Boeing made a well-informed, private business decision in locating its second 787 assembly line to North Charleston, S.C. The company weighed multiple business factors, but the bottom line was simple: keep the company globally competitive. Boeing’s confidence in our work force is well-founded.

Although Mr. Geoghegan refers to our labor force as “poorly educated and low-skilled workers,” experienced aerospace workers are coming from Puget Sound, from across the aerospace-intensive Southeast and from other national aerospace labor sheds. Local manufacturing workers with previous experience are also being hired following their graduation from an intensive, customized Boeing training curriculum offered by the state of South Carolina.

South Carolina is rapidly growing its manufacturing sector and leads the U.S. in the number of jobs recruited from international firms per capita, according to the Financial Times. (more…)

One, the editorial asserts that people in Massachusetts who wouldn’t buy coverage, even though they could afford it, was not a major fiscal problem. But as a state we were spending almost $1 billion on free care for the uninsured. What we did was convert that money into premium support for those who needed help buying a policy, and require those uninsured who could afford to buy coverage to take personal responsibility for their own health care. Two, while it’s true that insurance premiums in Massachusetts are among the highest in the nation, that was also the case before reform. A truer statement would be that getting everyone insured is not by itself enough to bring down the costs of health care. And finally, it is simply wrong to say that state spending on health care in Massachusetts has skyrocketed. The cost of the health-care plan to the state budget is “relatively modest” and well within projections, according to the independent Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation. They conclude that the new state spending on reform has amounted to less than 1% of the state budget each year.

While I have had my disagreements with the Journal’s editorial board, where we find common ground is on the need to repeal ObamaCare and replace it with reforms that empower states to craft their own solutions. A one-size-fits-all plan that raises taxes and ignores the very real differences between states is the wrong course for our nation.

Mitt Romney

Belmont, Mass.

The border situation is not something easily understood through statistics. It is far more easily seen in the fear in people’s eyes. A constituent who lives 20 miles from the border in the boot heel of New Mexico said that although there are more Border Patrol vehicles in southern New Mexico than in years past, the bulk of them are patrolling along Highway 9, some 50 miles from the actual border in some areas. Stunningly, Secretaries Napolitano and Locke did not mention the murder of Robert Krentz, a rancher from rural Arizona, or the recent murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry. Wearing rose-colored glasses will not change the fact that our government is failing us.

Just last week, a southbound van was stopped at a border checkpoint with 148 AK-47 magazines and 6,000 rounds of ammunition. Secretaries Napolitano and Locke will point to such an event and claim that the situation is improving because border agents stopped the truck. I look at such an event and wonder how many trucks we didn’t stop. If our borders are really as secure as Ms. Napolitano and Mr. Locke claim, then no smuggler would be so bold as to use our highways to carry weapons by the score straight through our checkpoints.

While those in Washington want to talk about “the progress we’ve made over the past two years,” I don’t have that luxury. As long as I see fear in the eyes of my constituents, I will hold our leaders to a higher standard.

Rep. Steve Pearce (R., N.M.)

Hobbs, N.M.

Prof. Blinder seems blind to the clear and present dangers of QE2. Instead of seriously discussing these dangers, he takes us on an excursion to a Keynesian utopia, a mythical land in which endless government spending is an amazingly effective job creator and investors’ confidence in U.S. Treasury bonds somehow increases as we sink ever deeper into debt while the Fed has its printing presses working overtime.

Here are some cold, hard facts from the real world: The first is the 8.7% 2012 unemployment rate predicted by the Survey of Professional Forecasters of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. It seems the Obama administration’s record spending binge won’t result in job creation, but in unacceptably high long-term unemployment. The second fact is that long-term interest rates have actually gone up following the Fed’s recent QE2 announcement. The markets took one look at the Fed’s pump-priming plans and decided they had to increase interest rates—probably in order to compensate for the expected rise in inflation.

None of this should come as a surprise. Blinders off, common sense engaged, it’s time for us to “refudiate” the notion that this dangerous experiment in printing $600 billion out of thin air, with nothing to back it up, will magically fix economic problems that were caused in large part by the government’s interfering with our free market system in the first place, and then made worse by the government’s reckless spending experiments with our children’s fiscal future. Instead of the tired, old Keynesian ideas behind Obamanomics, we need to turn to time-tested practices that are pro-free market rather than pro-big government. Some call this “free-market populism.” It’s based on the realization that the best way to get the economy moving again is to get government out of the way, let the free market dictate winners and losers, and allow the private sector to grow our economy one job, one paycheck and one American dream at a time. It’s the only way we can restore much needed confidence and certainty in our economy. This is the only way we will all be able to soar from New York to Los Angeles and throughout the heartland.

Sarah Palin

Wasilla, Alaska