A fundamental part of any period of rapid growth or decline is movement. Creative destruction plus a large, open, continental economy yields massive shifts in population. Rural moves to cities. Old cities give way to new. I like to say that a downturn is more of a restructuring than a recession. It's not as if when the economy grows back, all the saggy parts will inflate again.
Michigan, California, we know about those states. But did you know Ohio is on the downswing as well? The Dayton Daily News reports:
NCR will move its corporate headquarters from Dayton to Duluth, Ga., taking with it more than one thousand jobs from here. ... In the memo sent to employees, Nuti wrote, “The decision to consolidate functions in Georgia and build a corporate headquarters campus focused on innovation is in line with our business strategy to drive growth, improve our innovation output, increase productivity and continually upgrade our focus on the customer. In addition, we will decrease time-to-market for innovative solutions, improve our internal collaboration, deliver next generation employee education programs and lower our current operating costs.”
Somewhere in that lies the truth. Or part of it. The full article digs deeper and identifies the direct international flights that go direct to and fro Atlanta. From Dayton, it's 60-90 minutes just to get to one of the regional hubs in Columbus or Cincy. But I wonder.
The article makes no mention of taxes, so I turned to the handy-dandy Tax Foundation's 2009 State Business Tax Climate Index. So guess which state is ranked 47th out of 50? And guess which state is ranked 27th? Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.
Time to haul out the most important quote in the history of Political Economy:
"Little else is required to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes and a tolerable administration of justice." --Adam Smith
If we had a functional system for teaching America's youth, this would be the first and most often-repeated lesson in Social Studies.
Posted by: q | June 17, 2009 at 10:28 AM
Would it be possible for the site administrator to enable HTML so that commenters like myself could use BOLD, italics, and block quotations?
Thanks in advance!
Posted by: q | June 17, 2009 at 10:29 AM
The battle of ideas is not won or lost in Congress, or even in elections, but in the long assessment of history. Just ask Qeng Ho
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