Posts Tagged ‘jobs’

Export-Import Bank denies loan guarantees for coal project in India

By Rick Barrett of the Journal Sentinel, June 26, 2010

Up to 1,000 jobs at Bucyrus International Inc. and its suppliers could be in jeopardy as the result of a decision by the U.S. Export-Import Bank, funded by Congress, to deny several hundred million dollars in loan guarantees to a coal-fired power plant and mine in India.

About 300 of those jobs are at the Bucyrus plant in South Milwaukee, where the company has 1,410 employees and its headquarters. The remaining jobs are spread across 13 states, including Illinois, Minnesota and Indiana.

On Thursday, the Export-Import Bank denied financing for Reliance Power Ltd., an Indian power plant company, effectively wiping out about $600 million in coal mining equipment sales for Bucyrus, chief executive Tim Sullivan said.

The fossil fuel project was the first to come before the government-run bank since it adopted a climate-change policy to settle a lawsuit and to meet Obama administration directives.

Read more at http://www.jsonline.com/business/97225544.html

Thanks Obama! First, V.P. Biden calls a business manager a “smart-ass” for asking a question, now this!

Heritage.com Blog, Posted May 26th, 2010

What happens when a state is lucky enough to have one of their Senators ascend to one of the three most powerful committee chairmanships? According to a new study by three Harvard Business School the average state then experiences a 40 to 50 percent increase in earmark spending (the figure is a smaller 20% for powerful House committees). So this new government spending is then a boon to the state right? The public spending stimulates economic growth right? Wrong. Turns out, increased federal spending is connected with a decrease in corporate capital expenditures and employment. Study co-author Joshua Coval explains why:

Some of the dollars directly supplant private-sector activity—they literally undertake projects the private sector was planning to do on its own. The Tennessee Valley Authority of 1933 is perhaps the most famous example of this. Other dollars appear to indirectly crowd out private firms by hiring away employees and the like. … But we suspect that a third and potentially quite strong effect is the uncertainty that is created by government involvement.

Read more at http://blog.heritage.org/2010/05/26/harvard-reports-you-decide-more-government-spending-means-fewer-jobs/

By Dennis Cauchon, USA TODAY, March 4, 2010

Federal employees earn higher average salaries than private-sector workers in more than eight out of 10 occupations, a USA TODAY analysis of federal data finds.

Accountants, nurses, chemists, surveyors, cooks, clerks and janitors are among the wide range of jobs that get paid more on average in the federal government than in the private sector.

Overall, federal workers earned an average salary of $67,691 in 2008 for occupations that exist both in government and the private sector, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The average pay for the same mix of jobs in the private sector was $60,046 in 2008, the most recent data available.

CHART: Federal salaries compared to private-sector

These salary figures do not include the value of health, pension and other benefits, which averaged $40,785 per federal employee in 2008 vs. $9,882 per private worker, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Read more at  http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2010-03-04-federal-pay_N.htm

by Ben Poston of the Journal Sentinel, Feb. 4, 2010

Rules change counts same positions each quarter

A new report touts more than 10,300 jobs created or saved in Wisconsin by federal stimulus money in the last three months of 2009.

But the jobs listed are based on new accounting rules that make it impossible to track the total number of jobs created or saved by the program. And the updated guidelines also make it impossible to avoid double counting from quarter to quarter.

Read more at http://www.jsonline.com/news/wisconsin/83512527.html