I feel for the city of Aberdeen. The Simplot plant is one of those “life blood” enterprises. Aberdeen will become a more economically depressed area than it already is.

The Nampa plant is fairly modern but the Achilles heel of that facility is waste water disposal. They are hooked up to the city sewer and like the Birdseye plants of the 1970’s the profit margins and costs of sewage along with the Stormwater fees means party over for this facility.

The good news, if there is any, is Caldwell will get the new plant project. This plant has plenty of capacity for waste water treatment on all the property north of Hwy 19.

A loss of 800 or more jobs to a State like Idaho is a sizable hit to the economy. Perhaps world demand for food and the products produced here will give agriculture a renascence and a better deal for Idaho farmers.

I am not an economist, but if I remember correctly, the mulitplier effect has its roots in Keynesian economics and applies only to government spending. It is now considered to be debatable.. not hard fact. Any time you hear someone use a multiplier at a local level, you can bet it comes from someone with a bias and that it has little basis in fact. That goes for the yogurt plant, the new store in town, the train to nowhere, or the events like the triathlon, river festival, horse racing, fair, etc.

“Multiplier effect” and interest rates
Main article: Spending multiplier
Two aspects of Keynes’ model had implications for policy:
First, there is the “Keynesian multiplier”, first developed by Richard F. Kahn in 1931. Exogenous increases in spending, such as an increase in government outlays, increases total spending by a multiple of that increase. A government could stimulate a great deal of new production with a modest outlay if:
The people who receive this money then spend most on consumption goods and save the rest.
This extra spending allows businesses to hire more people and pay them, which in turn allows a further increase consumer spending.

This process continues. At each step, the increase in spending is smaller than in the previous step, so that the multiplier process tapers off and allows the attainment of an equilibrium. This story is modified and moderated if we move beyond a “closed economy” and bring in the role of taxation: The rise in imports and tax payments at each step reduces the amount of induced consumer spending and the size of the multiplier effect.

Second, Keynes re-analyzed the effect of the interest rate on investment. In the classical model, the supply of funds (saving) determined the amount of fixed business investment. That is, since all savings was placed in banks, and all business investors in need of borrowed funds went to banks, the amount of savings determined the amount that was available to invest.

To Keynes, the amount of investment was determined independently by long-term profit expectations and, to a lesser extent, the interest rate. The latter opens the possibility of regulating the economy through money supply changes, via monetary policy. Under conditions such as the Great Depression, Keynes argued that this approach would be relatively ineffective compared to fiscal policy. But, during more “normal” times, monetary expansion can stimulate the economy