[PRCo] Re: New York Times Streetcar Article

[Richard Allman]

that's if employment is the whole story; income, crime, quality of work, 
etc. and may other thing are quality of life markers!
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Schneider Fred" <fwschneider at comcast.net>
To: <pittsburgh-railways at dementia.org>
Sent: Tuesday, August 19, 2008 7:24 PM
Subject: [PRCo] Re: New York Times Streetcar Article


> Damn, I pushed send accidentally.  Let's copy and paste and start over.
>
> Except that in terms of unemployment and employment, Harrisburg is as
> good as any place.   The areas east and south of the mountains in
> Pennsylvania (and outside of Philadelphia County) have since the
> 1960s had a better economic picture than the national averages.  They
> still do.   Seasonally-adjusted unemployment in Harrisburg-Carlisle
> was 4.4 percent in June, the USA rate was 5.5.  Perhaps the Inquirer
> just wanted to make someplace else seem worse than Philadelphia?
>
> Certainly the city of Harrisburg has its bad neighborhoods.   Inner
> Susquehanna Township is not too great.  Parts of Steelton leave
> something to be desired.   But remember my earlier point that capital
> cities have always been a magnet for people who could find work
> elsewhere, particularly minority races and ethnicities.
>
> Hartford's rate was 5.7 on an unadjusted basis in June -- identical
> to the national rate.
>
> Charleston WV in June had an unemployment rate of 4.8% unadjusted
> seasonally, which was well under the national 5.5% rate.   If memory
> serves, there were a lot of chemical jobs in Charleston at one
> time.   I suspect that area has a large elderly population and a lot
> of people who are no longer in the labor force.
>
> Of 49 major labor market areas in the United States ... those with a
> population of a million people or more ... Richmond tied with Seattle
> and Baltimore for 7th lowest unemployment in June 2008.  The
> seasonally adjusted rate was 4.5 percent.
>
> The Philadelphia MSA (Camden, Burlington, Gloucester, Philadelphia,
> Montgomery, Bucks, Chester, Delaware counties), which the Inquirer
> was bragging about, came in 19th position.   Pittsburgh is actually
> stronger these days than Philadelphia, largely because the elderly
> are not looking for work.
>
> One of our strong suits, Rich, has been health services, principally
> because it was exportable.  It brought Euros, Pounds, Yen and other
> strong currencies into the United States.   If the dollar continues
> to weaken, the hospitals could be in a strong competitive position.
> But over the last few weeks the dollar has rallied from 63 cents to
> the Euro to 68 cents and this could hurt people looking for medical
> care in the U.S.
>
> I will agree that all business have a finite term.   I often thought
> it was one generation.   The founder knew what he wanted to
> produce.   He knew his market.   He understood his product.   His
> successor often neither understood it or bought the firm simply to
> liquidate it to eliminate competition.   If nothing else, changes in
> a business cycle force a firm to either change or go out of
> business.    Coal was the big thing in the 19th and early 20th
> century.   Then Ed. Drake drilled a well at Titusville and introduced
> us to a new liquid fossil fuel and now we are running out of that.
> You want another example ... for years we got our news by word of
> mouth or smoke signals, then came newspapers and magazines, then in
> 1920 KDKA went on the air and we eventually we had news by radio.
> In the early 1950s Pittsburghers started getting the miracle of
> television ... I think the first nearby station might have been in
> Johnstown.   I remember the first televised national Republican
> convention when Eisenhower was nominated in 1952.   Today I have BBC
> World News and Deutschewelle bookmarked on my computer.   Even some
> of the major manufactured goods like linoleum only lasted about 35
> years.   So if the commodities we produce have a finite production
> life, so should the work force that produces them and the towns in
> which they live.  The only difference is that since the industrial
> revolution, cities have become so huge that we no longer have ghost
> towns like we did with extractive economies.
>
> But my point remains that for many years government was the expanding
> employer in capital cities that tended to provided enough new jobs
> that it kept unemployment lower in the capitals than many other
> cities in those states.   And, as you can see, even the worst cases
> you cited Rich, are not all that bad.
>
> And some capitals are astounding.   I remember little Wyoming had as
> many people in it as Lancaster County, Pennsylvania when I first went
> there in the early 1970s ... something over 300,000.   Today Wyoming
> is closer to 500,000.   But the capital, Cheyenne has gone from
> 41,000 people to 53,000.  Most cities get smaller!
>
> Even so I continually marveled at how my counterparts in the smaller
> states got more work done with fewer people than we did in
> Pennsylvania because they were not arguing over petty things.   Some
> of the smaller states like Wyoming or Nevada or Montana or Utah could
> take their excess staff resources and use them to bid on outsourced
> jobs from the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington DC.  The
> bigger states like California, Texas, New York and Pennsylvania were
> having enough trouble just getting their huge staffs to do their own
> work.   For several years I was the director of an occupational
> statistics program in Pennsylvania intended by the bureaucrats in
> Washington to solve all the school problems and make all the kids get
> better jobs in the future.   Bull shit.   The lady who was my
> counterpart in Nevada was very frank.   She said we only have two
> labor market areas ... Reno and Las Vegas.   The rest of the state
> doesn't count.   I figure I can work myself out of a job in six
> months and go on to something else.   Fabulous.
>
>
>
>
> On Aug 19, 2008, at 6:11 PM, Richard Allman wrote:
>
>> what about our great state capital city? Unless I'm missing
>> something, it's
>> still a dump. A few years ago the Inquirer ran an article entitled
>> something
>> like "Harrisburg:Is this any place to have a state capital?" and
>> subtitled
>> "not  even a nice place to visit" (as oppposed to places that are
>> nowhere to
>> live but nice enough to visit.) Then a litany of what ailed.
>> Haven't been in
>> the city since Fred Schneider's retirement do, but his departure
>> cannot
>> possibly have helped matters! Then there's Hartford, Conn, a ontime
>> very
>> pleasant , vibrant place which is now downright scary-I was there a
>> couple
>> years ago and it's really hit the skids. As one involved in
>> healthcare,
>> trust me it takes more than hospitals to sustain a region. Richmond
>> VA has
>> seen better times as well. And Charleton, W Va-did it ever flourish?
>>
>> RICH
>>
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Derrick J Brashear" <shadow at dementia.org>
>> To: <pittsburgh-railways at dementia.org>
>> Sent: Tuesday, August 19, 2008 3:25 PM
>> Subject: [PRCo] Re: New York Times Streetcar Article
>>
>>
>>> On Mon, 18 Aug 2008, Joshua Dunfield wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 2008-08-17, Fred Schneider <fwschneider at comcast.net> wrote:
>>>>>  The only state capital that comes to my mind that is having
>>>>>  real economic problems is Trenton NJ, which for years had a
>>>>> sign on
>>>>>  the bridge over the Delaware River that read, TRENTON MAKES, THE
>>>>>  WORLD TAKES.
>>>>
>>>> The sign's still there; you can see it from the R7/Amtrak.
>>>
>>> DRJTC (I think, rather than DRPA) owns the bridge, and it's
>>> "toll-supported" unlike the adjacent US1 highway bridge.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>
>
>