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My personal musings about anything that gets on my radar screen--heavily dominated by politics.

2005-03-23

Good Economic News For Colorado

"Strong figures on jobs growth, profits surprise economists" says the caption to the headline story in Tuesday's Rocky.

Legislative economists predicted corporate income tax revenues will rise 34 percent in fiscal year 2004-05. That's 20 percent higher than the legislature's December forecast. Gov. Bill Owens' staff projected similar growth in a separate report on Monday.

The economists also predicted the state will employ as many workers by the end of this year as it did before 9/11 and that hiring will pick up even more in months to come as productivity gains decline, forcing companies to add workers to meet demand

"But they're BAD jobs" say the nay-sayers.

In the past three months, including January, 45,000 more jobs were created in Colorado as compared with one year before.

Of those new jobs, 12,000 are in the relatively high-paying business and professional services sector. Another 6,100 new jobs are in education and health services. The leisure and hospitality and natural resources/mining categories also showed gains.

The January-over-January growth of 2.1 percent outpaced national employment growth of 1.7 percent for the same period.

And all of this while the state was "fiscally crippled" by TABOR. Tell you what, if this is the result of a business sector learning to stand on its own away from a "weak" state government, then I say let's have more of it.
Posted by: Michael / 3/23/2005 12:37:00 AM

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