Category: Labor and Workforce
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Et Tu, McAuliffe?
By Peter Galuszka Sure, parents want to help their children but in the case of former State Sen. Phillip Puckett, it is getting ridiculous. And the latest disclosure in this morning’s Washington Post makes the Terry McAuliffe administration look just as sleazy as their Republican counterparts. Puckett, of course was a Democratic senator who held…
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Tobacco Commission Needs Huge Makeover
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in Business and Economy, Consumer Protection, Courts and law, Crime, Corrections, Law Enforcement, Demographics, Economic development, Education (higher ed), Education (K-12), Electoral process, Energy, Environment, Health Care, Infrastructure, Labor and Workforce, Land use & Development, Money in politics, Planning, Politics, Public safety & health, Social Services and Entitlements, UncategorizedBy Peter Galuszka One more glaring example of mass corruption in Virginia is the grandly named Virginia Tobacco Indemnification and Community Revitalization Commission formed 14 years ago to dole out Virginia’s share of a $206 billion settlement among 45 other states with cigarette makers. I’ve been writing for years about how millions of dollars are…
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Genius-Free Virginia
by James A. Bacon Economic development has become a game not just of recruiting corporate capital but of developing, recruiting and retaining human capital. Much has been written about the desirability of recruiting members of the “creative class,” the entrepreneurs, scientists, artists and educators who contribute disproportionately to entrepreneurship and economic growth. But how about the…
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Using Big Data to Put Veterans Back to Work
by James A. Bacon Unemployment among veterans in the United States is higher than that for the population at large. The problem is particularly acute among post 9/11 veterans, for whom the unemployment rate ran 9.0% in 2013 — nearly 50% higher than the 6.2% rate for all Americans, according to data from the U.S.…
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The Huge Controversy Over Gas Pipelines
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By Peter Galuszka Just a few years ago, Gov. Terry McAuliffe seemed to be a reasonable advocate of a healthy mix of energy sources. He boosted renewables and opposed offshore oil and gas drilling. He was suspicious of dangerous, dirty coal. Then he started to change. During the campaign last year, he suddenly found offshore…
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A Surprising Source of Resilience in SW, Southside Virginia
Back on the subject of entrepreneurship and business start-ups in Virginia… The Virginia Performs website provides a useful overview of data that describes the climate for business growth in the state. With the caveat that the data is subject to reporting lags, hence a little of out date, the picture is a modestly favorable one. The…
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“The Economy of the Past Is Over.” But What Comes Next?
by James A. Bacon So, Virginia faces a $2.4 billion projected budget shortfall, which Governor Terry McAuliffe blames largely on defense funding cuts mandated by sequestration. Surprise, surprise. We’ve seen this train wreck coming for years. Some (including multiple writers on this blog) have seen it more clearly and shouted about it more loudly than…
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How Not to Shift From Coal
By Peter Galuszka Coal is rightly the scourge of environmentalists. Economic pressure is on to shift to cleaner natural gas made plentiful by controversial hydraulic fracking. Political pressure is on to replace fossil fuels with renewables such as wind, solar and other methods. In Virginia, Dominion, the state’s largest utility, relies for 46 percent of…
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Chart of the Day: Virginia’s Aging Population
This graph comparing Virginia’s age between 1980 and 2013 comes from Luke Juday’s latest post over on the Stat Chat blog, published by the demographics shop the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service. I urge you to check out the opening chart in his post to see an animation of the changes year by year. It’s fascinating to…
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RAM, Coal and Massive Hypocrisy
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in Business and Economy, Demographics, Disasters and Disaster Preparedness, Economic development, Energy, Environment, Federal issues, Government Finance, Health Care, Infrastructure, Labor and Workforce, Land use & Development, Media, Money in politics, Planning, Politics, Poverty & income gap, Property rights, Public safety & health, Regulations, Gov’t Oversight, Social Services and Entitlements, TaxesBy Peter Galuszka Sure it’s a photo op but more power to him. Gov. Terry McAuliffe is freshly arrived from the cocktail and canape circuit in Europe on a trade mission and is quickly heading out to the rugged and impoverished coal country of Wise County. There, he, Attorney General Mark Herring and Health and…
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More Defense Cuts Plague Virginia
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in Business and Economy, Demographics, Economic development, Energy, Environment, Federal issues, Government Finance, Infrastructure, Labor and Workforce, Land use & Development, Money in politics, Politics, Science & Technology, Social Services and Entitlements, Taxes, Transportation, UncategorizedBy Peter Galuszka Virginia continues to see painful military spending cuts in the aftermath of the years’- long U.S. intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan. Among the latest news is that the Army may cut 3,600 jobs at Ft. Lee, ironically the site of a recent and large expansion, by 2020. That could result in a…
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Expect No Help from the Ivory Tower
by James A. Bacon In yesterday’s post, I expressed skepticism that Virginia’s system of education and job training (like that of the nation as a whole) is equipped to provide Virginia’s workforce with the skills required for employment today. Skills, I conjectured, are obsolescing faster than educators and job trainers can keep up. One reason for that, I…
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Virginia’s Jobs-Skills Mismatch
Evidence is mounting that a reason for slow economic growth and high unemployment — not the main reason but a significant one — is the mismatch between the skills required for the jobs that American companies have to fill and the skills that American workers actually possess. A recent survey of 87 small and midsize…
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Why High Schools Should Prioritize Proficiency in Writing and Algebra II
Virginia high school students who earned the more academically demanding Advanced Studies diploma were six times more likely to have earned an Associate’s or Bachelor’s Degree within four years of graduating. That’s one of the most recent findings to emerge from the Virginia Longitudinal Data System (VLDS), a system that matches de-identified data from multiple state…
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McAuliffe Hits Private IT Outsourcing
By Peter Galuszka Just a decade ago, privatizing and out-sourcing traditionally government work was all the rage. Virginia’s Democrats and Republicans alike saw a philosophical advantage in fending off Information Technology, road maintenance and other work to for-profit, private companies who supposedly – if you believed the hype then –could always do things better, faster…