During last year’s casino debate, there was an awkward period when huge job creation estimates were being thrown around — 30,000 new jobs was the high point. It turned out that the these estimates were derived by multiplying the number of jobs by their duration (e.g. 10,000 construction jobs for three years equals 30,000 “jobs”). I see the logic, but it overstates the number of actual jobs created. The Feds have no taken this analysis to the next level — coming out with an estimate of 122,000 new jobs from stimulus spending. Turns out that this figure is based on job-months (which would result in the above equation becoming 10,000 jobs for 36 months equals 360,000 jobs!).

Just got back from the last meeting of the Pension Reform Commission, where they declined to decide which of their proposals (now complete with cost estimates) to recommend to the Legislature. It’s a pretty unsatisfying outcome to a process that promised, at one point, to provide a cost-neutral set of recommendations to the Legislature. However, a close reading of their enabling statute shows that their were entitled to conduct a study and not make recommendations. An interesting subtext to this discussion is the primary public source of conflict on the commission — between PERAC and the Board chair (previously mentioned here). I encourage you to give PERAC’s costing analysis a close read. To paraphrase a colleague, there are plenty of […]

Re: Use of Email Tip #1: Don’t use it to try and engineer the installation of a lightly-qualified supporter into a plum job. Tip #2: Don’t repeat #1 a few months later with an even higher press profile. Tip #3: Don’t dispose of an authority head and blame them for something that your and their emails clearly contradict. Bonus Sub-Tip: Go easy on the WWII references. Tip #4: Don’t use email to lay out the political calculus for highly controversial decisions that are supposed to be made based on objective criteria. Thus ends today’s session at the Lomasney Center for Political Communications at Pioneer Institute.