ScissorTales » Economy

Mixed reviews

Mel Bracht — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 21:42:25 +0000

Although we normally try to stay out of the turnpike rivalry with Tulsa, we had to chuckle at CareerBliss.com’s recent survey of the happiest and unhappiest cities to work. Oklahoma City ranked No. 3 among its annual survey of the happiest cities for work, trailing only Miami, Fla., and Worcester, Mass. On the other end of the Turner Turnpike, Tulsa ranked No. 4 among the unhappiest cities for work. The worst cities for work list was topped by New Haven, Conn., followed by Dayton, Ohio, and Milwaukee. According to the website, thousands of employees in the happiest cities say they’re most satisfied with the people they work with, the way they work and the work that they do. Employees in the unhappiest cities want to see better growth opportunities, compensation and company culture. Tulsa, however, surpassed Oklahoma City in average salary, according to the website. Tulsa’s average salary was listed at $56,170 and Oklahoma City’s at $54,323.

Towering costs

owen canfield — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 20:19:23 +0000

One consequence of the Great Recession has been a lowering in construction costs. Tell that to New Yorkers. This week, auditors looking into the new World Trade Center said completing the tower will cost $14.8 billion — a stunning 35 percent more than the last estimate of $11 billion in 2008. Auditors said the Port Authority, which owns the site, has “insufficient cost controls and a lack of transparent and effective oversight” of the project. No kidding. Contrast that with construction of the Devon tower in Oklahoma City. The estimated cost was $750 million when the building design was unveiled in 2008. Now? “We have not revised that figure,” spokesman Chip Minty said.

Above: World Trade Center, Jan. 31, 2012. (AP Photo)

Left: Devon tower, Feb. 1, 2012. Photo by Jim Beckel, The Oklahoman

No more middle man

lindsay walle — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 21:25:42 +0000

When managing a tight budget, cutting unnecessary expenses is a good place to start. House Bill 3111, filed by state Rep. Jeff Hickman, R-Fairview, would end the state government’s role in collecting dues for labor unions. Currently, state agencies and school boards use automatic payroll deductions for Oklahoma Public Employees Association membership dues and Oklahoma Education Association contributions. While processing the payroll deductions doesn’t cost the state millions, bank drafts and automatic credit card charges are two alternatives with zero cost to the state. “This modernizes state government and takes advantage of the advances in financial technology that will allow unions to continue to collect dues in an efficient manner without the State of Oklahoma paying to be the middle man,” Hickman said. Taxpayers should appreciate the prospect of anything free, and we hope this effort to join the 21st century finds favor with legislators.

Do as we say…

j.e. mcreynolds — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 21:11:25 +0000

Graphic by Steve Boaldin

A single adult with one child needs a “living wage” of $16.74 an hour in Oklahoma County, where the state’s Democratic Party organization is based. The party touts itself as “a voice for workers’ rights and respectable wages, at both the state and national levels.” So how much does the party pay its own employees? The lowest wage at party headquarters is $11.63 an hour, which is more than the “living wage” for a single adult but considerably less than the rate for a single adult with one child. Also, in a list of 22 occupations, only three are typically compensated at a lower rate than the party pays. The party seeks to offer “competitively-priced options” for employee insurance. Not only is there a disconnect between what the party pays and what it thinks others should pay, but it seems to like competition in the health insurance field — something that its all-out support for Obamacare doesn’t jibe with.

Not mincing words

owen canfield — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 21:32:10 +0000

The criticism continues to roll in over President Obama’s decision last week scuttling (for now) construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. The 1,700-mile pipeline would move crude oil from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico and would produce thousands of jobs along the way, including here in Oklahoma. In a memo to employees, Bill Klesse, CEO of Valero Energy, shared the statement that the company had issued to media after the decision. The statement called rejection of the plan “absurd” and said the administration’s policies would force companies such as Valero (which has a refinery in Ardmore) to buy more oil from sources outside the United States and Canada. It also said the decision “throws dirt into the face of our closest ally and largest trading partner.” In an aside to his employees, Klesse said the administration’s decision wasn’t about pipelines in potentially sensitive areas of the country. Instead, “This is politics at its worst.” Well said.

Photo by Paul B. Southerland, The Oklahoman

Expensive trash

owen canfield — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 20:16:15 +0000

The story of bankrupt solar company Solyndra keeps getting worse. Solyndra was an administration darling when the company opened — an example of green technology at its best. That attitude was reflected in a $535 million loan the government provided in 2009, despite indications that things weren’t going well. Solyndra eventually went belly up last year. But the waste continues. KCBS television in San Francisco recently filmed workers tossing new glass tubes used in solar panels into trash bins. The station reports that Solyndra paid at least $2 million for the specialized glass. According to court documents, the bankruptcy trustee said the glass was of “inconsequential value” because the cost of storing them was greater than their value. An employee for the company in charge of selling Solyndra’s assets said they did a thorough search for buyers, with no takers. But KCBS says the tubes weren’t included on the list of assets put up for sale at two auctions last year. The owner of a Las Vegas warehouse, who already was reselling Solyndra solar panels, told the station he would have bid on them. Maddening.

AP Photo

Economy doesn’t bail out Dems

mark green — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 17:48:51 +0000

Friday’s economic news — 2 percent third-quarter growth — probably isn’t the “Hail Mary” so many Democrats across the country were hoping for heading into the final weekend of Campaign ’10. The figure is slightly better than the second quarter, but well short of what’s needed to favorably impact unemployment. “It’s the expected GDP number, which is mostly bad news for the economy,” economist Josh Bivens told The New York Times. “The growth rate is just nowhere near enough to put downward pressure on unemployment.” Consumer demand was relatively weak in the third quarter, experts said, and whatever good was produced by the federal stimulus bill is fading, The Times reports, with city and state governments cutting jobs. Again, not the evidence Democrats wanted as Americans prepare to render judgment on the majority party’s stewardship of the economy the past two years.

9.6 percent

mark green — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 14:00:46 +0000

Back in June, President Obama kicked off Democrats’ “recovery summer” with a crew of hard-hat workers in Ohio. With Friday’s announcement that unemployment edged up to 9.6 percent in August as the economy shed 54,000 more non-farm jobs, “recovery summer” might be the worst slogan since “Mission Accomplished.” Obama and his allies will continue claiming their stimulus package has things moving in the right direction, but the jobs figures say otherwise. Officials said although the private sector added 67,000 jobs last month, it was more than offset by 121,000 lost jobs on the government side. The White House and top congressional Democrats no doubt will see sunshine in the private-sector gains, but officials said the government losses were more than just Census jobs ending. State and local governments are trimming payrolls — and a lost job is a lost job. Overall, the U.S. economy has lost jobs three straight months now — and the November mid-term elections are less than two months away.

Sluggish economy

mark green — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 16:31:43 +0000

Though the White House no doubt will trumpet an improvement in the unemployment rate in June — down to 9.5 percent from May’s 9.7 percent stat — the monthly jobs report is a worrying figure for President Obama and Democrats four months out from the mid-term congressional elections. The Labor Department reports an overall decline of 125,000 jobs in June, reflecting the loss of 225,000 federal census workers who’ve finished their work. Analysts knew the census positions would be lost but hoped the private sector would make up for it. As for the jobless rate, the improved figure is due to 652,000 people who’ve left the labor market. Experts say the statistics reflect a labor market that remains sluggish as employers remain reluctant to add jobs. Again, not the kind of economic news Obama and his allies are looking for.

Stock answers

mark green — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 21:06:30 +0000

Globalization refers to the interconnectivity of the world through various means including trade and communications. And oil spills. The Gulf of Mexico gusher isn’t just an American concern. While the British no doubt care about environmental damage to the U.S. Gulf Coast, they’re really exercised about the plunging value of British Petroleum stock, currently at a 13-year low. The London Evening Standard reports the Brits think President Obama is partly to blame for billions of dollars in lost stock value. The newspaper says a number of leading Conservative Party members wish Obama would just knock if off already with criticism of BP. One Tory called Obama’s conduct “despicable,” and London Mayor Boris Johnson demanded an end to “anti-British rhetoric, buck-passing and name-calling.” They can save their breath. So far, BP hasn’t generating much sympathy in the colonies and besides — no matter what the sign on the president’s desk says — the oil spill buck is too large for Obama not to send BP’s way.

Deceptive job growth

mark green — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 15:41:18 +0000

Not much to cheer about in the May job report, unless you’re a fan of the Census Bureau. The government says 431,000 jobs were added last month, the best surge since March 2000, and unemployment fell to 9.7 percent. But virtually all of the job creation came from the hiring of more than 400,000 temporary workers to help with the census. Those jobs will disappear later this year after the counting is done. Private-sector growth was far below the 218,000 jobs added in April, and experts said the lower unemployment rate was less about an expanding labor force than about people giving up looking for work. Not great news for President Obama, who nonetheless said the job picture is brightening but warned “there will be ups and downs.”

Cooling on warming

mark green — Thu, 27 May 2010 14:48:01 +0000

Not too long ago the British were hot about global warming. As The New York Times notes, climate change was such a big deal in the U.K., Parliament put targets for emissions cuts into national law a couple years ago. But there’s been a cooling of British opinion on warming, following months of reports about allegedly skewed science, mistakes in key reports and other developments rattling the research supporting climate change theory. A BBC poll in February found just 26 percent believe man-made climate change is happening — down from 41 percent in November. “Legitimacy has shifted to the side of the climate skeptics, and that is a big, big problem,” says Greenpeace spokesman Ben Stewart. “This is happening in the context of overwhelming scientific agreement that climate change is real and a threat. But the poll figures are going through the floor.” Greenpeace, other environmental groups and scientists who swear by man-made global warming say inaccuracies in a United Nations report and e-mail traffic suggesting climate scientists fudged numbers to bolster their research have been blown out of proportion. They’re urging global warming believers to fight back. But it’s hard to restore lost credibility once regular people, British and others, doubt your integrity and your motives.

Obama’s slip shows again

mark green — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 18:12:05 +0000

Maybe President Barack Obama was ad-libbing from his teleprompter recently when he ventured onto the shaky economic/ideological soil of wealth redistribution during remarks at a rally in Illinois. What Obama said had sort of an off-the-cuff whiff to it. Touting financial reforms being debated in Congress, the president said his administration isn’t pushing new regulations “because we begrudge success that’s fairly earned.” Then came the Freudian quip: “I mean, I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.” Ah, yes! And conservatives everywhere are thinking Obama would be fine with the federal government telling Americans where that certain point is. Conservatives may be paranoid (or just think they’re paranoid), but Democrats keep saying things like that: Obama’s exchange with Joe the Plumber during Campaign 2008, a congressman talking about tax increases on the wealthy because “they won’t miss” the money, Dick Gephardt infamously musing years ago that the rich were merely the beneficiaries of “life’s lottery.” Karl Marx would be proud. Seriously, Democrats don’t hate wealth. Without it they’d have nothing to spread around.

Goldman’s bleepity deal

mark green — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 14:49:07 +0000

Michigan Sen. Carl Levin had the Washington Beltway abuzz on Tuesday with questioning of Goldman Sachs bigshots that was punctuated with some salty verbiage. Now, Washington lost its “G” rating some time ago. Yet public cussing still makes some blush in shock, even if it’s feigned shock — like when people acted horrified to hear President Richard Nixon on his secret tapes using language that would peel paint off a wall.

Levin cornered the Goldman execs on an internal memo in which some mid-level whatever used a barnyard term to describe the execrable quality of a security the firm was selling. Levin reportedly used the same term 10 or 11 times as he bore in with questions. For those keeping score at home, Levin was quoting the Goldman memo a number of those times; only a few of his barnyard references actually constituted gratuitous profanity. Even so, Levin no doubt was making a point about the ethics of people in expensive dark suits sitting before him. In a word, (bleep).

Survey says …

mark green — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 20:21:30 +0000

When President Barack Obama and his Democratic allies in Congress were crafting last year’s $787 billion stimulus bill, conservative historian/economist Bruce Bartlett produced a chart for The New York Times with historic economic data showing that federal stimulus packages almost always come too late to affect the downturn for which they’re targeted. Usually, the economy already is recovering — on its own — by the time stimulus legislation is enacted. Will the same be true for Stimulus ’09? A new survey of economists shows most of them think the 2009 stimulus has had no impact on the recovery that seems to be under way. The National Association for Business Economics polled 68 of its members who work in private-sector firms. About 73 percent said employment at their company is neither higher nor lower because of the stimulus. Likewise, they say a new $17.7 billion jobs bill won’t affect payrolls. Looks like bad money after bad — or maybe an extremely early jump on the next recession.

More jobs, but not enough

mark green — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 17:09:52 +0000

The economy added 162,000 jobs in March, the most since the recession began, but the total still was below many analysts’ expectation of around 200,000. The Labor Department said the total includes 48,000 temporary workers hired for the U.S. Census, which means the private economy added about 123,000 jobs, the most since May 2007. The unemployment rate was unchanged at 9.7 percent. Job creation isn’t increasing enough to keep up with the growth in the potential labor force, which is why the jobless rate is the same. Experts said the figures suggest the economic recovery is sustained but not particularly robust. That’s not great news for the White House or Democratic candidates, whose election prospects probably will be directly correlated to the monthly jobs report from now until November.

About those job numbers …

mark green — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 21:34:18 +0000

Conservatives have been howling for months about the Obama administration’s “jobs created/jobs saved” statistics. Every official measure of the country’s employment situation has shown the economy shedding jobs throughout the year. Yet the White House has insisted that its policies have saved a number of jobs and has issued figures to prove it.

Unchallengeable, of course. The number of jobs saved is in the eye of the beholder — or the counter. Now ABC News reports the counting has been off, calculating a number of jobs saved to congressional districts that don’t exist. For example, ABC reports, the administration’s stimulus Web site claims 30 jobs were saved in Arizona’s 15th District — but Arizona only has eight districts.

An administration official said human error was to blame. “Some recipients clearly don’t know what congressional district they live in,” a spokesman said, “so they appear to be just throwing in any number. We expected all along that recipients would make mistakes on their congressional districts, on jobs numbers, on award amounts, and so on. Human beings make mistakes.”

Slow rebound

mark green — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 20:38:18 +0000

The third quarter’s 3.5 percent growth rate drew cheers from a White House eager for data validating its economic policies. Certainly, growth is better than recession. But a number of analysts quickly pointed out the third-quarter figure was heavily inflated by one-time government spending — cash-for-clunkers, new home buyer tax credit — that overstated the truth health of the economy. One analyst told Reuters’ James Pethokoukis real economic growth probably was closer to 2 percent, which is poor compared with the way economies coming out of recession have performed historically.

The real test will be how much the economy grows without special government spending. While the $787 billion stimulus nudged the economy away from a possible depression, Pethokoukis writes, it wasn’t structured (two-thirds spending, one-third tax cuts) to launch a robust recovery. As a result, a number of experts think high unemployment will persist and be a drag on more rapid growth — allowing those who called for more tax cuts to say, we told you so.

Blame someone else

mark green — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 18:10:12 +0000

New polling suggests the shelf life of the Obama administration’s “Blame Bush” strategy might be nearly up. Over his first five months in office, President Barack Obama has found traction in blaming the Bush administration for the economy. But a Rasmussen Reports survey finds 39 percent of voters say current economic problems result from Obama’s policies, a 12-point jump from last month. While 54 percent say current conditions result from the recession Obama inherited from Bush, that’s down eight points from early June. According to Rasmussen, twice as many respondents (60 percent to 30 percent) trust their own economic judgment more than Obama’s. In February 49 percent trusted themselves while 39 trusted the president.

He said what?

mark green — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 04:24:37 +0000

“I don’t know anything about cars.” Uh, not exactly what you want to hear from the guy who’s going to lead General Motors when it emerges from bankruptcy protection later this summer. Former AT&T chief Edward E. Whitacre Jr. admits he’s not a car guy, but the man known as “Big Ed” figures business is business, and he was pretty good at it over a 43-year career. The White House is confident Whitacre will do fine, noting that Ford’s current CEO, Alan Mulally, came from Boeing. Still, taxpayers jumpy over the public investment in GM — $20 billion already and another $30 billion to come — must hope Whitacre studies up a bit before he officially takes over. GM can’t afford any more missteps.