Tom Pauken
November 7th, 2009
A favorable business climate and well developed infrastructure system has attracted another business partner to the state of Texas – the U.S. Air Force. According to an article in Saturday’s New York Times, the Air Force has...
October 19th, 2009
For September, unemployment in Texas rose from 8 percent in August to a 26-year high of 8.2 percent. With the exceptions of Waco and Odessa, the majority of the state’s major cities experienced increases in unemployment....
September 30th, 2009
As Chairman of the Texas Workforce Commission, I deal on a weekly and monthly basis with state and national unemployment figures.
September 2nd, 2009
We are very pleased at the Texas Workforce Commission that our Texas Veteran’s Leadership Program was honored with an in-depth feature in VFW Magazine. The Veterans of Foreign Wars and their 2.2 million members worldwide do...
August 18th, 2009
These difficult economic times have inspired serious soul searching on the part of the policy makers. In the quest for the right formula for economic prosperity, analysts have been increasingly drawn to a comparison between...
July 27th, 2009
President Obama’s chief economic advisor, Larry Summers, recently admitted what a number of us have been saying for some time now: The $787 billion Obama economic stimulus plan is not doing anything to create jobs in the...
May 7th, 2009
President Obama is proposing a wide array of tax hikes on the U.S. energy industry. If enacted, these massive tax increases would be a job-killer for Texas and a huge setback in our overall efforts to lessen our...
October 30th, 2009
Texas initial jobless claims for the week ending Oct. 17 declined to 20,228 – a 2,252 decrease from the previous week’s 22,480. The four-week moving average (a more consistent measure) for initial claims rose to 20,924....
October 1st, 2009
In his Web blog, Rich Karlgaard, publisher of Forbes, recently wrote about the importance of the small-business sector in avoiding a double-dip recession. Of his four potential causes for a second economic downturn, two of...
September 16th, 2009
“Government Jobs Have Grown Since Recession’s Start” was the headline of a recent story in The New York Times. The article cited a report from the Nelson A.
August 30th, 2009
Will homeowner debt continue to drag the national economy down? Before the residential housing bubble burst, rising home values fueled a high level of consumer spending as homeowners extracted what they thought was equity in...
August 4th, 2009
President Obama, in comments to the recent G8 Summit in L'Aquila, Italy, called upon the leaders of African countries to make their nations' economies self-supporting. While announcing a multinational relief package that...
June 5th, 2009
Matthew Crawford has an important essay, inspired by his new book Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work in the June 1st issue of the New York Times Magazine.