This is annoying

For three reasons. The Statesman reported on a Forbes article ranking Boise as "the second best place in the country for business and careers."

This is annoying because it just encourages people to move to Boise, and plenty of folks are doing that even without this cheer leading. Of course, the Statesman loves it. More people, more circulation. No wonder they give it prominent coverage.

It's also annoying because it doesn't make sense (at least to me.) How can they say that Boise is such a wonderful place to have a career when wages here are substantially below national averages?

Finally, it's annoying given the Idaho House's Revenue and Tax Committee looking at lowering taxes for business. The Statesman reports that the Forbes article said that "Boise ranked highest in job growth at 13. It also ranked 17th for the cost of doing business..." As I noted in the previous post, if things are so peachy for business now, if costs are relatively low, why do we need to cut taxes on businesses?" Low unemployment, good growth and low costs under the current tax structure. Revenues are down this year; why lower them even further?

I just don't get why these conservative Republican legislators keep getting reelected, even in the face of actions like this that shift taxes onto voters. Which brings me to the next annoying legislative effort, again reported in the Statesman.

Senate lawmakers voted 23-9 to require proponents of citizen initiatives to list their initiatives' possible fiscal impact on state revenue, local government, private property and business.

The Republican proponents of this bill tout it as a way to make sure that citizens signing a petition are adequately informed. Riiight. It looks to me like an effort to make citizen initiatives more difficult to succeed. Do they think we're stupid? Do they think we won't see through an obviously phony excuse for preventing citizen involvement in legislation? Apparently so. And maybe we are. We keep reelecting them. Even after they overturned the citizen initiative for term limits.

And you gotta love this.

Senate Minority Leader Clint Stennett asked Pearce if his own fiscal impact statement on the bill [to impose the fiscal impact statement requirment on citizen initiatives] would meet the standard it demanded.

Pearce said, "Likely not."