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NAMPA, Idaho—The staccato of nail guns echoes across a cavernous building here as workers piece together manufactured houses with easy-to-clean linoleum floors and rugged interiors for muddy oil-field workers. There is no oil and gas production in Idaho, but that doesn't mean the U.S. energy boom has bypassed this bedroom community west of Boise. Fleetwood Homes of Idaho, a subsidiary of Cavco Industries Inc., has increased production by 25% since last fall at its Nampa factory, hiring 40 workers and adding hours for employees. It is building the extra-insulated "Dakota" model for shipment 1,000 miles east to the Bakken oil field in North Dakota.
Were it not for the new demand for oil-field housing, factory manager Jeff Chrisman says he would be handing out furloughs, not overtime. Instead, "We've been able to bring back people that we hated losing a couple of years ago," he says. An energy boom is revving up the U.S. economy. The use of new drilling techniques to tap oil and gas in shale rocks far underground helped add about 158,500 new oil and gas jobs over the past five years, and economists think it has created even more jobs in companies supplying the energy industry and in the broader service industry. U.S. oil production is rising for the first time in decades. Natural gas has become so plentiful that prices recently plunged to a 10-year low. Oil and Gas Boom Lifts U.S. Economy
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You got it, this is a real life example of what they call "trickle-down economics".
Isn't the article self-explanatory ? Perhaps 40 jobs means nothing to you, but to those men and their familys it surely means a great deal ? And I suspect there will be more jobs to follow including other industries that have opportunites to expand production and thereby capacity and production and jobs to meet the new demand for more goods and servies from the giant North Dakota Shale-play.
Rock_Chalk - KU ?
JimBaker, I agree with you 100%. The Boise area isn't the only area feeling the "trickle down" affect. Manufactured home and Modular home builders in Wisconsin, South Dakota, Iowa, and Minnesota have also hired workers and carpenters to build homes at plants in their states to be shipped to ND. An article out of Seattle (could not find it) is building liquid tanks and retro fitting semi's for companies in North Dakota's oil patch, used to haul oil, water, etc... So yes, trickle down affects are happening in other parts of the country because of this oil boom and oil play.
Isn't the article self-explanatory ? Perhaps 40 jobs means nothing to you, but to those men and their familys it surely means a great deal ? And I suspect there will be more jobs to follow including other industries that have opportunites to expand production and thereby capacity and production and jobs to meet the new demand for more goods and servies from the giant North Dakota Shale-play.
"Trickle-down economics" is the theory that government tax breaks or incentives for the wealthy and businesses will "trickle down" to the middle class and poor.
Whether you buy that or not, this is a different situation.
"Trickle-down economics" is the theory that government tax breaks or incentives for the wealthy and businesses will "trickle down" to the middle class and poor.
Whether you buy that or not, this is a different situation.
Couldn't agree more, you're exactly right there JayHawk ! My response was meant to be more in the area of offering some tangible evidence of certain macroeconomic benefits of the Oil & Gas E&P activities in North Dakota in the form of employment growth in the Boise area. In a sense this would be another form of "trickle down" econ.
But to your point, I personally have a few dollars invested in a couple of the big players in the Oil/Gas Shale-plays: Chesapeake & Devon. Now I don't think either one of those OK-based independants is presently active in the Bakken, but they've got a lot going on else where like the Marcellus and the Eagle Ford, atleast last time I checked.
And re Tax incentives, these are risky projects especially when one is operating in a political environment like we have with these politicians in this administration in DC which is full of tree-huggers, i.e., they don't like fossil fuels in spite of their necessity to our economy. So for example are the favorable tax treatments offered to investors to me in this area like lower rates on capital gains upon dispostion of our investments an incentive to invest ? Absolutely, those sorts of factors even act as inducments for many of us to invest. And BTW, I am not wealthy, not by a long, long ways !
It's great to see opportunity like this come to the US.
Odd though that many people act like this is something new. My dad worked on rigs in that area in the early 1980's, but for whatever reason things went south and everyone backed off. Probably cheap oil overseas.
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