I was talking to a supporter yesterday about all the things I would like to do for state employees. As a former state employee I know how much they struggle. I want to raise salaries so they are competitive, I want to reestablish a matching 401K. And he said, “that sounds great but people are going to say we can’t afford to do this.” My response was that we can’t afford NOT to do this. Our population decline is the root cause of every economic problem we have. People leave because they can make much better money out of state. As people leave our tax base shrinks and we have to cut because of less money. More people leave, more cutting. It’s what I call our economic death spiral. And it must be stopped.

The trap is how our leaders in power have thought about this issue. You have heard the analogy used that the state should be like a household and live within its means. If you as a person had budget issues you’d cut spending. Well that makes sense if you are a household. But name me one BUSINESS that would use that strategy.

Our leaders are thinking about the problem wrong. A business would simply get a loan and GROW their way out of it. Heck many of our elected leaders have businesses of their own. And they would never do that for their own businesses. They would invest in themselves because how you think about running a business is radically different than running a household.

WV is experiencing some good economic news this year. But I have read all the economic reports from both conservative and liberal economists. And they all say the same thing. Yes we’ve had economic growth but its all being driven by natural gas pipeline construction. And the pipeline is almost complete. Only 7 out of 55 counties had economic growth last year. All in the panhandles, all in shale country. 7 out of 55. Know how many jobs were added in the other counties? Only 300. That’s 6 jobs a county.

That’s why I support a massive investment program, spread throughout ALL areas of WV. We have seen in this state with pipeline construction, with our current batch of road construction, that investing in ourselves drives economic growth. In fact it’s the only thing that does. West Virginians deserve an economy that is as good as everywhere else. And this is how we get it.