Our Back Pages: Updates on past posts

About 10 days ago I ranted about what I perceived as missing letters to the editor on the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel website in Open Letter to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel aka JSOnline. Well, one of our regular readers was able to contact David D. Haynes, the editorial page editor. And here is what he said:

We no long (sic) post letters to the editor online; they are a print only feature. What we found, much to our surprise, is that hardly anyone read them online although they remain a popular feature in print. Go figure. To save staff time, we gave up publishing online. Thanks for asking.

I guess I wonder how they know print subscribers read them (ok in my original post I admitted doing so) and how much time it takes to add the two letters they publish daily and the half dozen on the weekend. And if they aren’t going to publish them why the continue to provide menu links to the existing letters instead of just removing them. shrug.

Back in June I discussed the current labor shortage in Milwaukee and how supply and demand was still out of whack, since wages hadn’t risen enough to meet the demand for labor. One of the examples I cited in When Did We Break The Rules From Econ 101 was the Milwaukee Drop Forge. They still have their signs out three months later. They need to raise the hourly rates being offered…particularly in an environment where Riteway buses is offering $15 an hour to drive school buses…

In the article Let’s Do Some Simple Math! I questioned the $10 billion cost of the Foxconn plant compared to other significant investments announced by Amazon and the Toyota/Mazda partnership. I guess I am on the right track…something smells funny when you look at the numbers for Foxconn versus the state of the State’s current manufacturing base…don’t know if you caught it in What We Are Reading 09/20/2017 but here is what the Wisconsin Department of Revenue says about the math:

The state Department of Revenue says all Wisconsin manufacturing property is valued at $14.3 billion. A $10 billion plant would – with just one investment – boost the value of manufacturing property statewide by 69%.

So there you go…some catch up on the news!

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