Ithaca, NY is facing an economic disaster...
I have two take-aways from this.
First is that they shouldn't have cheerfully driven Remington out of town on a rail. This ties into the second point.
Diversification is good for your economy, overall. That way when you have a disastrous shortfall in one sector, the others will keep the boat afloat. Ithaca overspecialized in catering to the two large colleges in town at the expense of manufacturing...
A third take-away could be that every job is essential and that by clipping one from the market causes a ripple effect down to the smallest endeavor.
It was obvious, over and over, when I slogged through economics getting my BBA that while government really couldn't keep an economy running or really make it grow; it damn sure could do things that would fuck an economy right up, good and hard.
I laugh in their faces, Hahahahaha.
ReplyDeleteWe have the same thing here in Gainesville/Alachua County. The powers-that-be have environmentalized-oversupervised-overtaxed/overfee-d any company that wanted to ever build bigly here. There was a very successful rechargeable battery manufacturer, including manufacturing batteries for space applications, that the powers-that-be just niggled and regulated and taxed and chipped away at, until it was just easier to ship assembly of battery packs to Juarez, and then just keep chipping away until the former Gates Energy, then Energizer, just gave up. Way to lose 600 jobs!
Former boss describes the situation as a plantation mentality. The university here is the plantation house and it wants a bunch of cheap labor with no manufacturing or other industry. And it gets it. Seriously, go down to Marion County and that's where all the manufacturing that should be connected to offshoots of UF are. We should have... some aerospace, computer science, chem engineering and industrial engineering companies here, but noooooo... Those are all toooo durty for the soft socialist fingers of our University masters.
So what is the #1 industry of Alachua County? Government. 2nd biggest? The Welfare State. Yay...
I shoulda got out of here when I had the chance. But I was a stupid loyal worker and it bit me in the arse...
ReplyDeleteOne other thing. Everywhere that has University/College as a primary 'industry' is hurting real bad right now, and they have no-one except themselves to blame for it.
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