Avista sale: Nationalist outcry a little late

Whoa, there!

Relax a bit over this Avista sale, folks.

Teeing up all three members of the Idaho Public Utilities Commission at a hearing last Thursday night was a bit over the top.

You’d think the entire state was being handed over to Iran.

As best I can tell, naysayers who want nothing to do with Avista being sold to Canada-based Hydro One had two rousing objections.

First, sovereignty.

Somehow, the fact that Hydro One is located in Toronto struck a nationalist chord with quite a few people.

I’m not trying to be snarky here, but if we were going to be worried about foreign ownership of U.S. entities, well ...

That horse left the barn a long time ago.

Do you have any idea how much foreign capital has been sunk into this country?

China alone holds $1.3 trillion in U.S. Treasury securities, and Chinese firms are buying up businesses here by the dozens.

Right here at home, there’s our beloved Ironman event.

The entire Triathlon brand was acquired by Chinese conglomerate Dalian Wanda Group for $650 million from former owners Providence Equity Partners.

That was almost three years ago, and I can’t recall any torchlight parades down Sherman Avenue.

The Ironman sale was a tiny piece of a much bigger picture.

The estimated foreign direct presence in the United States was $3.1 trillion in 2015.

At the time, that was about 12 percent of the combined value of the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq,

The sale of traditional American companies like Anheuser-Busch, GE Appliances, Holiday Inn, Burger King, Motorola, AMC Theaters, Ben and Jerry’s — plus dozens more — isn’t all bad.

Again, using 2015 numbers (it takes a while to add up all the transactions), foreign-owned companies employed 6.1 million American workers, who were taking home an average of $80,000 per year.

Obviously, all of those numbers are going up, up, up.

And meanwhile, the U.S. economy is considered extraordinarily strong. We can debate what the middle class thinks of “strength” another time, but you get the picture.

NOTICE that little caveat about how hard it is to gauge exactly how much foreign investment is now locked into the United States.

China (among others) is buying real estate every day.

Foreigners own enough American farmland to cover the entire state of Tennessee — and even the U.S. Department of Agriculture doesn’t know how much it is, because of huge data gaps.

What the USDA can say for sure is that foreign ownership of U.S. agricultural land more than doubled from 2004 to 2014, to 27.3 million acres.

In other words, a lot.

Right, I think that’s enough on the don’t-sell-to-Canada theme.

It’s no big deal.

The crowd’s second complaint at the Thursday night hearing was about rising utility rates if some greedy Canadians get their hands on Avista.

The answer to that one is simple: Rates won’t be set in Toronto or anywhere else north of Boundary County.

Only the IPUC can adjust rates within Idaho, and does it solely on costs for local service.

So scratch off that one.

The irony of all this hand-wringing is that Idaho has been working harder than just about anyone to lure foreign investment and ownership to the state.

Gov. Butch Otter considers it one of the bright spots of his tenure that foreign money helped Idaho recover more quickly from the 2008 recession than most states.

Bottom line, I doubt we have anything to fear from the Avista sale.

It’s a yawner.

So have a Molson’s and relax, eh?

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Steve Cameron is a columnist for The Press. A Brand New Day appears Wednesday through Saturday each week. Steve’s sports column runs on Tuesdays.

Email: scameron@cdapress.com.

Twitter: @BrandNewDayCDA