• Chester Telegraph
• VERMONT FRIENDLY: Artist concept of a Dollar General for small Vermont town.

In Arkansas, the fight isn't over wooden siding at Dollar General stores but whether they should be allowed to add beer sales. Building aesthetics are not on the list of concerns.

Quad/Graphics, a worldwide printing firm, announced yesterday that it would close its Jonesboro plant in the fourth quarter of this year. That will put 600 people out of work. The company said it would attempt to find jobs for workers in other facilities.

A recent article on the company's poor earnings explains that the printer is feeling the shock of reduced demand for ink-on-paper things like glossy magazines, advertising circulars and books. Heard of the Internet, not to mention the iPad, anyone?

• STILL MORE JOBS: Gov. Beebe at previous announcement by Welspun, which is expanding again.

It will be interesting to see how Republican U.S. Rep. Tim Griffin, the Arkansas Republican Party and its paid mouthpieces on the web spin this:

For the second time in its three-year history of operation in Arkansas, international pipe manufacturer Welspun Corp. Ltd today announced it will expand again, adding 200 jobs and investing an additional $100 million in its Little Rock, Ark., facility, the company’s first large-diameter pipe manufacturing location in North America. With this expansion, Welspun will bring total overall investment to $280 million since opening in April 2009.

Pipe produced by Welspun is primarily used in the gas and oil industry.

You may recall that the delay in approval of the Keystone pipeline is cited tirelessly and tiresomely and inaccurately by Republicans as costing jobs in Little Rock. Apparently Welspun is doing OK. (As I've written before, 60 part-time workers were laid off temporarily from a short-term job loading pipe as a result of the Keystone decision, but a plant official said they'd eventually have the work to perform regardless.) Undoubtedly Welspun would like Keystone and many more pipelines to be built, but the market is apparently strong. It has already completed manufacture of all the Keystone pipe, by the way, though some finishing remained when last I checked. TransCanada is obligated to buy it regardless of the outcome of Keystone, on which planning is proceeding for a new route.

Roby Brock reports the state payout on the expansion: $4.5 million for site prep;
$300,000 for training; payroll tax rebates for 10 years; sales tax refund on construction materials.

Welspun had said when it expanded in 2010 that its pay averaged $17 an hour, counting some higher-skill engineering and technical jobs. Entry level jobs started at $12 an hour. 200 jobs at $17 an hour might produce as much as $400,000 a year in state income tax withholding, though likely a good bit less after deductions. So, at a minimum, it will take 10 years for income tax payments alone to repay the state payout for site prep. Other rebates add significantly to the state cost. Materials come from out of state, Welspun has said. The jobs have a multiplier effect in the community as the pay is spent, however. And there will be a temporary boost from construction work.

More on today's announcement:

Caterpillar will build a plant expected to employ about 1,400 near Athens, 40/29 reports. Fort Smith had made a run at the plant, though only North Carolina is mentioned as a contender in the Atlanta paper's account.

Sounds like Caterpillar will be given several hundred acres of land and utility service will be installed. Other elements of the deal have not yet been revealed. The Georgia site is relatively close to Atlantic ports for overseas shipments.

The New York Times reports a $26 billion deal is near in the 49-state investigation of mortgage services. (Oklahoma didn't think banks should pay.)

Almost 2 million homeowners could be helped — either with lower-rate financing or cash payments to people who lost their homes.

UPDATE: Deal has now been announced. Arkansas is a part of it. Attorney General Dustin McDaniel chimes in. He estimates the deal is worth some $39 million in Arkansas. The majority is in the form of savings for mortgage holders in refinancing or direct payments. Other uses include $13 million for state agencies that provide housing assistance.

UPDATE II: Republican messaging is underway, judging by tweets from Ari Fleischer and Alice Stewart. These are undeserved payments and help for people who made bad investment decisions.

UPDATE III: Detailed analysis from Firedog Lake. Hold your applause.

McDaniel release follows:

Gov. Mike Beebe says Fort Smith has a shot at landing a 1,400-employee Caterpillar plant, maybe at the emptying Whirlpool facility in a city with a lot of skilled factory laborers anxious to be retrained. Caterpillar likes our right to work law, low wages and free hand with government payments.

The City Wire reports this and other news from Beebe's web-streamed interview with Talk Business.

Here's a taste of Caterpillar and unions and pay.

The state Alcoholic Beverage Control Division has picked up the alcoholic beverage permit of Porter's Jazz Cafe, which opened in September, because the cafe had never obtained a state sales tax permit, ABC Director Michael Langley confirms. The alcohol permit can be returned when the sales tax permit issue is resolved, an ABC spokesman said.

Add this to other woes reported here yesterday for the development, not to mention a report this morning in Democrat-Gazette over complaints from the neighboring Rose Law Firm about grease being spattered on their cars by a restaurant exhaust fan.

UPDATE: The Little Rock Bureau of Conventions and Visitors says Porter's is also delinquent on the restaurant tax. It paid $382 on $19,168 in sales in September and reported owing $349.56 on $14,945 in sales in October, but never paid it. It has filed no reports for November and December.

I liked this sentence in 40/29's coverage of the event:

Officials are hopeful that in a few short years Arkansas will be the edamame capital of the United States.

Move over, Popeye.

Edamame is the immature soybean, processed and often marketed as a healthy snack food.

The writer argues that rules against giving or selling paperless tickets purchased through Ticketmaster amount to a restraint of trade in the secondary market. Some states have moved to stop the practice. Ticketmaster, and others who've imposed this rule, contends it is a bar to fraud.

Scalping is, of course, illegal in Arkansas. So the idea of reselling a ticket at a higher price is merely theoretical. (Tongue in cheek.)

• THE PAUSE THAT REFRESHES: Cokes once came only in glass - and wooden crates.

This is a continuation of long consolidation in the soft drink bottling business and makes me nostalgic. As a child, did you have contests with pals to see whose Coke bottle bore the stamp on the bottom of the farthest-removed bottling plant? The returnable bottles would get shifted around over time. Instead of Lake Charles on the bottom, it might be a product of one of a number of Louisiana bottlers or even someplace more exotic, like Natchez or Mobile, Memphis or St. Joe.

Bankruptcy Judge James Mixon Monday approved the sale of assets of the bankrupt Yarnell's ice cream company in Searcy to Schulze and Birch Biscuit Co., a Chicago snack company that has said it hopes to restore ice cream manufacturing at the Searcy plant.

The sale of real and personal property, including intellectual property such as recipes and trademarks, was for $1.3 million. No objections remained when the judge approved the sale.

Here's the judge's order. It notes that most of the $1 million reaped on sale of personal property, after deduction for fees and taxes, will go to the Arkansas Development Finance Authority and the Arkansas Economic Development Commission, which had loaned, together, about $4 million to the firm.

Yarnell's went out of business without notice in June and filed for bankruptcy in August.

Corporate results come and go, but I thought the report from Dillard's this morning on December sales was of a piece with state tax reporting yesterday that, stripped of estimated income tax payments, showed modest gains, but not stunning jumps, in such areas as taxes on retail sales.

Dillard's reports sales up 4 percent at comparable stores for both the Christmas shopping period and the 48-week period ending Jan. 1. That mirrors the 4 percent rise the state as a whole saw, according to what a state economist told me yesterday.

Welspun, the pipe plant in Little Rock, says it will lay off 60 temporary workers because of a slowdown in shipments related to delays in the Keystone pipeline from Canada through middle America. Talk Business reports.

The Republican echo chamber machine is busily blaming this on Democrats. It's worth a reminder that Republican elected officials in Nebraska threw up the biggest objections to hurryup orders on this pipeline because of fears of damage to their water supply. Are 60 temporary jobs in Little Rock really worth more than careful consideration of long-term environmental impact? With an election pending, for Republicans the cynical answer is easy. Go to full demagogue mode. None of them gives a hoot about the environment.

Do small businesses really make expansion decisions based on tax rates?

Good report here, an admiring review of NPR reporting on the subject.

They asked the Republicans for names of small business people they could interview that would confirm what they say. How many did they get? Zero. They also asked some of the lobbying groups that say the same thing. Again, no introductions. So they went online and looked for some small business people to interview, and got the same answer over and over. They played the interviews. It was inspiring! They're trying to win, in business, not win in taxes. When they have a chance to grow — they grow, and they don't worry about whether they'll pay more or less taxes. A couple of them said taxes are too low and they worry about the country, and they would happily pay more.

That's what I love about business people. It's an art and a sport. It's best played by creative people, not bean counters, and certainly not politicians.

Remember this the next time U.S. Rep. Tim Griffin dusts off this cherished fiction from the Republican message factory. For what it's worth, over my 20 years as investor in a small business I can add that not a single one of our expansion (or contraction) decisions was a product of U.S. tax rates.

You can write this story much larger. It's the same with the impact of marginal tax rates on major industrial decisions. Businesses make them based on workforce, raw materials, transportation, energy issues, location relevant to market and a host of other issues, not marginal tax rates. Particularly in Arkansas where a loose law allows national corporations to lay off profits in one location against expenses in another location as a tax dodge.