Bozeman News

Doubling the exports of goods and services in the next five years would be a “major boon...”

Really? A $10K raise would be good for my bank account. There's nothing resembling news here.

Great scenery and ease of access to out of door activity bring educated people to the New West to work at intellectual property jobs which can be located anywhere due to the connectivity of the net and modern information flow. We export the ideas, and offshore industry flourishes, and ours lag behind.

There was a time when the public sector did not earn the big bucks the private sector did. That has flip-flopped, and now the secure and good paying jobs are in the public sector...for a while. The lagging private sector employment and compensation rates have driven down tax collections which will be addressed by fewer public employees providing fewer services. Obama can't print enough money fast enough to keep up with the disparity between public spending and private side economic doldrums and lesser tax collections.

If you examine the public lands dominated New West, you will find that the major economic driver is local, state and federal government employment. That is hardly exportable. Except for natural resources coming off public lands, and that is now mostly minerals regulated by the Mining Acts of two centuries ago. Timber left that market in the late 1970s. Water is no longer available, and electricity is hampered by the lack of a sufficient grid to dispense it when available and when surplus to local needs due to the vagaries of wind and water, and recent EPA decisions to regulate biomass electrical production with the assumption that burning wood is as bad as burning coal or other fossil fuels. Meanwhile, the proponents of fire in the forests cannot see the hypocrisy of their stance that fire is good and not harmful to the atmosphere. Tell that to the EPA.

So, since the New West has the largest percentage of folks living in the urban area for the whole of the Hew Hess Hay, exports are an urban problem in need of an urban solution. Hardly the bailiwick of the rural New West.

Foreign students pay huge tuitions, double or more than those of US students and maybe four times or more what in state students pay. Spendthrifts that they are, maybe it is up to the higher education folks to gear their schools, or some schools, entirely to education of foreign students, complete with political indoctrination of Blue State idealism. On a profit making basis, of course. Your department is not making a profit, we hire a new chairman. Your classes are not well attended, we hire a new mind for that job. After all, we are exporting education and ideas, for profit, and if you don't cut it, you are gone. It is a business. It is the future of the local economy.

I was reading earlier this year the prospectus for a new university president for USC, the private university in Los Angles. That place raises $450 M a year in donations. Has 620 athletes in NCAA programs. Is the largest private employer in Los Angeles. 19,000 jobs. The new President will direct the endowment, add to it, keep the $450 M a year coming and grow it. Keep three hospitals and 5 ancillary clinics for the poor open, and keep on training 950 medical residents. Run 17 separate schools or programs in a diverse array of academic disciplines, all named schools. That all sounds like a huge economic engine for Los Angeles. Oh, and USC has the largest number of foreign graduate students of any university in the USA. Harvard and Yale might be running the East coast and the Supreme Court, but USC is keeping LA a functioning city even with property tax relief due to non-profit status.

So, if I were in Boise or Missoula, Denver-Boulder or Laramie, I would be taking a hard look at how to gain the resources to make my universities into as big of academic engines to grow economic success as possible. Privatize them, and let them grow themselves to be whatever they can be. If USC can drive LA, it can certainly drive a city in the Mountain/New West. And yes, I know UCLA is in LA, too. But UCLA is public and will never have the potential to grow that the private USC has. Or Harvard. That is the lesson. The gems of US post graduate education are primarily private schools, with some exceptions in Land Grant Universities. They educate the world, and generate a huge local economic impact. The cities they occupy are not the worse for their existence. And those universities attract and keep idea factories germinating alongside the campus every day.