took a huge punch in the nose from the same actuaries who provided the cover for state politicians to spike public employee retirement benefits. The latest shocker comes from California State Controller John Chiang who yesterday unveiled a new actuarial report that shows California faces another unfunded debt of $59.9 billion to pay for retiree health and dental benefits over the next 30 years.
Controller Chiang highlighted that the unfunded liability grew during the 2010 fiscal year by $8.1 billion; an amount equal to almost 25% of this year’s entire California kindergarten through high school education budget.
Actuaries have aided and abetted the explosion in under-funding of pension and healthcare liabilities for public employee pension plans over the last ten years. With most public employee pension plans fully funded in 2000, a preposterous actuary study gave assurances that the technology stock market bubble of the 1990s would continue its high returns never burst.
The California Governor and the Legislature used the study, paid for by employees who are eligible for retirement benefits, to justify 40% retroactive increases in lifetime pension payments and enhancements of retiree healthcare. During 2008 and 2009, a bogus California actuary study claiming the retiree healthcare plan was over-funded was used to justify waiving mandatory employee contribution increases to cover accelerating healthcare insurance premium increases.
The bulk of this new increase in retiree costs came as the result of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CALPERS) actuaries “discovering” after the fact that employees with their new pensions payments spiked and healthcare enhanced are retiring earlier, retirees are living longer, and healthcare costs are increasing faster than the crony projections by the actuary. The new actuary calculations now estimate the total un-funded California retiree costs are about $340 billion.
Unlike the state pension plan, which has a prayer of large investment returns reducing its un-funded liabilities, California retiree health benefits are covered on a “pay-as-you-go” basis. This means that actuary “error” that resulted in the new massive un-funding will start coming out of the state budgets immediately. California state retiree benefits have risen from 4% of the state budget to 11% in just ten years; and both pension and healthcare systems are still irresponsibly under-funded. The vicious impacts of this sky-rocketing cost of retiree healthcare may result in a 10% teacher layoff and an equal increase in class sizes next year.
