| While others other embrace the mundane Thanksgiving day football, or if you're like me and you want something interesting to do WHILE you watch football....and if you're a policy geek and you want some light work for the holidays you can sleuth through the most excellent Legislative Fiscal Division (LFD) web site http://www.leg.mt.gov/css/fisc... LFD web site. It is a relatively unknown and underutilized asset. I subscribe and they send me a "chart of the week" that is often informative but sometimes just a curiosity. These are certainly people who earn their money as public employees because they provide a great public asset (thank you Sen. Lewis). Tracking the chart of the week and digging into the site's other features allow some insight into Montana's short-term economic future and a cursory understanding of the state's budget process during the upcoming session.
The first realization is the absence of any "progressive" thinking on the horizon in the upcoming session, because there has been very little historically in Montana. Hence our traditional standing at the bottom of the national economic ladder. I consider "progressive thinking" in economic terms along the lines of Obama's "stimulus", the Fed's current QE2 program or simply investing in quality public education. Montana State government has a very limited history of state government actively spending to stimulate certain economic sectors and that won't change in the 2011 session.
All this makes me a Krugmanite (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/) where I see an essential role for both federal and state government investment in certain sectors for economic stimulation and development. My career in science makes this a natural believing that there are certain places that government investment has to go, because private investors would be crazy to do so.
My favorite examples are biomedical research and the space program. No private company could ever have conceived of investing in a program to send a man to the moon or develop a space shuttle in the 20th century. Thus, it took the government to spend/invest there, but the payoff was huge. All the products (Teflon, Tang, etc., etc.) and of course a satellite fleet next to none have been the basis for our economic growth in the late 20th century. It goes without saying that the private sector is the twin to government investment where entrepreneurs mine the gold through product development and marketing. Witness how, once the technological groundwork was laid and the risk is lowered to an acceptable level, 21st century companies are moving into space. A corollary also exists between NIH funded research and the pharmaceutical or health care industries. The trick for Montana policy makers is to find our local "space program" and invest accordingly. That's not easy.
The tealeaves for the upcoming legislative session predict that GOP legislators will be off-task and most certainly tip too far in the direction of the private sector's "magic hand" by over-cutting government spending. This will only serve to starve Montana's economic growth in the long term, evidenced by their cutting educational budgets and other essential services like FWP that maintain the infrastructure for tourism. They will also pass ill-advised tax cuts to fatten corporate profits that only fly out of state. Our consignment to the bottom percentiles of the national income ladder and our legacy of being exploited by other more wealthy states and corporations will continue. Out of state corporations will continue to make money and send their profits back home (e.g. Walmart). The debilitating trend where out of state landowners buy up large ranches and lock out Montana recreationalists will only accelerate. So, if you want to make some money in Montana, invest in the orange paint business. |
