The Arizona Republic
The evidence of what constitutes a failing economy by now is pretty clear.
It’s easy math. We count up the closed businesses, the fired workers and the new applicants for unemployment benefits, divide by “m” for misery, and there you have it: The classic recipe for an economy in descent.
Rarely do we count opportunities lost. But the magnitude of the lost opportunity represented by the failure of Congress to clear a path for the Resolution Copper project near Superior — and, now, the effective suspension of the huge project — demands we make an exception.
Economically, the years-long failure to push this enormous opportunity through Congress has represented a huge loss for the state’s financial prospects.
Three thousand construction workers are no closer to being hired to build the massive, innovative copper mine. Thirty-seven hundred miners will not be drawing paychecks in the near future.
An anticipated overall economic impact of $46.4 billion over the 66-year life of the mine is not reverberating through Arizona’s economy. And perhaps $20 billion in tax revenue over that same period is not about to flow into local, state and federal coffers. By any economic measure, those are substantial blows.
Now, the news gets still worse.
