Salvation is at hand: California is going out of business

The prolonged recession in Idaho is finally starting to cause some people to ponder the fate of the state, though not yet in the public sector. Rest assured, though, the day of reckoning is coming for those folks too.

You probably saw the Statesman’s business panel making predictions about what they think will bring some financial security to Idaho. If you missed it, here’s the short exchange between economist John Church, Lorana Quintero from Idaho Pizza, and Clay Young from Innovus Solar:

What do you think are the implications for Idaho’s economy of having students who do not have this global view?

Church:
Our growth in Idaho is very bright, and one reason I think it is going to be very bright in the future is California, not because of how good California is, but how messed up California is. Fiscally, the handwriting is on the wall: Something is going to have to be done, and it is not going to be painless for business and people in California. What are they going to do? They are going to leave. If we just catch a trickle of that, Idaho is going to do very well.

Do all of you share John’s scenario for California?

Quintero: I think so. Ask anybody where they are from, (and they say) California.

Church: We should be mining.

Young: I would agree with that.

These are the impotent cries of our leaders: wait for California to fail, and we will win.

Utterly, ridiculous.

Even if California with all its human capital cannot figure out its budget situation - what makes these people think that: 1) Idaho is the best choice for all of California’s businesses to relocate, and 2) that Idaho’s elected officials will manage our resources here any better than California?

And that is only one argument. For God’s sake California is the fifth or sixth largest economy in the world. It offers unprecedented access to domestic markets as well as Asian markets. It has a university system that is tops in the world - and Berkeley is the top research university in the country. California has 350 sunny days a year, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, the home of the west coast banking and finance establishment in San Francisco, the military industrial complex, and on and on and on. Stating that California is going out of business anytime soon, and that Idaho is a likely beneficiary of any financial malaise there can’t be taken seriously.

BVEP and plenty of local leaders want you to believe that economic salvation is as easy as saving your own soul - but it aint. At some point, our leaders need to invest in something - ANYTHING. Roads, education, infrastructure - SOMETHING. Idaho’s immediate problem is that it cannot compete with the well run Utah, or Colorado which has a structural budget SURPLUS. Until we can be top dog regionally at SOMETHING, Idaho with its low cost of living and little else will continue to succeed at luring California’s low-skilled, unemployed hard cases, and nothing more.

What an engaged government looks like: Case study - Rail in California and Nevada

With the lack of participation by Idaho’s state level elected officials in many of the conversations that the community is having about transportation, planning, growth, sustainability, transit, etc., an article and a few photos from the western press really drove home the importance of an engaged legislature.

Last month, the Urban Land Institute and Boise State University convened a half-day conference on transit in the Boise Valley. One legislator attended.

The issue being discussed was how to get the rail line, which runs from the City of Nampa to the Micron plant in East Boise, operational for regional passenger service. We’re talking about one tiny little move toward rail transit - and we can’t seem to assemble any political leadership in the room.

There was no representation there from the Governor’s office. Neither the legislature nor the Governor have shown any interest in local option or other funding mechanisms to help the region get some kind of rail transit happening. Meanwhile, our federal officials are heading in the opposite direction and trying to get Amtrak to restore service to the Boise Depot. Our political leaders are all over the map.

So what’s going on in other parts of the country? Everyone else is experiencing the same confusion/apathy, right? Not exactly. Here, in images is what is happening in California:

The proposed high-speed rail network in California

Proposed high-speed rail line from Anaheim to Las Vegas

In case that is unclear, what is happening in California is that the state - through a combination of federal, state, local, and private money - is building a $45 billion, high speed rail network to connect the state. Because California is so organized, they are likely to get the lion’s share of the $8 billion that President Obama made available for regional rail projects.

This in turn spawned the proposal by Nevada to build a high-speed rail connection from Las Vegas to Anaheim. So while the all these grand plans are going on, we’re still sitting around here asking questions like “who’s gonna ride the thing?” Well, they asked that in Nevada too, and the poll below shows that 69% of people said they would ride the Vegas high-speed line if it were built.

A recent poll from the Las Vegas Sun-Times

The California system would link San Francisco with Los Angeles with train service in under three hours. How is it that a project spanning 800 miles and dozens of local governments and special districts, can get off the ground but Idaho can’t even get train service happening from Boise to Micron? Vice President Joe Biden sums it up:

“The reason why California is looked at so closely — it’s been a priority of your governor, it’s been a priority of your Legislature, they’ve talked about it, a lot of planning has been done,” Biden said.

Where Harvard grads fear to tread

Few Harvard grads are moving west

Saw this report a week or so ago and thought it interesting. As you can very nearly see from the infographic above, only California really got a significant number of grads from the last Harvard class. 13% of Harvard 2009 grads moved to California for work or grad school. Another 2.3% moved to other places in the West. The largest share of grads stayed right there in the Northeast Megaregion. What’s up with the Brahmins? They don’t imbue a sense of adventure among Harvard students anymore?