Picking through the rubble of yesterday’s special session in Albany, it’s hard not to be very, very worried.\u00a0 The problem in a nutshell, is that the North Country relies on the legislature and the administration for the lion’s share of\u00a0 our vitality.<\/p>\n
Here’s how state Senator Betty Little puts it:<\/p>\n
“We rely on government.\u00a0 Our economy is based on goverment jobs.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Ouch, right?\u00a0 It’s painful to see it laid out there so bluntly.\u00a0 Like much of rural America, we’ve grown dangerously dependent on government spending.<\/p>\n
And with Albany and Washington verging on bankruptcy, people are scratching their heads about what to do in the post-Big Government era.\u00a0 Here again is Sen. Little speaking on Monday:<\/p>\n
“I don’t know how you prepare for it, because when it happens it’s devastating to those who lose their jobs or those who have to move…We don’t have other jobs to go to because we don’t have that growth in the private sector that we need to have.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Little says important next steps are easing taxes and regulations so more private sector businesses will choose the North Country.<\/p>\n
Those strike me as reasonable things to talk about.\u00a0 But it seems that a much bigger regional planning process is called for here.<\/p>\n
What are our assets?\u00a0 Which communities have some private sector vitality that could be built-upon.\u00a0 Is it time to concede that some communities, where government is all that is left, are simply no longer viable?<\/p>\n
Put simply, government is our version of Michigan’s automobile industry.\u00a0 That era appears to be over.\u00a0\u00a0 My guess is that we don’t have a lot of time to plan and prepare for what comes next.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Picking through the rubble of yesterday’s special session in Albany, it’s hard not to be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[10],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3313"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3313"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3313\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3314,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3313\/revisions\/3314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}