Where We’re Importing and Exporting

A glance at two maps – top import and expert country for each state in 2016 – reveals some interesting observations:

  • On the export side, Canada is the leading destination from 33 states (including Indiana and 25 of the other 31 east of the Mississippi River)
  • Mexico (six states) and China (four states) were next on the list
  • Among the more intriguing partnerships: Nevada’s exports are going to Switzerland
  • On the import side, nine countries are represented with China (23 states) and Canada (14 states) leading the way
  • Indiana and Oregon are the two states in which the lead importer is Ireland (Happy St. Patrick’s Day, by the way!)
  • Of Indiana’s four neighbors, China is tops in Ohio, Kentucky and Illinois, while Mexico (think auto industry) is the top partner with Michigan
  • Hawaii stands alone with its top partners of Indonesia (imports) and Australia (exports)

According to the American Enterprise Institute:

Last year, American companies sold $2.2 trillion worth of goods and services to buyers in other countries, and American companies and consumers purchased $2.7 trillion worth of imports from trading partners all around the world. Seven states – Michigan, Louisiana, South Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Washington and Texas – have their international trade represent more than 30% of their economic output.
Together, that volume of international trading activities represented 26% of the value of America’s $18.5 trillion in GDP in 2016. In terms of employment, more than 27 million American workers, about one in five, have jobs that are directly supported by trade with the rest of the world. Some states like California and Texas have more than two million jobs that are directly supported by international trade.

America, the Beautiful

7659613I love traveling. In fact, I am infatuated with traveling.

I’ve been to six different countries across three continents, and in January I plan on studying abroad in Europe for four months. It’s my greatest pleasure to seek adventure and experience culture, but something I often forget is just how awesome our home country is.

I found a list on BuzzFeed of the 29 most breathtaking places in the United States. You’ll want to check this out — and you might even need to update your bucket list.

Paige Ferise, a sophomore at Butler University, is interning in the Indiana Chamber communications department this fall.

Breaking Bad? Google Chairman Warns That Governments Could Effectively ‘Break Internet’

WIn a recent event hosted by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), Google Chairman Eric Schmidt offered an alarming prediction that governments, especially our own, could end up splintering the Internet into pieces. This, he argues, is because countries may prefer to operate their own Internet instead of allowing surveillance organizations, such as the National Security Agency, to collect data on their citizenry.

Wyden added that this would hurt American tech companies — and thus eliminate some American jobs.

Be sure to read the full National Journal article about these remarks, and watch the brief video featuring Schmidt’s comments.

CSI: Oregon? (Cue The Who)

We’ve all seen the yellow crime scene tape bearing the warning: “Do not cross.” But residents of Grants Pass, Oregon could make the leap by partnering with law enforcement as volunteers.

Josephine County Sheriff Gil Gilbertson wants to recruit residents to assist his barebones police department (reduced by more than 50% in 2012 due to budget cuts) with property crimes such as burglaries and thefts.

A recent news story has the details. Here’s an excerpt:

The volunteers … would undergo the same training as a recruit officer at the academy level and would be led by retired and experienced law enforcement.

But there are questions about how the evidence collected by volunteers would stand up in court. Josephine County District Attorney Stephen Campbell said while Gilbertson is trying to think outside the box for solutions for the struggling department, he has to think inside the jury box.

“We always have concerns about reducing the standards under which evidence is collected,” Campbell said. But he called the program workable because of the types of crimes the volunteers would be working on.

“My vision is they’ll be on burglary scenes – looking for fingerprints, latent fingerprints, tool marks that were used to break through a door or window,” Campbell said.

Gilbertson wants to have the volunteer teams working by July. So far he has a handful of retired officers and a list of people interested in volunteering. He said this program would just be a temporary relief, and it definitely wouldn’t supplant jobs.

Did you notice that Sheriff Gil Gilbertson shares his first name with former main character Gil Grissom on CSI: Crime Scene Investigation? That is too cool!

States Turning Tuition World Upside Down

Recently, Oregon was the first state to propose a "Pay it Forward" college tuition plan. While many questions remain on whether the dramatic proposal is valid, that isn't stopping a legislative leader from another part of the country from recommending further study of the concept. NJ.com reports:

Under the plan, New Jersey public colleges could waive tuition and fees for students who pledge to give the state a portion of their salaries after graduation.

In theory, the idea would reduce the amount of loans students take out to go to college.

"When kids are getting out of college, they’re buried in debt," Sweeney said. "It gives another pathway to higher education. As someone who didn’t go to college and recognizes how fortunate I am that things worked out for me, you don’t want to leave things up to luck."

New Jersey’s public colleges have some of the highest tuitions in the nation. For example, the average in-state Rutgers University undergraduate will pay $13,499 in tuition and fees for the 2013-14 school year. Once room and board are added in, the total cost of attending Rutgers will be $25,077 for students living on campus.

New Jersey would not be the first state to explore the idea of delaying tuition payments.

On July 29, the governor of Oregon signed a bill to appoint a commission to study a "Pay it Forward" plan and recommend whether the state should institute a trial program.

Although details have not been finalized, proponents of Oregon’s plan have called for the state to waive tuition for students who agree to pay 3 percent of their incomes over 24 years.

Supporters say the program will help alleviate the nation’s growing student loan problem since many graduates leave college encumbered with tens of thousands of dollars of debt before they ever find their first job.

But critics say the "Pay it Forward" idea has too many holes.

While students would get free tuition and fees while they are in school, they will still have to take out loans to cover the cost of living on or off campus, buying books, paying for transportation and other costs that often account for more than half of the expense of attending college.

It is also unclear if asking students in Oregon to repay 3 percent of their income for a quarter century would cover the cost of running a college or if the schools would have enough cash to operate in the first few years of the program. Critics also questioned whether the state would be able to keep track of the incomes of students who move out of state or out of the country.

Here’s a Vote for Cleaning Up the Rolls

When you read as many reports, studies, analyses and similar materials as I do, it’s difficult to be shocked by many of the facts that emerge. But check out these numbers from the Pew Center on the States regarding voter registration:

  • 24 million vote registrations either invalid or largely inaccurate
  • 1.8 million dead people still listed as active voters
  • 2.75 million who are registered to vote in more than one state
  • 51 million (estimated) voting-age U.S. residents who are not registered

Here’s a portion of the NPR story on the findings.

Election officials say one problem is that Americans move around a lot. And when they do, they seldom alert the local election office that they’ve left.

Ben Skupien, a registered voter who now lives in Northern Virginia, is pretty typical. He has moved repeatedly over the years and says he’s probably registered to vote in about a half-dozen states.

"The assumption, I would think, is that they would do the courtesy of letting the other states know that if you’re registered with a new state, [the old registration] would no longer apply," said Skupien.

In fact, states seldom share such information. The Pew study found that almost 3 million people are registered to vote in more than one state.

Voters also die, which leads to another problem, says Linda Lamone, who runs Maryland’s elections.

"If a John Smith lives in Maryland and goes to another state, say on vacation, and dies," Lamone said, "the law of the state where John Smith dies dictates whether or not the Maryland vital statistics people can share that information with me."

And even when they do — or if a person dies in-state — there’s often a delay before election officials are alerted. It’s also not always clear that the individual on the death certificate is the same one who’s registered to vote. Election officials still have to do a lot more digging to avoid accidentally taking someone off the rolls who is very much alive.

Washington Secretary of State Sam Reed says it’s amazing how many times his state has come across names on the voter rolls that appear to be the same person, but turn out not to be.

"We’ve even had cases, in very small counties, people [with the] same name and same birth dates," added Reed.

He said that has led to inaccurate reports that "dead" people are voting. He admits there have been a few cases in his state where widows or widowers have cast ballots for former spouses, but he said such fraud is very rare.

Still, election officials say it’s important that the public have confidence in the system.

So Washington and seven other states — Oregon, Colorado, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Utah and Nevada — are joining a pilot program to share more voter information and other databases, to try to make their lists more accurate. 

Video: Super Committee, Get to Work

Indiana Chamber Communications VP Tom Schuman explains why streamlining the tax code and reforming entitlement spending will create a simpler and fairer system for American workers and businesses. The U.S. Congress’ Super Committee should work to make this happen.

Riding the Rails, Slowly but Surely

The road to high-speed rail has been a rocky one in many places. In the Northwest, purposeful efforts to slow down are proving successful – producing more riders at less cost. The goal is to increase the speed incrementally. Are there lessons to be learned? Governing magazine has the column.

Civic leaders still call their town the “Hub City,” a holdover from its role a century ago as a rail center for the movement of goods and people in all directions. A dozen passenger trains a day — half northbound, half southbound — still rumble through this western city of 16,000 that sits equidistant between Portland and Seattle.

They are run by the Washington state government-subsidized Amtrak Cascades passenger service, which has taken a deliberately incremental approach to developing the Cascadia corridor running from Eugene, Ore., to Vancouver, B.C.

Passenger rail service has been central to the corridor’s strategy and is reflected in a 15-year track record of increasing ridership (up 10 percent in the last year alone) and fares that cover nearly two-thirds of operating expenses. The strategy has marshaled local investment in infrastructure and forged partnerships with those who have an interest in the shared rail bed, including cities and towns along the corridor, Amtrak, the freight carrier Burlington Northern Santa Fe, federal funding agencies and regulators.

In the Northwest, passenger rail has purposely taken some of the speed out of high speed. Instead, the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) measures its rail initiatives based on a three-part definition of convenience: reducing total trip time while boosting system efficiency and average speed. Scott Witt, former director of WSDOT’s State Rail and Marine Office, says a number of studies all indicate that sticking with faster (rather than fastest) rail would allow the region to realize 90 percent of the ridership and revenue targets at 50 percent of the cost of true high-speed rail, which can peak at 150 mph on Amtrak’s Acela service in the Northeast.

The lion’s share of the $781 million in federal passenger rail funding awarded to Washington is dedicated to raising the average speed by eliminating slow parts of the corridor with new bypasses and other upgrades.

This incremental approach to higher-speed rail has not isolated the service from the complexities of establishing a governance structure for the multistate, binational effort in which five governments must act in concert with one another. As part of that mix, the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) is transitioning from being a regulatory and safety organization to one responsible for project delivery, funding and management. Witt, whose career has been in project delivery, notes, “The FRA just has not seen this level of funding and complexity before.”

Still, he remains confident that the state will get there. “Our long-range vision is still to establish a dedicated high-speed track with trains running at up to 150 miles per hour,” says Witt, “but we’re laying the foundation to get there step-by-step.”

Looking for a Lottery Rebound

Personally, I have nothing against the lottery. In fact, I joined co-workers back in the 1990s in one of those infamous "everybody throw a few dollars in and we’ll all retire early when we hit it big" plans, only to never, ever get close in several years of playing. We really only earned enough once in a while to buy more tickets. But then I guess that’s why they call it a game of chance.

The number of lottery games have seemingly multiplied at a rapid pace since then. But with the Great Recession of the last few years, and certainly a few other factors, far fewer lottery players have been taking their chances.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, lottery revenues declined in 25 states in fiscal year 2009. In addition, they were flat in 10 states and increased in only seven. Indiana had the dubious distinction of the biggest drop, with revenues going down 18.1%. Puerto Rico, Oregon and Arizona were the only others with double digit drops.

North Carolina, with a relatively new lottery, saw revenues increase 17.4%. Others on the positive side of the ledger: North Dakota, Iowa, Ohio, Kentucky, Louisiana and Minnesota.

Finally, the seven states that have not authorized lotteries: Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii, Mississippi, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming.

At one point, many in Indiana questioned whether the lottery was a good idea. That was before horse racing, riverboats, racinos and the like. The tax dollars generated by the gaming industry have become an essential part of the state budget. That’s the safest bet one can make.

7-Year-Old Oregonian Gets Valuable Lesson About Business, Government

Lemonade StandI don’t know what to say. I’m just glad this scofflaw is off the streets. Just read this:

It’s hardly unusual to hear small-business owners gripe about licensing requirements or complain that heavy-handed regulations are driving them into the red.

So when Multnomah County shut down an enterprise last week for operating without a license, you might just sigh and say, there they go again.

Except this entrepreneur was a 7-year-old named Julie Murphy. Her business was a lemonade stand at the Last Thursday monthly art fair in Northeast Portland. The government regulation she violated? Failing to get a $120 temporary restaurant license.

Turns out that kids’ lemonade stands — those constants of summertime — are supposed to get a permit in Oregon, particularly at big events that happen to be patrolled regularly by county health inspectors.

"I understand the reason behind what they’re doing and it’s a neighborhood event, and they’re trying to generate revenue," said Jon Kawaguchi, environmental health supervisor for the Multnomah County Health Department. "But we still need to put the public’s health first."

Riiiiiiight. A little perspective could go a long way, Oregon.

HAPPY UPDATE: After the county chairman urged health inspectors to use "professional discretion," the young lady was allowed to open her stand back up and made nearly $2,000. She and her mother will be celebrating the same place Super Bowl Champions do — in Disneyland. Kudos to government officials involved for ultimately applying common sense to this matter.

Hat tip to Chamber staffer Jonathan Wales for the update.