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H the K[_4_]

On 2/23/10 12:13 PM, wrote:
On Tue, 23 Feb 2010 08:58:48 -0600, Jim"Jim wrote:

Ayup. No jobs have been created. Just taxpayer money passed out to
'Bama pals.

There does seem to be a pattern here that the contractors who are
getting the jobs come from the "blue" counties, even if they have to
travel a couple hundred miles. The local guys here in Lee County say
they are not getting anything.
One of my excavation contractor friends did get a gig burying a dead
horse for $200 last week so I guess his job was "saved".

Unemployment is really a phony number unless you also look at
"underemployment". If an electrician is mowing lawns he is not
"unemployed" but he is certainly "underemployed" and he is not adding
much to the economy. He just put a Mexican, who was working off the
books, out of work.

Another visit to rec.boats, which I am sure will give some of the
righties here the closest thing they've had to a woodie in decades...

In the late 1990's I was dispatched to the Florida panhandle to write a
feature article about a family of constuction workers then in their
fourth generation of working union. The patriarch had move to Florida
from Memphis right after the Korean war. His sons, grandsons and a great
grandson were working construction, 19 in all, still all active, all in
the skilled trades.

They were working on two new schools and a powerplant in their area.
Same contractor, a Yankee unionized contractor who had worked the
Miami-Dade area for years. Local contractors were upset because he got
"their" work. The deal was, he underbid them by a substantial margin,
and he was unionized, paying union wages and fringes...a package that
was half again as large as the non-union local contractors were paying.
And even by underbidding, he was still making his normal profit.

The local contractors, a bunch of good ol' boys, were simply ripping off
everyone, including their employees.

The moral: there's more to bidding work than just bidding the work.

And now, my time here is up. Too many morons, but obviously not you,
gfret... :)