V&T Railway disappoints in job creation
Though long disproven, Keynsian thinkers justify government spending by claiming jobs will be created. This ignores the jobs that would have been created by leaving tax money in private hands.
Now that the Carson City incubator is being proposed and numbers are in for jobs created by V&T reconstruction stimulus, we have a chance to compare apples to apples. The V&T powers that be have long claimed 885 jobs will be created by their project. At the same time, for more than $2 million in spending on Phase 3A, 10.72 jobs were reported on recovery.gov.
The claim of 885 jobs was made when the V&T budget was under $30 million (as opposed to over $70 million today), costing $34,000 per job. Today, $2 million spent created 10.72 jobs, costing an inflated $187,000 per job.
The incubator proposal is claiming to create 1,026 jobs for $41 million of government investment, costing $40,000 per job.
Why is the V&T project costing us $187,000 per job when a well-estimated incubator proposal provides jobs at 21 percent the cost? If the railroad had met its original estimates of 70 percent private funding, perhaps it would have been worth it.
Since I have been following the project, the budget has more than doubled while the general economy has seen radical drops in commodity and construction costs.
Why has the cost of jobs quadrupled during deflation?
Jim Lohse
Reno
Key to happiness? Diet high in fish oil
A recent Appeal story was about a CDC study showing that people in the sunniest states (Louisiana, Hawaii and Florida) are the happiest. Why else would a happy person be said to have a "sunny" disposition?
But think about it. If the sun makes you happy, why is it that Greenland, the darkest place on earth, has the world's lowest rate of depression? The surprising answer is that fish consumption, not sunlight, is the key to happiness, and nobody eats more fish than Greenland's eskimos. This also explains why New Zealanders, who have the lowest per capita fish consumption in the industrialized world, have 50 times the rate of depression as the Japanese, who eat the most fish.
Fish has long been described as "brain food," and the term is well-justified. It contains high levels of triptophan, precursor of serotonin and melatonin, and Vitamin D3, which also fights depression.
A study by the University of Pittsburgh found that the brain grows in people on a diet high in oily fish, and this new gray matter develops in the parts of the brain (amygdala, hippocampus and cingulate) that affect mood. Seriously depressed people have less gray matter in these areas.
Looking for happiness? Don't move to Louisiana, Hawaii or Florida, the states with the highest per capita fish consumption. Stay right here and eat more oily fish - salmon, sardines and mackerel - or just take fish oil supplements.
Rich Dunn
Carson City