Zorro
Zorro's JournalKansas is still bleeding, thanks to tea party economics
Give some credit to Sam Brownback, the far-right Republican governor of Kansas: He’s got tenacity. Confronted by an unbroken string of reports that his fiscal policies are leading his state to economic ruin, he hasn’t given an inch.
We’ve been chronicling the tea party ruination of Brownback’s Kansas for more than two years, since soon after he enacted a slew of dramatic tax cuts in the conviction that they would unleash stupendous economic growth.
The latest evidence to the contrary comes from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, which has just released its monthly survey of economic indices for the 50 states.The survey compiles state-level statistics on nonfarm payroll employment, average hours worked in manufacturing by production workers, the unemployment rate, and inflation-adjusted wages and salaries.
Kansas ranked rock-bottom in the three-month change in these metrics from July through September, with a decline of 1.18%. Indeed, it was one of only eight states that showed any decline. The U.S. average gained 0.64%. Most of the other states with negative changes were oil-and-gas producers. Kansas is too, but that industry has been a tiny factor in its economy for years.
http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-kansas-economy-20161031-story.html
Southern California's deadliest quake may have been caused by oil drilling, study says
A new study suggests that the 1933 Long Beach earthquake, the deadliest seismic event in recorded Southern California history, may have been caused by deep drilling in an oil field in Huntington Beach.
The study, written by two leading U.S. Geological Survey scientists in Pasadena and to be published in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America on Tuesday, also suggests that three other earthquakes, including magnitude 5.0 earthquakes in 1920 in Inglewood and in 1929 in Whittier, may also be linked to oil drilling.
The two government scientists, Susan Hough and Morgan Page, wrote the report after a review of nearly forgotten state oil drilling records. They discovered that the epicenter of some of the Los Angeles Basin’s largest earthquakes between 1900 and 1935 happened shortly after significant changes were made in oil production in nearby fields. During this era, the Los Angeles area was one of the world’s leading oil producers.
“It was kind of more of a Wild West industry back a hundred years ago, and the technology wasn’t as sophisticated,” Hough said. “People would just pump oil and in some cases the ground would subside—fairly dramatically.” That possibly changed stresses on underground rock that could have pushed earthquake faults to rupture.
http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-ln-oil-drilling-earthquake-20161031-story.html
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