Category: Labor and Workforce
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Innuendo vs. Substance In the Governor’s Race
By Peter Galuszka Virginia’s nasty gubernatorial race fills television screens and Web sites with suggestions of corruption by both candidates, involving everything from gifts to natural gas rights to a struggling electric carmaker in Mississippi. There’s anything but a smoking gun, but no shortage of innuendo. And I think it is important to point that…
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Another Probe: This Time It’s McAuliffe
By Peter Galuszka All Virginia’s gubernatorial race needs is another investigation for potential wrong-doing. Yet here’s another and it involves Democratic contender Terry McAuliffe. The U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission is investigating two McAuliffe-connected firms. They are GreenTech Automotive and a sister firm, Gulf Coast Funds Management, according to the Washington Post. McAuliffe, a veteran…
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The Rise of the Aspirational City
by James A. Bacon Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox have introduced the concept of the “aspirational” city — cities to which people move “to change their circumstances and improve their lives.” These are cities on the rise — restless, growing and entrepreneurial magnets of opportunity. I was pleasantly surprised to find Richmond ranking No. 7…
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Welfare Dependency Breeds More Welfare Dependency
A new study explores the phenomenon of inter-generational welfare and finds that children of parents on welfare increase their participation over the next five years by 6% and over the next 2 years by 12%. “We find strong evidence of a welfare culture, where welfare use in one generation causes welfare use in the next…
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Better Government through Better Metrics
by James A. Bacon Richmond Mayor Dwight Jones wants to tackle the city’s entrenched poverty, and he wants to do it by investing smartly in community revitalization efforts. The big question is, what works? Supporting job training might seem a logical way for the city to lift people out of poverty. But what good is …
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Breadwinner Moms and Income Inequality
by James A. Bacon The Pew Research Center made a big splash in May with research showing that mothers are the sole or primary source of family income for two out of five American families. The Pew study, based upon an analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data, yielded important insights into the dynamics of wealth…
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Does Anyone Know What the Rules Are?
By Peter Galuszka The furor over celebrity chef Paula Deen’s use of a pejorative term against African-Americans is curious because it raises so many issues that still bubble in this country and still resonate in the South. They involved codes of appropriate behavior that are extremely hard to figure out. Deen, whose buttery and sugary…
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The South Has Risen
For a Californian, Joel Kotkin sure sounds like a Southern triumphalist. One hundred and fifty years after its defeats at Vicksburg and Gettysburg, he writes in “As the North Rests on Its Laurels, the South Is Rising Fast,” the region is on the move. While Northerners stereotype the South as the home of the ignorant,…
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“You Want Maggots With That, Hon?”
By Peter Galuszka Free trade capitalists may cheer the proposed $4.7 billion takeover of Virginia icon Smithfield Foods by a Chinese firm, but there is plenty to give pause and the blowback is creating some strange bedfellows. The major issues are whether one should want Chinese-style management in charge of American corporations given their record…
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Holy Pig Slop! Chinese to Buy Smithfield
By Peter Galuszka For eons, the name “Smithfield” has conjured up rich, salty Virginia ham slices that fit right on Christmas rolls or in crab dishes and with eggs for breakfast. The company that has produced such food for 80 or so years is based (of course) in Smithfield, a quaint Tidewater town the Pagan…
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The Cooch’s Freak Show Dream Team
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in Business and Economy, Consumer Protection, Courts and law, Crime, Corrections, Law Enforcement, Demographics, Disasters and Disaster Preparedness, Economic development, Education (higher ed), Education (K-12), Electoral process, Energy, Environment, Federal issues, Government Finance, Government workers and pensions, Gun rights, Health Care, Housing, Immigration, Infrastructure, Insurance, Labor and Workforce, Land use & Development, Media, Money in politics, Planning, Politics, Poverty & income gap, Property rights, Public safety & health, Race and Race Relations, Regulations, Gov’t Oversight, Science & Technology, Social Services and Entitlements, Taxes, TransportationBy Peter Galuszka Ken Cuccinelli just can’t keep away from the bizarre, but perhaps that’s what makes him what he is. He stages a convention instead of a primary to neuter Bill Bolling. And since a convention is smaller, it draws more GOP hard-righters than June bugs on a humid night and they succeed in…
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A Whole Lot of Commuting Going On
The Governing magazine blog has published some fascinating U.S. census data on commuting patterns in the U.S., and though the author did not pick up on this particular angle, the data shows Virginia as a real outlier. The chart above, extracted from the census data, shows Virginia counties with populations of 60,000 or more. There…
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Virginia: Pretty Darned Enterprising
by James A. Bacon For those who haven’t yet succumbed to state-ranking overload, here’s one more, this from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Its fourth annual Enterprising States report ranks states for the degree to which they are “best positioned to grow, create jobs and prosper in the coming five to ten years.” The Chamber…
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Virginia’s Big Metros Lagged in 2012 Job Creation
by James A. Bacon Has Virginia already felt the impact of the slowdown in federal spending? That would seem to be the obvious conclusion from 2012 metropolitan-area job data released last month by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and highlighted by Aaron M. Renn on the New Geography blog. After years and years of growing…
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First Phase 2 Rail-to-Dulles Bid Comes in Below Estimates
I didn’t get to this last week, but it’s too important to overlook… The low bid for half the work associated with Phase 2 of the Rail-to-Dulles project came in at $1,178,000,000 — seemingly way below the estimated $2.7 billion total cost for the project. The bid was submitted by Clark Construction Group. The contract…