According to The Wichita Eagle:
“Experts predict Wichita's economy will rebound by 2012
BY DAN VOORHIS
The Wichita Eagle
Green shoots. That's what President Obama calls the first tentative signs of recovery: The upswing in the stock market, the bump in consumer confidence.
But jobs are different.
Jobs are the last thing to go in a plunge and the last to come back in a recovery. That's why companies are still laying people off 18 months after the official start of the recession in December 2007.
A new forecast from economic forecasting firm IHS Global Insight predicts that Wichita will regain the number of jobs it had at its employment peak by the second quarter of 2012.
Some analysts say that seems realistic, while others say that may be too optimistic.”
But Wichita suffers from tunnel vision. They put all their eggs in one basket – the aircraft industry. The Aircraft plants have outsourced a lot of jobs, leaving more minimum wage jobs and less union paid jobs. Meanwhile they build large expensive homes as if millionaires are flocking to this city.
They continue to use up agricultural land for housing developments so fast that Wichita can no longer claim to be tied to the agriculture industry. The aircraft industry may never fully recover from this recession and there are no other really big industries to take over.
The leadership of Wichita is made up of people with short sited goals who have no long term vision at all and seem incapable of planning any kind of diversification. Of course the same in-bread Republicans that get elected in the rest of the state seem to dominate Wichita as well. Such backward looking people can’t be expected to fix anything on their own.
No comments:
Post a Comment