Aging & Wisdom Quote by John Hoeven

The sentence is a classic piece of gubernatorial statecraft: it turns a politically loaded agenda (education and training policy, business incentives, and demographic anxiety) into a single, frictionless cause-and-effect chain. Hoeven leads with “best business climate,” a phrase that sounds technocratic but is really ideological shorthand. It typically signals lower taxes, lighter regulation, and public spending that primarily benefits employers. By immediately pairing that with “higher paying jobs,” he borrows the moral language of wages and dignity to sell what might otherwise read as corporate-friendly policy.

“Retain our young people” is the emotional fulcrum. It evokes the quiet crisis of outmigration in rural and energy-state economies: graduates leaving for bigger metros, main streets thinning out, communities aging. The pronoun “our” makes it intimate and parochial, turning labor-market strategy into a story about family and belonging. It also implies that young people are a resource the state is losing, not citizens with independent reasons for leaving (housing, culture, rights, climate risk, or simply ambition).

The subtext in “we’re going to have to build a workforce prepared” is where the burden lands. Employers’ needs are treated as the future, and public institutions are tasked with aligning human lives to that forecast. It’s an appealing, managerial optimism: if we train correctly, prosperity follows. Missing are the messier levers that also shape “higher paying jobs” - bargaining power, sectoral diversification, childcare, health care costs, and whether firms will actually share gains. The rhetoric works because it makes structural economics feel like prudent preparation, not political choice.