[PLUG] Re: Jobs to Canada

[Paul Johnson]

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On Thu, Aug 28, 2003 at 10:00:00AM -0700, Phil Tomson wrote:
> Yeah, those job are going or already gone, but I'm not too worried about 
> them -they're not really very good paying jobs.

Actually, the money's not that bad.  There's very few places in the
world that costs as much as it does in the US to live.  If I had the
same job in Canada for the same pay I do now converted into the coin
of the realm, I would live like a god compared to what I do now.

> It's like this silly baseball stadium: They keep saying that it will 
> create jobs.  Sure it will create something like 15 really good paying 
> jobs for players (that's if they manage to get a team) who really have no 
> connection to the area and then it 
> will create another couple of hundred minimum wage jobs.  Of course it 
> will also create construction jobs initially, but in the lone run it's 
> minimum wage jobs.

Anybody bother to do the math on that other than me?  Their proposal
for paying the damn thing off is contingent on getting a AA quality
baseball team (compare the Beavers stats against the Expos, the
Beavers play a better game but just barely) that can only sell 5,000
seats a game (Civic Stadium has four times that many) that we still
have next to zero chance of getting, taking 9% off the salaries of one
of the lowest paid teams in the MLB.  The stadium will never break
even.  The stadium won't ever even cover the interest on the debt.

Congratulations, MLB fans, you have your field of dreams.  I find it
rather unnerving that you can so easily dance on everybody's backs,
especially in such hard times.  Y'all realize voting yourselves
subsidies to buy all the Portland MLB fans to drive to every game in
Seattle would have been just as shallow, childish and stupid while
being less of a leech on the common taxpayer, right?

> Oregon's problem isn't that we're not paying enough income,property and/or 
> sales tax, it's that we've lost a lot of these high paying engineering 
> jobs - hey, I used to pay several thousand dollars / year to Oregon in 
> Income tax, but for the last year and a half or so I haven't been paying 
> anything (no income) and I know lots of folks in the same situation.

It doesn't help that the local governments so readily roll over and
let companies get away with paying fewer actual dollars in taxes than
I do, and I'm only taking down outsourced security officer money.

- -- 
 .''`.     Paul Johnson <baloo at ursine.ca>
: :'  :    
`. `'`     proud Debian admin and user
  `-  Debian - when you have better things to do than fix a system
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