The Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce sponsored breakfast with Paul Jadin, Secretary of the Department of Commerce and soon-to-be head of the new Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation. Good breakfast meeting on an important Wisconsin initiative to “elevate the Wisconsin economy to be the best in the world”. Wisconsin has over 465,000 businesses; 99.97% are private; 94% have less than 50 employees; 71% do less than $1 million in revenue annually.
I’m viscerally anti-government bureaucracy, so support the move to WEDC. Jadin and his team are putting together a strategic plan to explain how he’s going to elevate the Wisconsin economy via its businesses. The first draft of his plan can be found here. I’m sure their strategies are more thought out than mine but I plan on keeping my eye on these kinds of things too:
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Increase the number of start-ups (there have been a little over 12,000 in the last 22 weeks in Wisconsin), perhaps by providing better funding access and also intellectual development support in the creation of viable business models.
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Provide advocacy to remove the unnecessary constraints to growth currently imposed on businesses by government (of which there are numerous examples).
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Create quality jobs for long term economic health, not just any jobs to hit the 250K number being pursued.
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Privatize non-core government work. There are a lot of things the private sector can do better than government at a considerably lower cost with higher quality outcomes and generate a profit while doing so.
