Manufacturing Jobs!
By Mitch Berg
Viper Motorcycles is going into production!:
The company, which began limited production of motorcycles in 2009, said it expects to begin manufacturing in Auburn in 2011.
Viper will occupy a new 63,000-square-foot facility that it will lease from the city…The company has 10 employees but expects its workforce to grow to about 100 in the next two years.
That’s ninety new manufacturing jobs! The kind of jobs that are the absolute measure of an advanced economy!
Er…
Viper Motorcycle Co. plans to move from Hopkins to Auburn, Ala., this year.
I guess they weren’t happy to pay among the highest business taxes in the country for a Better Minnesota.
August 12th, 2010 at 10:29 pm
Here is an article Walmart quietly raising prices:
http://consumerist.com/2010/08/turns-out-walmart-has-raised-prices-6.html
Walmart did not raise prices because some fat, cigar-smoking old white guy needed a yacht. Walmart is a publicly traded company. I can only imagine the calculus — literally calculus — involved in their decision to selectively raise prices.
This kind of action is, I think, an endorsement of human free will. If people acted in a deterministic way, there would be a Hell of a lot of money to be made if you could figure out the formula.
Someone should tell this to Paul Krugman.
August 13th, 2010 at 8:09 pm
Kel, how do you know so much about UHG?
(I am employed by them right now)
August 14th, 2010 at 12:12 pm
Bill C
I used to work for UHG and still have a lot of contacts in the corporation so I do have access to “proprietary” information but nothing I say here or elsewhere violates my NDA with UHG because its all in the public domain. I’m also a shareholder who reads the annual report (a good cure for insomnia).
The talk of moving HQ first came up with the MetraHealth merger in the 90s and was addressed in subsequent quarterly conference calls with Wall Street analysts and with trade press. Its an issue that keeps popping up in the financial press because there are periodically concerted overtures on the part of other states to lure UHG away. And Wall street is interested because a move to a low tax state would definitely have a positive effect on their bottom line.
Current management has made their commitment to MN clear in recent years with their expansions and recruitment locally but it doesn’t mean that a hostile political environment couldn’t change that. Electing Mike Hatch Governor would have had serious repercussions for instance. Hatch’s “investigation” of Medica a few years ago was targeted primarily at breaking the contracts between Medica & UHG, but even the hand picked board of directors he installed refused to throw Medica under the bus for Hatch’s vendetta against UHG.
I was just using UHG as an example of how Mad Marks “tax the rich” platform could backfire with the net result being a serious loss of revenue to the state.