AFPBusiness.com: Grab your tool belt
Story by Chris Graham
AFPBusiness.com
The tool-belt recession is having a negative multiplier-type effect on the U.S. economy. AFPBusiness.com examines a report from the Center for American Progress that offers as advice to Congress the idea of promoting energy-efficiency incentives to homeowners as a way to get construction workers back to work.
Click here to read the story on AFPBusiness.com.
‘Found money,’ ‘something necessary,’ the rebate, and stimulus
Column by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net
The so-called fiscal-conservative elected officials in Waynesboro are falling all over themselves to spend the $560,000 in “found money” resulting from last fiscal year’s budget surplus. Vice Mayor Frank Lucente has even suggested recently that he would like to see the city hold onto the money “until we need it for something necessary.”
“Something necessary”? That sounds to me like somebody wanting to spend my money on something that he wants to spend it on.
Reminds me of my first sitdown at a meeting of the Waynesboro Citizens for Responsible Spending last week. I like the name and the aims, but I began to have issue with the group just a few minutes into the meeting, when a person described as one of the founding members of the group walked to the podium and spent the next several minutes rambling on and on about how “ObamaCare” was going to bankrupt the nation, then gave way to another founding member who spoke for close to 10 minutes on a local historic landmark that she thinks the city should commit time and money to repairing. Read more
Virginia Tech: Grant to train new green workers
Staff Report
News tips: freepress2@ntelos.net
A Virginia Tech-led team of almost 20 partners has won $3.8 million in federal stimulus money to train workers for new, green jobs in the construction industry.
The grant is expected to train some 400 workers over two years.
“Faculty from the Virginia Tech College of Engineering and College of Architecture and Urban Studies will work with three community colleges to help develop a green curriculum in communities hard hit by job losses,” said John Provo, associate director of the Office of Economic Development in Virginia Tech’s Outreach and International Affairs<http://www.outreach.vt.edu/> (http://www.outreach.vt.edu/). “This will lead to jobs. We’re talking to industry partners who already create innovative products and processes in sustainable ways but need people. Everything from people installing solar panels on homes to building windmill turbines – it’s a host of things. We’re really on the edge of an emerging field.” Read more
What is ‘the right direction’?
Column by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net
My first reaction to the news that Republican Scott Brown had upset Democrat Martha Coakley in the special election to fill the late Ted Kennedy’s Massachusetts Senate seat – Damn, there goes the country.
The pundits were laying out the course for the next few months in the political give-and-take on Capitol Hill, and it sounded to me like a whole lotta nothing. No movement on health-care reform, meaning we get to continue to pay more for less in the way of services, with insurance companies that don’t do a thing to provide health care getting richer while doctors and hospitals struggling to make ends meet at their end. Yeah, perfect.
Certainly we’ll see nothing substantive on environmental issues or immigration reform. Health care was supposed to be relatively easy compared to those briar patches.
The message to Democrats, according to the pundits, sent by voters in Massachusetts, following up on the GOP wins in governor’s races in New Jersey and here in my backyard in Virginia, is, loud and clear, Focus on the economy. Read more
Stimulus needs better reporting
Column by Greg LeRoy
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Aside from health-care reform, probably the most divisive issue in Washington today is the $787 billion economic stimulus program.
One camp argues that the Recovery Act has done a good job in preventing the country from plunging into a more serious crisis than the one we’ve got, while another camp says the whole effort has had little effect and was an expensive mistake. We suspect the former conclusion is correct, but would like better evidence. Read more
Anatomy of a stimulus effort gone wrong
Column by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net
It all sounded good. A Small Business Administration workshop leader told a group of small-business owners in Harrisonburg this past summer about a new loan program funded under the Recovery Act that was designed to help struggling small-business owners deal with short-term cash-flow issues resulting from the ongoing financial and economic meltdown.
What the SBA didn’t tell the moms and pops was about how the red tape that comes with dealing with the byzantine bureaucracies of banks and the federal government would make participation in the program a virtual nightmare.
“And they wonder why people are worried about what would happen if the government took over health care,” one business owner told me of her experience with the SBA, which initially approved her business for a loan under the ARC Loan Program, but after some confusion, and weeks of unreturned phone calls and e-mails involving SBA offices in Richmond, Arkansas and California, well, she’s out of luck. Read more
Kaine: 5,900 jobs created, saved through stimulus
Gov. Timothy M. Kaine noted today that state agencies have reported more than 5,900 jobs created or saved from American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds flowing through the State Treasury. To date, more than $5 billion in ARRA contracts, grants and loans have been awarded in Virginia, with more than half in the form of direct aid to localities and organizations outside of state government. Read more
