November 18, 2004
Constipation Partnership

A talking shop known as the Puget Sound Regional Council says that "It's Time for One Economic Strategy for the Puget Sound"

Business and government leaders announced today they have joined together to create a unified economic strategy for Puget Sound with the goal to create 100,000 new jobs for the region.
The PSRC has helped launch a so-called "Prosperity Partnership", which is putting on a "Regional Economic Summit" tomorrow.

The "summit" is sponsored by the direct beneficiaries of large-scale public boondoggle projects -- CH2M HILL, Bank of America, Foster Pepper Sheffelman, and by corporate welfare queen Boeing.

With the mantra of "100,000 New Jobs", the summit is intended to build support for the massive infrastructure projects that are beloved by its sponsors. Projects like Sound Transit, that bleed the productive economy and enrich the few while doing little to address the underlying problems that they're purported to fix.

The Prosperity Partnership represents the first time that community leaders from throughout the central Puget Sound counties have agreed to collaborate on a unified economic agenda for the region. Instead of individual communities competing with one another for economic activity, the Prosperity Partnership will pursue a single agenda for the benefit of the entire metropolitan region.
Sorry dudes, competition is a good thing. Central planning will only causes economic constipation, or worse. None for me, thanks.

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at November 18, 2004 12:31 PM | Email This
Comments
1. Stefan--you are all over this one. There are so many hogs suckling on the public trough its hard to know where to start the weaning!!!

Posted by: Dude on November 18, 2004 06:46 PM
2. I'm in engineering and I find it just shocking the "Budget" numbers our state comes up for like the Alaskan Way Viaduct. Denver is in the midst of their T-Rex project which is just huge but is only $2 B, similarly Salt Lake did a huge project for the same kind of $. We are talking about 3.5B for like 10 miles on the Viaduct. That is $ 66,000 per foot! No wonder our state can't seem to get any roads built, there are not enough trees for the studies.

Posted by: Kitsap_Jay on November 18, 2004 08:44 PM
3. Amen.

A centralized economic policy is sheer folly, worthy of the former Soviet Union...and we all know how that worked out.

Let the jobs and prosperity go to the city/county/state with the lowest taxes and fewest regulations.

Let the greens be green, and unemployed and poor.

Posted by: Kevin Shannon on November 18, 2004 10:27 PM
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