Category: Economic development
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Is Virginia Exporting Its Human Capital?
by James A. Bacon Researchers at the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV) are asking a question with profound implications for Virginia’s higher-education policy. Is Virginia exporting more college graduates than it is importing? The answer, conclude Tom Allison & Susan Hankins in the latest Insights post, is, “Maybe. Enough to get our…
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Should Choice of Supplier Extend to Natural Gas?
by Steve Haner Should there be retail choice for natural gas? The developers of a proposed natural gas-fired merchant electricity plant are testing the waters with a proposal to bypass their local monopoly supplier by building their own one-customer pipeline to another source. In the electricity arena, this is an old issue as large industrial…
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JLARC Agrees: VA Economy Lags National Growth
by Steve Haner First published this morning by the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy. This makes if official: Even the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC) has documented and highlighted how poorly Virginia’s economy is performing, how far our state is lagging national growth averages. The admission comes in the most recent summary…
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Bacon Bits: Bafflement, Confusion… and Hope
What is wrong with this picture? Headline from FFXnow: “Inova temporarily closes urgent care centers in Reston and Tysons due to high patient volume.” On top of an influx of COVID-19 cases fueled by the Delta variant, Virginia hospitals are getting more patients — many of whom had delayed seeking medical care due to the pandemic…
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Virginia Job Growth Trails U.S. Averages
by A. Fletcher Mangum Virginia’s employment growth has been underperforming the national economy for quite some time. As shown in Figure 1, soon after the recovery from the Great Recession began in earnest in 2011 Virginia’s year-over-year growth in total employment uncharacteristically fell behind the national economy and even briefly went negative in 2014. Then…
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The Economics of Flood Control in Virginia
by James C. Sherlock We have work to do, and need to do it quickly and well. If we want to get storm defenses built before major storm damage rather than after; and if we want the federal government to pay 65% of the costs. Let’s assume we do. The “Virginia Coastal Resilience Master Planning…
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Quote of the Day: Mary Trigiani
Mary Trigiani is a management consultant in Southwest Virginia. One of her interests is rethinking “economic development” in the region. I was struck by this morning’s lead-in to her daily newsletter. Economic development is, for some, the game of redistributing taxpayer money and sustaining agencies for that purpose – without reporting ROI back to taxpayers…
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Federal Contracting in Northern Virginia Reaches $60 Billion Annually
by James C. Sherlock The Washington Business Journal (WBJ) reported today that annual federal contracting in Northern Virginia has reached $60 billion. That compares to federal contracting there of $33.7 billion in 2000 (2020 dollars). As a reference points, I consulted St. Louis Fed data for Virginia GDP in those same years and converted the…
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The Goochland Revolution: Making Growth Pay for Itself
by James A. Bacon Ken Peterson, a leader of Goochland County’s turnaround from fiscal basket case to bearer of a AAA bond rating, thinks he has discovered the holy grail of fast-growth county governance: how to make development pay for itself. In previous posts I described how Peterson and his fellow fiscal conservatives swept into…
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There’s Gold in Them Thar… Press Releases?
by Jock Yellott It seems there is a vein of quartz underground in Buckingham County sparkling with gold. The General Assembly almost prohibited mining it, but then backed off. This time. A string of historic gold mines going back to the 19th Century appear as red dots on the county geological survey map like chigger…
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Loudoun’s Golden Goose Lays Fewer Eggs
by James A. Bacon Data centers may not support a lot of jobs, but they sure do pump up the tax base. In Loudoun County, home to the world’s largest cluster of server farms, the facilities were expected to support $11.2 billion in taxable assets. When the actual number came in $1.1 billion shy of…
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The Mayor of Alexandria Anticipated my Column
by James C. Sherlock We scribblers at Bacon’s Rebellion pride ourselves on being leaders in the progressive thought process. In acknowledgment of the wisdom in my column that called out the observable inefficiency of government, I give you: The city of Alexandria, Virginia, is joining a growing number of cities across the U.S. that are sending money to…
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Got $26,000 To Replace All Your Gas Appliances?
by Steve Haner Maybe not today or tomorrow, but soon the War on Fossil Fuels will be fought in the equipment room or garage of your house. A push to prohibit new natural gas connections and remove existing home gas services is inevitable if Virginia’s current leaders are serious about zero carbon within 20 to…
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If No Better Ideas Emerge, Go With These
By Steve Haner First published Tuesday by the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy. In 1972, a Virginia taxpayer needed a taxable income of $12,000 before the state’s maximum income tax rate kicked in. Adjusted for inflation, that threshold should be $78,000 today. There has been one adjustment since, to $17,000 in income before the…
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A Deeper Dive into CNBC’s Rankings
by Chris Saxman In doing a deeper dive on the CNBC Top States for Business rankings, two quotes keep running through my unsettled mind. Why unsettled? Well, last year I posed this question to Virginia FREE’s Board of Directors: If Virginia was a stock, would you Buy, Sell, or Hold? Not one said Buy. They…