What to B&C may be profligate spending on widely-distributed local projects is more appropriately seen as an exercise in distributing the benefits broadly, if imperfectly, among future taxpayers.
Read MoreWhile Hamilton and Marion counties are the biggest winners, Madison, Wayne, Delaware, Grant and Lake will have less representation and will be the biggest losers.
Read MoreIn the 21st century, it’s time to reconsider the uses of our land as a way of attracting and retaining people, rather than industries.
What does it take to make progress? Unclench the jaws and remove the fangs of the contesting opponents; play the harp and silence the trumpets.
Woodlands still account for 22 percent of Indiana’s land area, an asset of unmeasured value.
But does a relationship exist between a state’s tax-climate ranking and its actual economic growth as measured by gross domestic product?
Not providing seats denies jobs to how many thousands? What portion of those on disability payments are out of the workforce because employers fail to provide opportunities to sit on the job? We do not know.
Multinational companies and foreign trade are not evil forces. Rather, states and cities need to recognize the economic perils any community can face almost anytime as private companies make changes.
Our state has good places the size of Evansville, South Bend and Muncie on down to Hartford City, Portland and Sullivan. These places could offer a quality of life deemed acceptable by our elite state economic developers if a program of incentives removed the blemishes caused by stagnation and decline.
The new movie about Noah and his ark, combined with the antics of the General Assembly, led me to setting the fabled story here in the Hoosier state.
Sometimes it seems our political leaders know only four-letter words like jobs. They often precede this with another four letter word: good.
What is the number one complaint of Hoosier employers? The labor force is outdated. We do not have enough workers with the training and experience to compete with other states and nations.
Governors and mayors normally talk as if they are personally responsible for bringing jobs to their states and communities. This is nonsense.
A good friend has come up with a good idea. I know it is a good idea because, when he presented it to me and another friend, both of us were skeptical. Such is the inevitable fate of good ideas among friends.
No one pays attention to a sentence buried in the middle of a recent news story out of Indiana University.
The Rockefeller Foundation has called for ideas that address the nation’s youth unemployment situation. Here are mine:
In the decade of the Great Depression, the 1930s, the population of Indiana grew 5.8 percent. Later, in the 1970s, a decade of great economic turmoil, the state’s population advanced 5.7 percent. The 1980s saw a strong recession and a subsequent restructuring of American business; Indiana’s population grew a mere 1 percent.
Today, unions are being peeled so that they become smaller.
Without standards of performance, taxpayers sign blank checks while children are set up for future failures.
Many parents would joyfully let their 14-year-olds become roofers, if it meant more money for meth.
For all of our philosophical pondering combined with our statistical cleverness, we cannot figure out what is “living” nor determine its “cost.”
The U.S. Army says, “Be all that you can be.” Indiana is moving toward a different message.
