Transportation Funding Crisis Hitting Engineering Firms

[WhoIsStanwix?]

Originally Posted by BrianTH

For educational attainment stats, see here (article starting on p1, continuing on p4; PDF):

http://www.ucsur.pitt.edu/files/peq/peq_2010-03.pdf

Because of the many local universities, we bring in lots of new students each year, and send out a lot of people with new degrees each year. But that constant flow isn't resulting in brain drain, as those statistics show.

And in fact some of those people educated here spend some time elsewhere acquiring new skills, ideas, and other forms of capital, then come back (these are sometimes called "boomerangers"). Others don't come back themselves, but create new economic ties, or end up promoting the area to others, and so forth. In that sense we should be embracing the notion that people educated here will spread out to other areas, since that network provides all sorts of long-term value.

I'm definitely what you would call a boomeranger. And you'd be hugely surprised at the number of them I've met professionally as well as during the evenings in only a month of being back. The brain gain is real, the main thing is keeping the momentum and not swinging the other way again with detrimental decisions on things like public transit and property taxes, which young people find to be increasingly relevant issues, given the desire of many of the brains gained to reside within the urban core.

[BrianTH]

As I keep noting, right now we are making massively disproportionate contributions to the state's recovery from the recession, and likely we will continue to be among the state's growth leaders even after the economy is fully recovered (the brain gain being a major data point in favor of that view), so it would be really self-defeating for the state to hamper our growth by refusing to provide adequate transportation funding for our region.

[Clint.]

Government spending is not always like dumping money into a hole and burying it. It often has a lot of collateral value, so to dismiss all government spending as wasteful and inefficient is either misguided or part of some sort of agenda. The problem is when government spending is too far out of alignment with revenues for too long, or if it is too large a proportion of the economy (like Greece). People would be shocked at how every sector would be impacted if 'people kept more of their own money' and government spending dried up. That's not to say taxpayer agencies and government projects, etc. can't end up being inefficient and boondoggles, but the aggregate cost to benefit ratio is not a bad one.

Kudos to everyone who recognizes the difference between a historically moderate Republican and the new breed of radical.