I am often asked about the relative position of oil and other industries in the ND economy. Usually this is me being asked to settle a dispute between industries as to who is more important or some such nonsense. However, the issue of oil in the North Dakota economy is worth revisiting right now given the decline in oil price and the effects on the state revenue forecast.
A caller to the radio show last week questioned why the North Dakota economic experience seemed is such stark contrast to the Minnesota situation. (She asked this while almost getting hit by a school bus breaking traffic laws.) There are a couple of reasons for this, one pretty easy to explain on the radio, and the other is visual and so is not as easy to explain. I should point out the two stories are not in opposition to each other. That is, they can be part of the same larger narrative.
I’ve talked about this on the radio for the last few weeks already, and talked to national media about this too. I thought I would just briefly mention here some of the items people should be looking at with these budget revisions. Here is a link to the announced revisions to the document.
Several people asked me to put up a graph for goals allowed to complement the goals scored graph I did before. In part this is due to the insane hockey following UND enjoys. Also, the recent stellar performance of the goalie with a crazy streak of minutes without allowing a goal begs the question of how this team is doing compared to others.
I was looking at some sports statistics these days and decided to look at the performance of UND hockey. Right now I am just looking at goals scored by UND, totaling it up across games in the season.