Rick Perry is not the subtlest politician, but he looks like Pericles next to the liberals falling over themselves to discredit job creation in Texas. We’d have thought any new jobs would be a blessing when 25 million Americans are looking for full-time work, but apparently new jobs aren’t valuable jobs if they’re created in a state that rejects Obamanomics.
Let’s dissect the Texas record. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas reported this summer that Texas created 37% of all net new American jobs since the recovery began in June 2009. Texas by far outpaced every other state, including those with large populations like New York and California and those with faster-growing economies, like North Dakota. Other states have lower unemployment rates than Texas’s 8.2%, though that is below the national average and the state is also adding jobs faster than any other.
In today’s Opinion Journal video: Editorial writer Joe Rago on Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s jobs record; and editorial writer Mary Kissel on Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren’s potential challenge to Massachusetts GOP Senator Scott Brown.
Texas is also among the three states and the District of Columbia that are home to more jobs today than when the recession began in December 2007. Without the Texas gains, according to the Dallas Fed, annual U.S. job growth would have been 0.97% instead of 1.17%. Over the past five years, Texas has added more net new jobs than all other states combined.
The critics claim demography is destiny, and of course jobs and population tend to rise and fall in tandem. The number of Texans is booming: According to the Census Bureau, the population grew 20.6% between 2000 and 2010, behind only Nevada, Arizona, Utah and Arizona. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the seasonally adjusted size of the Texas labor force has increased by 5% since December 2007, faster than any state other than North Carolina at 5.4%, though the Tar Heel State has declined 0.4% over the last year. The labor force has shrunk in 28 states since December 2007.
Some of this Texas growth is due to high birth rates, some to immigration. But it also reflects the flight of people from other states. People and capital are mobile and move where the opportunities are greatest. Texas is attractive to workers and employers alike because of its low costs of living and doing business. The government in Austin is small, taxes are low, regulation is stable, and the litigation system is more predictable after Mr. Perry’s tort reforms—all of which is a magnet for private investment and hiring.
As for the critics, well, one of their explanations is that Americans are moving to Texas because of the nice weather. The temperature in Fort Worth this week reached 108 degrees.
The critics also claim that Texas’s new jobs somehow don’t count because the wages are supposedly low and the benefits stingy. Yet BLS pegs the median hourly wage in Texas at $15.14, 93% of the national average, and wages have increased at a good clip: in fact, the 10th fastest state in 2010 at 3.4%.
The Texas skeptics often invoke high energy prices, as if Texas were some sheikdom next to Mexico. But according to the Dallas Fed study, energy jobs accounted for only 10.6% of the new positions. The state economy today is far more broadly based than it was before the early-1980s oil-and-gas bust. For the last nine years, Texas has led the states in exports.
To put a finer point on it, the energy industry isn’t expanding merely because of rising oil prices or new natural resources. Technological innovation is also driving the business, such as the horizontal drilling that has enabled shale oil and gas fracking. New ideas are how an economy expands.
Nearly 31% of the new Texas jobs are in health care, many of which are no doubt the product of federal entitlements that go to every state. But the state is also making progress filling in historical access gaps in west and south Texas and the panhandle, where Mr. Perry’s 2003 malpractice caps have led to an influx of doctors, especially high-risk specialists. The Texas Public Policy Foundation estimates that the state has netted 26,000 new physicians in the wake of reform, most from out of state.
From 2007 through 2010, Texas lost 178,000 private sector jobs. Texas job growth during that period was all in the public sector. Texas gained 125,000 government jobs.
Of all new government jobs created in in the nation from 2007 through 2010, 47 percent were in Texas.
From On the Economy, August 16, 2011. The data comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
One would think those simple facts might be worth a mention, since the governor claiming credit for the “Texas jobs miracle” spends much of his time complaining about the Recovery Act with which he temporarily balanced his state budget, and ranting about the necessity of downsizing job-killing government.
Texas may claim to have rejected “Obamanomics”, but Perry certainly grabbed the stimulus funds, and he’s certainly counting the new government jobs.
@Greg:
Let’s examine your claim that for three years there was no private sector job growth in Texas. I find no proof of that from the article you link. Perhaps you can provide it for me from the BLS. Also, you claim that Texas gained 125,000 public sector jobs, although you do not say for what period or how long it took to amass that number.
Now, perhaps you would like to also address what happens when you have an average of 500,000 people annually moving to a state? Those 500,000 represent a city the size of Austin. Do they not require teachers (government workers), fire fighters (government workers), police officers (government workers), municipal/county utility workers (government workers), additional DMV, state/local agency workers (government workers) or postal workers (also government workers)? You seem to be, as is Larry, under the impression that none of those 500,000 people will need the services (like the DMV) of any government worker.
I would also like to you provide a legitimate link to your claim that the Texas Legislature (who writes our budget) balanced the Texas budget only with the availability of Stimulus money.
What I can tell you is that between April, 2001/2010, Texas saw a rise in 732,800 private sector jobs, with a 2011 incease of 251,700, provided to us by the research done by G. Scott Thomas of bizjournals.com. Feel free to check it out.
Now, let’s go to the “expert” you quote in the linked article:
In the “about” section it says:
“Jared Bernstein joined the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in May 2011 as a Senior Fellow. From 2009 to 2011, Bernstein was the Cheif Economist and Economic Adviser to Vice President Joe Biden, executive director of the White House Task Force on the Middle Class, and a member of President Obama’s economic team.”
What Bernstein doesn’t tell about himself on his own website is that he is half of the Bernstein/Romer Ecomonic Plan that was presented to the public on January 10, 2009, advocating for Obama’s Stimulus Bill. Bernstein and Romer predicted that with the Stimulus package, unemployment would NOT exceed 8% and in fact, would be at approximately 6.75% in this current quarter. Bernstein and Romer also said that without the Stimulus, the unemployment rate would reach an unacceptable rate of 9% in Quarter 1, 2010, remain there until the end of Quarter 2, 2010 where it would automatically come down to a rate of 8% in this current quarter.
What you are doing is taking the word of a man who is a) deeply ensconced in the White House insider group and b) has a vested interest in bashing Governor Perry and c)was half of the duo who got the unemployment predictions painfully wrong. Perhaps this explains why neither Romer or Bernstein still work for the White House.
@retire05, #2:
From the Bureau of Labor Statistics:
Texas; government jobs. The graph shows the increase, and the table below it provides the count. (Numbers as shown must be multiplied by 1,000.)
From Texas government job count as of December 2010 of 1,860,800 subtract Texas government job count as of January 2007 , which is 1,718,500. Total government jobs gained 2007 through 2010 equals 142,300.
Texas, total non-farm employment. (This includes both the private and public sectors.)
From the December 2010 count of 10,444,700 subtract the January 2007 count of 10,230,300. Total of jobs gained, 214,400.
My quick arithmetic indicates that government job increases in Texas account for at least two-thirds of the state’s total job growth for the 2007 through 2010 period. Is my arithmetic faulty or have I missed something?
These figures do differ from those in Bernstein’s article. This might be due to my use of the most readily available BLS data sets, which are all seasonally adjusted. It’s also possible that he may have included federal census takers in his computations. I’m not clear if that’s included in BLS figures or not. Note that there’s no giant spike in the Texas government job count that appears to correspond to the period when census taking was underway, but the count does trend a bit higher as mid-2010 approaches and then fall off later in the year.
BTW, the Texas Economy at a Glance page is here. It has back data links for each item listed.
@Greg:
Let’s take you second chart first: if you will look at your chart, the jobs numbers continued to climb until the market crash of September/October, 2008 when they continued to fall until December, 2009 where they started to climb again. By January, 2010, those numbers were back to your January, 2007 figures and have continue to climb ever since. So you cannot say that the jobs did not increase since 2007 since in January, 2007 they were at 10,230,300 and in January, 2008 they were at 10,561,500. That is a total of 331,000 jobs for one year. By September, 2008, the beginning of the market crash, the job level had reached 10,607,400.
I don’t believe that your non-farm stats would include federal census takers as there is no uptick in the employment rate in January, 2010, when they were hired, to reflect that. How many federal census takers do you think it took to take the census of 25 million people?
Now to your first chart: you show that there was an increase of 142,300 public sector workers in three years. Considering Texas was seeing an influx of population, let’s just assume that 20% of the 5 million new residents are children. If you count a class room as 30 students, (it is less than that in Texas) do the math. How many teachers alone would be required to teach 1,000,000 children? And again, how many police, fire, utility workers, municipal and county workers are required to service an additional 5 million people? If you know that you are having that kind of migration, does a good manager wait until those people are standing outside the DMV door to hire and train additional people?
If you look at the goverment worker chart, there is a huge uptick in the number between January, 2010 and May, 2010 when the census was being taken for a total increase of 51,900 which would account for temporary census workers. That number has since fallen to 1,855,100 for July, 2011 which provides us with 286,400 public (state, county, municipality and federal) jobs since January, 2001 to service an additional 5 million residents.
@Greg: Greg, tell that to California where the private sector jobs in the medical industry moved to Texas. Dude, tell me your boy 0-bama doesn’t claim the Texas jobs created and see what that does to his failure statistics of job creation. Obviously you and the other Kool Aid drinkers are really scared that Perry is the real deal cause you go after him like a bunch of rabid dogs!! Which you are by the way!!
No matter how this gets spun, the underlying facts are that under Perry Texas added jobs and under Obama the country lost jobs. The more team Obama tries to spin or argue the facts the more attention they will bring to those facts. Great strategy for Perry. Bad strategy for the WH. The subject of jobs for them is a losing issue right now and a big losing issue at that.
@another vet, #6:
The underlying facts are that Perry added mostly government jobs to the Texas workforce, while filling a $6.4 billion hole in the Texas budget using Recovery and Reinvestment Act money.
Perhaps conservatives should judge Perry’s words and actions using the same critical standard they apply to Barack Obama.
@Greg: The millions who have lost jobs will know that jobs were created under him regardless and lost under Obama. They could very well say, “Let’s give this guy a chance. Even if he’s not totally responsible for all those jobs, he must have at least done something right whereas under Obama we’re still unemployed so he must be doing something wrong.”
Carter tried to using Reagan’s record as governor against him and all it did was draw attention to the successes, real or perceived, of Reagan as a governor further highlighting and contrasting those successes to Carter’s failures as President. Bush I tried the same with Clinton and all that did was highlight the fact that whereas Arkansas added jobs under Clinton, the economy was in a recession under Bush. No one really cared if those jobs were in the poultry industry. Arkansas added jobs. It also highlighted the fact that Clinton balanced budgets in Arkansas and the deficits increased under Bush. The fact that Clinton had to balance the budget because Arkansas had a balanced budget amendment didn’t weigh in. All people cared about was that Clinton had a record of balancing budgets and Bush did not.
@Greg:
I have already debunked your claim, taken from Bernstein, that there was mostly public service jobs created in Texas. Unfortunately, you can’t debate the BLS figures and stats unless you use Bernstein’s twisted math. Further ciphering shows us that in Jan., 2001, the public sector jobs in Texas represented 7.8% of the work force. In July, 2011, it is 7.2% of the total work force.
You need to stop paying attention to, and believing the guy that gave us the Bernstein/Romer report that obviously Jared Bernstein is not willing to claim credit for on his own website.
Again, I have asked you to provide proof that the Texas budget was balanced by using Stimulus money. In fact, I read today that Texas got less in stimulus funds, per capita, than did California. So if the Stimulus money is what created jobs in Texas, California should be humming. Instead, California is now at 12+% unemployment. Explain that using your rational.
According to Greg’s favorite guy’s website, Recovery.gov:
Stimulus dollars
California – awarded $31,700,195,500.00 Received $19,089,380,651.00
jobs created – 52,465 @ a per job cost of $363,849.82
Texas – awarded $16,759,901,407.00 Received $11,451,967,1033.00
jobs created – 45,340 @ a per job cost of $252,579.78
Notice that California was awarded almost twice as much as Texas but has only 44% more residents. According to Greg, who says that Texas benefitted from the stimulus money and that explains the job growth, California should be a job mecca. But it is still bleeding jobs and population.
And look at cost per job. Barry should have just kept his Stimulus since we are going to have to pay all that money back one of these days.
@retire05:
I don’t believe there’s any twisted math involved in the simple facts, simple logic, and simple arithmetic up in post #3. The results indicate that two-thirds of the net increase in Texas jobs 2007 through 2010 was in the public sector.
That would be relevant provided the percentage of total wages represented by private sector wages has increased, while the percentage of total wages represented by public sector wages has declined. I’m not sure where to find the data needed to check. In its absence, it’s possible that while private sector jobs might represent a higher percentage of all jobs in Texas than they did in 2001, there may have been a corresponding trend toward private sector jobs that don’t pay much.
@Greg:
You want to play from a dishonest stand point. No, the job gains were not as great between 2007 and 2010 due to job losses after the market crash of late 2008. Now, if you want to compare that to the jobs gains/losses for the same time period in California, the next nearest populated state, let’s have it.
The truth of the matter is that there were:
296,000 jobs gained in 2007
48,000 jobs gained in 2008
360,000 jobs lost in 2009
235,000 jobs gained in 2010
and
175,000 jobs gained in the first seven months of this year for a figure of 10,619,000 jobs currently in Texas. This is the non-farm employment number which does NOT include public sector.
For you, who subscribes to Bernstein’s distorted figures, that comes to a net gain of 410,000 jobs over the 3 1/2 year period from Jan. 2007 to July, 2011.
Public sector jobs:
January, 2007 – 1,718,500
July, 2011 – 1,855,100 Gain – 136,600 jobs which includes military and the doctors that facilitate the medical hospitals in Texas, one of which is replacing Walter Reed.
Now, if you can provide the stats for another state of similiar size that has done as well, provide the stats. Do you want to talk about the national job losses just since January, 2009 and now? How’s that working out for ya?
Try as you may, you just can’t bring yourself to admit the man who gave us such pathetic predictions when it came to the Stimulus is wrong. And you can’t bring yourself to admit that if Stimulus money was the main factor in job creation, California should be gaining jobs, not losing them as it is.
Average hourly wage in Texas is $15.14/hr. or $31,491.20/yr. That is about mid range of all the states. Now, I know that you libs like to point to wages but you don’t want to point to wages when compared with the COL figures. Wages have actually increased more in Texas than in California, where the COL is much greater. To have the same buying power of $31,491./yr, working in Houston, you would have to make $52,080/yr in Los Angeles.
@retire05, #12:
Why do we keep talking about California? I’m not clear what California has to do with Perry’s claims about his Texas job miracle.
I believe the statewide Total Nonfarm amount DOES in fact include both the private and public sectors. Refer to the Economy at a Glance table. Government (i.e., public sector) is one of the 11 subcategories that are broken out from the Total Nonfarm category. The figures for all of those 11 items add up to 10,488.9, which is equal to the Total Nonfarm amount. This makes a big difference in the computation.
I haven’t relied on Bernstein’s computations at all in #3; I’ve only reached a similar conclusion about Perry’s campaign spin.
@Greg:
In post #3, you provided two charts, goverment and non-farm, which come to the total of the chart you just provided in post #13. Perhaps you better look at your Economy At A Glance sheet again:
total employment – 11,218.4
total non-farm – 10,619.8
that’s a difference of almost 600,000 jobs.
I use California as a bench mark because it most resembles Texas in population. If using the Stimulus funds to balance their budgets contributed to the employment rate, considering that California has gotten more in funds, it would stand to reason that they would also benefit from the greater employment gains. They did not. They lost jobs and continue to lose jobs. It would also stand to reason that the California budget, just recently passed, would not be in the hole by $19 billion for the next fiscal year while Texas balanced its fiscal bi-annual budget. The Texas budget had a slightly more than $4 billion short fall which was taken from the “rainy day” fund. A fund that had to be built up after the hurricane devestated Galveston Island and the federal goverment (Obama) refused to reimburse Texas for many of those expenses while Obama continued to send money to New Orleans.
Now, why don’t you tell me what state you live in so we can compare it to Texas?
The Wall Street Journal is a font of facts and figures about jobs and Texas…..
* Texas created 37% of all net new American jobs since the recovery began in June 2009.
* Texas is also among the three states and the District of Columbia that are home to more jobs today than when the recession began.
* Texas has added more net new jobs than all other states combined since 2006.
* Texas population grew 20.6% between 2000 and 2010.
* Texas labor force has increased by 5% since December 2007. (The labor force has shrunk in 28 states since December 2007. )
* Texas median hourly wage is pegged at $15.14.
* Texas wages have increased at 3.4%, 10th fastest in the country.
* 31% of the new Texas jobs are in health care.
* Texas has netted 26,000 new physicians in the wake of reform, most from out of state.
…………………………
Another Texas jobs summary based on BLS data.
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/private-sector-not-gov-t-created-nearly
@Greg:
anothervet beat me to it, but it seems that your claims about Perry’s jobs record in Texas are false, or, at the very least, extremely misleading. Consider;
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/private-sector-not-gov-t-created-nearly
I know retire05 has been combating your perceptions regarding Perry and jobs in Texas, and essentially has stated, throughout his posts, what I linked above.
@johngalt:
John, also what Greg does not want to address is that of that 5 million increase in population, approx. 20% of them are school aged children. Estimated that the student/school district staff is 10/1 how does that come out doing simple math. Now, Greg will come back and say that you don’t need 1 staffer per 10 students, but that includes teachers, school district office staff, principals and his assistants, superintendent and staff, maintainence men and lunch room workers and cleaning personnel. My own small central Texas district has a ratio of 7.8/1. Houston Independent School District, one of the largest with 200,944 students has a total district personnel of 24,735 for a ratio of 8.12/1. Even if the increase in student population is only 15% of the population increase, that comes to 750,000 kids that need schools and at a 10/1 ratio, that is an additional 75,000 school district staff required.
Greg also doesn’t take into account that with the closing of Walter Reed, the nation’s foremost military hospital is now Brook Army Medical Center in San Antonio (staff are government workers) and the enlargement of the VA hospital in Temple.
So let’s just remove the 75,000 school staffers from the 280,000 number. That leaves 205,000 jobs as fire fighters, police officers, state/city/county office staffers, utility workers, trash men, sanitation workers, street/road repair/construction crews, etc. all to service an additional 5 million people and who are ALL considered “government” workers.
@retire05:
What you are saying, then, is that with a corresponding increase in population, the government, then, must need to increase correspondingly as well, in order to provide the necessary services.
Of course, that isn’t to be confused with the arbitrary increasing of government size due to implementing new, onerous and burdensome regulation on businesses and individuals. Liberal/progressives do not quite understand that conservatives are not, necessarily, in favor of smaller government for the sake of being smaller. Conservatives believe in smaller, more efficient government that presents a positive business atmosphere and stays as much out of people’s lives as they can. There is a big distinction that needs to be made in this regard.
@johngalt, #17:
I believe my statements to be factual.
The period under discussion in the Bernstein article and by myself was the period specifically relating to the current recession. This period included the years 2007 through 2010, which was clearly stated in Bernstein’s article and in each of my comments.
anothervet is arbitrarily expanding the period to include 2000 through 2006. What happened from 2000 through 2006 reveals nothing concerning the effectiveness of Governor Perry’s policies as a response to the economic conditions that existed from 2007 forward.
At least 2/3 of Texas job growth since the beginning of the recession has resulted from new government jobs added since then. That’s what the numbers tell us.
@Greg:
Yes, Greg, but you discount the massive migration of population to the state of Texas and the correspondingly required increase in public sector jobs to provide the necessary services. Not to mention that, in the end, the number of government workers per resident decreased.
And I didn’t call your facts false, or misleading, but rather, your conclusions that you drew from them. You cannot present a fact showing the increase of public sector workers and jump to a conclusion that Perry is, somehow, actually for the same policies that he denounces, without looking at the REASONS for that increase in public sector jobs. What you did was what the author of your original linked article did, which is to selectively use data, while excluding other data, in order to fit within your viewpoint. It doesn’t work like that, Greg.
Overall, one would expect that an increase in public sector jobs, given everything else in stasis, would be at, or slightly below, the pace of increase in the population. So Texas, with a 20.9% increase in population from 2000 to 2010 should have an increase in public sector jobs during that same period pretty close to 20.9%. In reality, the increase was only 17.8%. Without looking at everything, and putting everything in context, the full picture of why public sector jobs in Texas increased is likely to be missed, or misread, as both you and the author of your linked article have done.
Here’s a little something that blows the “public sector jobs” BS out of the water.
http://hotair.com/archives/2011/08/22/was-texas-jobs-expansion-due-to-government-growth/
@Greg:
BTW, I just wanted to thank you for your response, that I found thoughtful, respectful, and congenial, even if I did disagree with it. While I rarely agree with your conclusions or views, thoughtful, reasoned debate is how any discussion like these here at FA should be. Thanks again. Now, I gotta get ready for work so I can pay for someone else’s bennies. 😉
@Greg: Let’s update this even more using the data cited in your post #3.
Total non-farm jobs June 2011- 1,0590.5
Total non-farm jobs 2007- 1,0230.3
Difference- +360, 200 non-farm jobs
Total government jobs June 2011- 1,864.5
Total government jobs 2007- 1,718.5
Difference- +146,000 government jobs
Total non-farm jobs- 360,200
minus
Total government jobs- 146,000
Total private sector jobs= 214,200
Feel free to check my calculations. I’m good at math but do make mistakes!
GREG this is incredible, you are trying deliberately, to diminish the fact that PERRY has increase the economy in TEXAS, and you cannot back up on being shown the facts,
how much did you get paid for those comments?
you are misleading the viewers with your comments,
that is your goal. bad of you
@ilovebeeswarzone:
Bees, you have to forgive Greg. He can only parrot what he reads from left wing hacks. The person he is taking his stats from is Jared Burnstein who has a website and whose facts and figures were reprinted in the Washington Post. Bernstein is one half of the Obama duo who predicted that WITH the Stimulus bill, unemployment would not rise over 8%. Bernstein also predicted that WITH the Stimulus bill, unemployment would currently be around 6.75%.
You see, Bees, Bernstein is a policital hack for Obama who was so terribly wrong that his partner in that criminal report, Christine Romer, quit the Obama administration, I am sure out of shame. Because of those two people, Bernstein and Romer, American taxpayers are now almost $900 billion deeper in debt when there was no reason for it.
I have been trying to figure out how Bernstein claims there was a 0.6% drop in private sector jobs from “January, 2007 to last June.” What Bernstein did was use the employment figures from June, 2010, not June, 2011. That is because Burnstein, who btw, is NOT a trained economist, (surprise, surprise, Bernstein has a degree in Social Welfare from (tah-dah) Columbia University, Obama’s alma mater) is one of those who claims we got out of the recession in June, 2010. There are 14 million Americans out of work who would disagree with that claim. And Bernstein is soooooo proud of his work for President Obama by presenting the Bernstein/Romer Report, that he does not even list that report on his own website.
Now, had Bernstein been honest, which he is not, he would have added that although Texas continued to lose jobs in 2009 just like the rest of the nation, the national unemployment rate went from 7.8 (January, 2009) to 9.9 (December, 2009) and remained in the high 9% for most of the year, 2010 while Texas on the other hand began to rebound in January, 2010 and has continued to add jobs every month since, directly opposite of what the nation has been doing.
@another vet, #26:
Your math is correct so far as I can see, and the results are interesting. While government job growth was stronger than public sector growth in Texas from January 2007 through December 2010–accounting for 2/3 of total growth during that period–I have to concede that the trend does in fact reverse quite strongly beginning with January 2011. During 2011, private sector jobs growth has continued, while the public sector count has actually declined slightly. And while I can see a good argument for excluding pre-2007 data–that all being pre-recession–I can’t see any reason why the 2011 data should be left out.
This does strengthen Perry’s claim, and weaken the argument of his critics.
@Greg:
I am not quite clear who you are responding to since post #26 was mine.
But here is another little bit of information for you: while the left decries Perry’s economic philosophy as not really being the reason for the increase in jobs in Texas, and claims that the recent gains are simply due to gas prices, why do they not also claim the those gas prices were a reason for the jobs loss in 2009? Could it be that showing that does not fit with their agenda of discrediting Governor Perry?
Example:
On August 23, 2006 regular gas prices were @ $2.86/gal.
By July 16, 2008 regular gas prices had skyrocketed to $4.12/gal.
By January, 2009 those same prices had plummeted to $1.60 and remained under the 8/23/06 price until December 15, 2010.
How does your economic guru explain that although gas prices for a good portion of 2010 were still lower than they were four years earlier, Texas, in 2010, continued to add jobs? Kinda destroys that whole “when gas prices are higher jobs are created in Texas” meme, doesn’t it?
The honest argument would be the entire 11 year history of Perry’s governorship, and has number of jobs met the challenge of an ever increasing population. And that argument would also include the question “How does Texas stack up to other states with similiar populations?” since the recession affected every state, not just a few.
What Bernstein tried to do was use the excuse that although a company had seen almost ten years of profit and growth, it was wrong to assume the company was successful because there was one year out of those ten that the company suffered a loss.
Let this be a lesson to you Greg that when you take someone’s opinion at face value, you should always check out their agendas. Bernstien’s agenda is to discredit Perry because Obama can’t back up his claim of job “growth” when you look at the national numbers compared to Texas. Reasonable people would understand that if job growth was based on stimulus money, those states with the greatest amount of awards would be doing better. If job growth was tied to oil prices, other states, like Louisiana and Mississippi, would have also seen the same results.
@retire05, #28:
Sorry about that. I must have clicked on the Reply button in the wrong post.
My #27 was actually intended as a reply to anothervet’s #24.
I was conceding that his math is correct, and that including 2011 data does make the case for Perry’s jobs claim a lot stronger. While I wasn’t blindly accepting Bernstein’s argument and did my own calculations, I had stuck to the same range of time he was using. In retrospect, I can’t actually see any good reason why 2011 data shouldn’t be included. Including it changes the results.
So far as agendas go, everybody seems to have one these days.
@Greg: Hopefully I didn’t transpose any numbers.