Molly Messick was StateImpact Idaho's broadcast reporter until May 2013. Prior to joining StateImpact and Boise State Public Radio, she was a reporter and host for Wyoming Public Radio. She is a graduate of Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Medicaid recipients and advocates turned out to testify at a February hearing.
A bill that cut nearly $100 million in combined state and federal Medicaid spending was a flashpoint of last year’s legislative session. This year, the question was whether the Legislature would reinstate any of that funding and, if so, how much.
Governor C.L. “Butch” Otter kept mum about state health and welfare spending in his State of the State and Budget Address. Meanwhile, advocates for people with developmental disabilities and mental illness kept pushing.
An unemployed financial engineer peddled for a job on the street in New York City.
Joblessness has long-lasting effects. It’s a troubling fact, and one that has received particular attention in this downturn, during which the average length of unemployment has surpassed all earlier records.
Click on the image above to see the full Brookings Institution report.
Boise is among the U.S. cities showing the strongest signs of economic recovery, as we reported yesterday.
But that assessment comes with a big qualification: in the short-term, the Boise economy looks strong. Its gross metropolitan product — that is, the market value of goods and services produced in the city — grew at a faster rate than the national average in the final quarter of last year.
Boise’s housing prices were up 3.1 percent in the same period, a rate of improvement that only Phoenix surpassed. Continue Reading →
A Brookings Instituion report calls Boise one of the "strongest 20 metros" in terms of its economic recovery.
Boise’s economy got a vote of confidence today, in the form of a report from the Brookings Institution. It puts Boise among the top 20 metro areas in the country, in terms of recession and recovery, considering measures such as job growth and housing market improvement.
Brookings researcher Kenan Fikri says growth in the city’s manufacturing and high tech sectors late last year boosted Boise’s economy. That, in turn, bolstered the local housing market. While that is definitely good news, it does come with a caveat.
“The Boise economy looks very good over the short-term, looking back about one year, but it doesn’t look so good over the long term,” Fikri says. “To understand Boise’s recovery you really need to look over the cycle, from peak before the recession to the present.” Continue Reading →
Bureau of Economic Analysis / U.S. Department of Commerce
Click on the image above to see the full report.
Idaho posted above average personal income growth from 2010 to 2011, thanks largely to increases in farm earnings. Other top industries, in terms of earnings growth, included health care and professional services. The construction industry had the most notable earnings losses.
Idaho’s personal income grew 5.4 percent from 2010 to 2011. That’s higher than the national average of 5.1 percent, according to a Bureau of Economic Analysis report issued today.
Per capita personal income growth was not as substantial, rising from $31,897 in 2010 to $33,326 last year. That 4.5 percent increase put Idaho slightly ahead of the national rate of 4.3 percent.
In cities like Boise and Las Vegas, the housing market turned down so sharply that houses were left half-finished.
Anyone anxious for a housing market turnaround got a bit of dreary news today, in the form of the most recent Case-Shiller Index report. It found that home values fell 3.8 percent nationally between January 2011 and January of this year, a greater decrease than expected.
In the West, though, there has been a trickle of good news lately. The Wall Street Journal recently singled out Phoenix for its strides toward recovery. Last week’s new home sales numbers showed the nation’s housing market to be “wobbly,” as the Los Angeles Times put it, but in the West, new home sales were up 8 percent. Continue Reading →
INL's Materials and Fuels Complex in southeastern Idaho.
The Idaho Department of Labor will receive a $1,045,000 federal grant to assist Idaho National Laboratory workers who lost their jobs late last year. About 600 people were laid off by three INL contractors, according to Department of Labor spokesman Bob Fick. The department estimates about 175 of those workers will seek help through its field offices.
The funding is provided by the U.S. Department of Labor through what’s called a National Emergency Grant. The grant money can assist laid-off workers in many ways. It can be used for education or on-the-job training, for example, or even for the cost of getting to an out-of-state interview. “It depends on the people who take advantage of it,” Fick says. “It will be tailored to them.”
This is the fifth National Emergency Grant the Idaho Department of Labor has received since the start of 2010. Spending from those grants totals more than $5.5 million, so far. Fick says INL workers have already begun to search out assistance through the state Department of Labor.
When StateImpact reporter Molly Messick traded in her old Toyota last fall, it had racked up more than 260,000 miles.
Until recently, my car was a 1994 Toyota Camry that my parents purchased second-hand when I was in high school. By the time I was finished with it, its odometer had passed the 260,000 mile mark. It had been broken into in D.C. and held its own on rutted out back roads all over Wyoming. I probably would have kept driving it, had it not been for a couple of expensive repairs on the horizon.
All of that is to say that when I read this recent New York Times article that declares 200,000 miles the new 100,000, it touched a chord. “[T]oday, as more owners drive their vehicles farther,” the article says, “some are learning that the imagined limits of vehicular endurance may not be real limits at all.” Continue Reading →
To see Planet Money's full post, click on the image above.
The good folks at NPR’s Planet Money created this neat visualization of how the jobs we work have shifted over time. The clearest change is in manufacturing jobs. In 1972, they accounted for nearly 24 percent of jobs in the U.S. Now, just 9 percent of workers are employed in that sector. The proportion of jobs in service industries, meanwhile, has grown substantially.
Government jobs hold the top spot, employing more than 16 percent of U.S. workers.
We’ve spent a good deal of time documenting just what people here in Idaho do for work. For example, this county-level map shows whether the private or public sector is responsible for a greater share of jobs.
This story shows Idaho’s top 30 employers, and the extent to which they’ve expanded or cut back since 2005. As it explains, government jobs are at the top of the heap in Idaho, too. “If taken as one entity,” the post says, “the state would finish well ahead of other employers in [Idaho], with about 24,400 employees at the start of this calendar year, according the state controller’s office.”
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