This editorial is so unfocused that it's hard to decide how to attack it. The first paragraph tells us that recent reports show Indiana lags behind the nation in income and housing prices. That proves that we are falling behind in areas important to attracting businesses:
How would you like to be an economic-development official in Indiana trying to attract businesses and knowing that those reports are in the wings?
But if I were looking to locate a business somewhere, wouldn't low incomes mean I could hire workers at lower wages than in some other states? And, while the fact that our home prices don't increase as much as elsewhere might be bad news for longtime owners looking for a return on their major investments, wouldn't housing affordability be an incentive to a relocating business? In fact, shouldn't we be advertising the fact?
Then we get to the heart of the economic development argument, which is that Indiana has a terrible "small-businesses environment . . . with small-business ownership and microenterprise ownership rates at or near the bottom (51st and 50th, respectively)." The solutions? Showing we value education with all-day kindergarten and "common-sense building projects" and committing to "quality of life" by ending our relaxed pollution standards for industry and big agriculture and stopping our silly protests over downtown development and smoking bans. So, we will attract small businesses by showing our eagerness to increase spending programs, which will create taxes they have to pay, and expand public initiatives, which will signal that government any promises to "end red tape and made the community more business friendly" might be big, fat lies.
This is an example of a newspaper identifying a perceived problem, the trotting out its favorite progressive causes and trying to connect the dots.
Comments
Leo, Splendid job of pointing out how the dots DO NOT connect. Doesn't someone at the JG review the editorials before printing them?
Somehow, I get the felling that the DOTS aren't the ONLY thing disconnected with that editorial.
But that's just me.
;)
B.G.
What an idea: To get more investment let's determine why investors invest. Every study I've ever seen -- or every viable economic theory, for that matter -- is that they invest in places where taxes and government intervention is minimal or being minimalized. Productive people are moving out of the large coastal cities of California, New York and (lakefront) Chicago. That is the incovenient fact of local economic development, and attempts by the Journal Gazette to wish it away will only produce incomprehsible editorials such as the one you so ably critique.