Sunday’s Peoria Journal Star had a nice article about the recovery of Keystone, for those of you that do not know Keystone is a steel maker in the Peoria and provides many good paying manual labor jobs to the area. A few years ago Keystone entered bankruptcy and say the price of their stock decline to 2 dollars share, since then the company has made a strong recovery with help from their employee’s union and a loan for Peoria country, the company’s revenues has grown, there stock price risen to 25.48 as of Friday March 30th and they have even entered into agreement to buy Calumetals, which is one of the remnants of the now defunct Calumet Steel. In a time when we hear a lot about decline manufacturing jobs and how American Steel companies are struggling to compete, Keystone is building themselves a nice little success story. One has to wonder how well Keystone’s story will continue if Governor Blagojevich get his way and Illinois enacts a Gross Receipts Tax, this tax would drive up their cost of doing business and make their products more expensive, which in turn would make Keystone less competitive compared to companies based in other states and countries.
Ultimately what all of this would mean would be that Keystone would become less profitable, which means that they would have less money to invest in expanded and that would be less attractive for investor to loan them money for new investment or buy their stock. The end result of less investment by Keystone means that they will be fewer new jobs created and the possibility of jobs cuts and if hurts Keystone ability to compete enough they might even end up in the same situation they were in a few years back.
A new poll done by the Public Opinion Strategies company found by a margin of 54 to 34 percent, voters believe that the Governor is breaking his campaign pledge not to raise taxes.
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