Secondary Sources: Small Business Job Creation, Fiscal State of the Union ... - Wall Street Journal (blog)

A roundup of economic news from around the Web.

–Small Business Job Creation: John Robertson looks at the connection between small businesses and job creation. “Economic research published last month by John Haltiwanger, Ron Jarmin, and Javier Miranda provides some compelling evidence on the relationship between firm size and job growth. It turns out that the age of a firm is important independent of its size. In particular, the paper finds no systematic relationship between net job growth rates and firm size after controlling for firm age? This finding doesn’t imply that firm size is irrelevant, but size matters mainly because, conditional on survival, young firms grow faster than older firms and tend to be small. In other words, because start-ups tend to be small, most of the truth to the popular perception that small businesses create the most jobs is driven by the contribution of start-ups to net job growth.”

–Fiscal State of the Union: Len Burman says the president should be give an annual explanation of the fiscal health of the nation. “The problem with our fiscal challenges is that they aren?t news. We have a large unsustainable debt burden, just like we did yesterday and the day before and will have tomorrow. It?s news when we run exceptionally high deficits, as we have for the last couple of years, or when we achieve surpluses, as we did briefly at the end of the Clinton Administration. But there?s no event that captures the media?s and the public?s attention, and the problem will only grow worse as giant deficits become old news. There?s little chance for the media to educate the public about the debt and possible solutions. An annual Fiscal State of the Union Address would change that. There would be news coverage. There would be serious discussion of the causes, consequences, and possible remedies to the problem of too much debt. There would be pressure on the president to have some good news to announce as part of the speech, and enough media scrutiny to guarantee that it wasn?t just smoke and mirrors. There would be pressure on the opposition to put forward a coherent plan to do better than the president, not just warmed over rhetoric and platitudes.”

–Economics of Lobbying: Jordi Blanes i Vidal, Mirko Draca and Christian Fons-Rosen examine how political connections are valued for lobbyists. “Lobbying in the US, as well as other democracies, is big business. This column investigates the extent to which former government officials ?cash in? on their political connections when working as lobbyists. It finds that once the politician for whom they worked leaves office, their revenue falls 20%, or $177,000 per year, suggesting that lobbyists are paid more for ?who they know? than ?what they know?.

Compiled by Phil Izzo

View the original article here

Ohio adds stimulus jobs, but it's a 'drop in the bucket' - The Morning Journal

By BRANDON C. BAKER
Special to The Morning Journal

Stimulus funds are making jobs, like this road work in Mentor, but the effect has been called only a 'drop in the bucket' for Ohio. (Photo special to The Morning Journal)

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act shares at least two similarities with other large-scale federal undertakings of recent years. Like the war in Iraq or health care provisions, the debate regarding its merit and the justification for its creation will likely never end. And, people will have to wait several years to definitively know whether the stimulus package’s goals will be fully or partially accomplished.

That latter parallel is especially painful for some Ohioans, given the second word of the $800 billion-plus package’s proper name. By far, jobs are the chief concern of citizens tracking the ARRA. Through June, or the end of the quarter with the most recent available data, the number of jobs in Ohio created by the act amounts to a little more than 15 percent of the state’s unemployed population.

Since the stimulus was enacted nearly 20 months ago, Ohio has created 91,726 recipient-reported jobs funded by the contracts, grants and loans awarded to employers. The state’s 25,896 new jobs in the April-through-June quarter of this year were good enough to rank the state seventh behind the likes of California, Georgia, New York and Virginia.

Though Vice President Joe Biden released a report defending the program in recent weeks, many have soured on the stimulus, including 52 percent of Americans polled in a USA Today/Gallup study this summer. Most economist estimates have the ARRA creating at least 2.5 million jobs since last February, but some deem the package less effective here.

In the most recent quarter, Lorain produced 32 new jobs and Elyria had a robust 136 jobs during the three-month period. But the job impact was much lower for many communities west of Cleveland. The same was true east of Cleveland, where Painesville, Euclid and Richmond Heights were the only municipalities with recipients reporting a total greater than a single-digit new job count.

Predictably, most of the jobs, along with the biggest awards, went to agencies near the center of the state’s bigger cities, especially Columbus, with more than 20,000 jobs last quarter. Cleveland created about 830 jobs between April and June with its awards.

“Looking at those numbers, that’s only a drop in the bucket,” said Patricia Hoyt, dean of Workforce Development and Continuing Education at Lakeland Community College in Kirtland. “A lot of those jobs are seasonal, but are any of those jobs sustainable?”

It can’t be much of a surprise that smaller counties like Lake and Geauga would receive $62.6 million and $13.9 million, respectively, compared to Cuyahoga, Franklin and Hamilton counties, which all received $400 million or better. Still, that money has gone toward jobs, infrastructure projects, educational aid, health care and energy and environmental spending that did not previously exist.

Here are a few awards given to public and private entities in Lake and Geauga counties, large and small. In some cases, all of the funds may not have been received yet.

• The Navy awarded Willoughby-based Pinnacle Construction and Development Corp. about $2.5 million for the demolition, minor asbestos abatement, architectural repairs, roofing, plumbing, lighting, HVAC renovation and construction and other modernization work at the Navy’s operational support center in Cincinnati. The firm selected a couple of small area firms for two of its sub-contracts. Russell Flooring Co. of Willoughby will receive $78,500, and Summit Painting in Eastlake will get about $1,000 more than that for its work.

Overall, 33 jobs have been reported for the project. A Pinnacle executive declined to discuss the award.

• The City of Mentor received $512,200 from the Department of Energy to retrofit traffic signals, street and parking lot lighting throughout the city with high-efficiency LED bulbs.

Mentor Public Works Director Matthew S. Schweikert said that money was presented to the city in spring 2009 for any projects it wanted to undertake that would conserve energy. The city has some funds left over to take bids for a boiler at its civic ice arena, but “a good chunk” of the funds went toward energy efficient lighting at the city’s 85 signalized intersections.

The city will do some of the installing but also contract some of the work, Schweikert said.

• The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s ARRA Capital Fund Program paid for the Geauga Metropolitan Housing Authority to renovate the parking lot and road surfaces at its Chardon facility, along with money to make various repairs at low-income housing facilities throughout the county.

The reward totaled about $432,000 and created about four jobs. The work is mostly complete, including replacing the building exit doors at Harris House in Chardon and replacing the exterior electric meter boxes at Cloverdale Estates in Middlefield and Strickland Arms in Bainbridge. The funds also covered concrete driveway and sidewalk replacement at Scranton Woods in Newbury Township and the administrative costs for the ARRA projects.

The projects were on the GMHA’s five-year plan, with some deemed shovel-ready, but the stimulus funding helped to expedite the process, said Mel Kirschnick, the agency’s modernization coordinator.

“You want to be a high performer, maintaining that status,” Kirschnick said. “HUD comes out every other year to look at our physical properties, and we get rated on that, and that’s part of a score that determines if we’re high performers or not. This parking lot, it was kind of an embarrassment before. That was really a project we were thankful to get done.”

One doesn’t have to travel far to see physical manifestation of the ARRA, as the familiar green signs with stimulus notation are scattered throughout Ohio’s interstates, routes and bridges.

“In Ohio, we look at the stimulus as something very important,” Ohio Department of Transportation District 12 spokeswoman Jocelynn Clemings said. “The governor and our director always say, where you see orange barrels, you should think jobs. It’s clear we’re putting people to work and folks who wouldn’t otherwise be working because of these dollars — not only people who we have on (construction) sites, but people behind the scenes, like haulers of materials, producers of materials, those who have a hand in fabricating, welding or doing things that you don’t see on a day-to-day basis.”

There were 11 ARRA-funded road projects between Lake and Geauga counties.

They are part of the $44.2 million share that the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency got from ODOT’s ARRA funds, NOACA spokeswoman Cheryl Onesky said.

The most expensive project is easily a Regional Intelligent Transportation System to include seven counties in the greater Cleveland and Akron areas.

The $21 million system will include traffic cameras and the informative, real-time highway message boards motorists have seen in other cities and states.

The cameras and radios provide the information for the boards and Web platforms that will give drivers an idea of congestion before they leave home or work. The system will be completed by the end of 2011.

“The system has been up and running in other cities, but ours is the best of the best, most updated and light years ahead of other systems,” Clemings said of the Dynamic Message Boards, manufactured by Brookings, S.D.-based Daktronics, which produces LED billboards and sports scoreboards.

That project is one of the 388 stimulus-funded transportation construction initiatives in the state, Clemings said. As of mid-September, 146 of those projects have been completed, including the $9.3 million rehabilitation of Interstate 271 from Wilson Mills Road to Interstate 90 and the resurfacing of State Route 700 in Troy and Burton Townships, worth $987,570 of ARRA investment.

Everybody, from the funding agencies to the recipients themselves, is aware of the criticisms of the ARRA and the perception that some of the projects are not important in today’s economically-depressed United States of America.

GMHA Executive Director Nancy Sadler knows those opinions will probably be coming her way as more people learn about the funds her agency received for the parking lot and facility repairs in Geauga County.

She has very different thoughts about the stimulus, at least as it affects her community.

“It’s actually brilliant when you think about it, for HUD, especially,” she said. “They’re actually dumping the money into their own federal assets.

They’re killing two birds with one stone: Supplying jobs and investing in their own properties. I really think that’s smart. It flowed just like it should have.”

View the original article here

Stein says she knows how to help 'ordinary people' - Boston Herald

LEXINGTON - As a physician, Jill Stein says she grew tired of prescribing pills for people who could not afford them, so she left her clinical practice and decided to go into medical research and policy work to help improve the nation’s health care system.

Now, the 60-year-old says she is sick of politicians who promote solutions, such as business tax incentive programs, that only benefit the wealthy.

She says the focus of state government on corporate elites — instead of the working class — is what has motivated her to mount her second run for governor of Massachusetts as a Green-Rainbow candidate.

"Business as usual has not been delivering for ordinary people," she told The Associated Press during a recent interview at her home in suburban Lexington. "We are starving small businesses so that we can give to the big gorillas."

Stein paints her opponents — Democrat Gov. Deval Patrick, Republican Charles Baker, and independent Timothy Cahill — as three political insiders who care more about "arcane policy details" than the real needs of people across the state.

"They tend to spend a lot of time finger-pointing and calling each other liars," she said. "Who could care less?"

Stein is a graduate of Harvard and Harvard Medical School. She has been an internist, medical teacher, author and guitarist. Her husband is a surgeon, and the couple has two sons — 27-year-old Ben and 24-year-old Noah.

In 2003, she helped found the Massachusetts Coalition for Healthy Communities, a nonprofit focused on health care and the green economy. She has not practiced medicine since 2006, instead becoming something of a perennial candidate.

In 2002, she ran for governor; she ended up receiving 3.5 percent of the vote. She then ran unsuccessfully for state representative in 2004 and secretary of state in 2006, but explained losing did not mean the campaigns were not successful.

"Change does not happen easily," she said.

If she were to be elected, Stein would have the state place more emphasis on creating green jobs. She would support public schools rather than pitting them against charter schools. When she gets to talking about subjects that she feels the most passionate about, like creating more home weatherization programs to reduce energy costs, she moves her hands emphatically and leans in to her audience.

Stein hopes her message connects with voters who are upset with the status quo, including tea party supporters. She says she sometimes refers to her coalition of supporters as the "Green Tea Party."

"We share the same feeling that we have been betrayed," Stein said.

Some political observers believer her campaign can siphon liberal voters from Patrick, since Stein espouses support for the legalization of marijuana and single-payer health care while opposing casino gambling.

So far, Stein has attacked Patrick for what she calls his failure to deliver results for the middle class.

"The governor pretends he is a friend of the ordinary working person," she said. "He is powered by big corporate America."

View the original article here

CHI completes acquisition of Consolidated Health Services - ModernHealthcare.com

CHI completes acquisition of Consolidated Health Services

Catholic Health Initiatives, Denver, has completed its acquisition of Consolidated Health Services, a home-health subsidiary of Cincinnati-based Bethesda that operates in Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio.

More »

This article requires a Basic Web subscription. Log in or register below.

Not a ModernHealthcare.com member yet?Already a ModernHealthcare.com member?Get Free Access Breaking NewsCover StoriesSpecial Features & ReportsReader PollsAwards & HonorsBasic Web access is and only takes two minutes!
See subscription options

mktoMunchkin("968-FFL-836");

View the original article here