NJ’s Delaware Jobless Rate Article Whacks Markell
In an article notable for its lack of sham objectivity, and bereft of the usual he said/she said “balance” the News Journal’s business reporter, Jonathan Starkey takes a hatchet to Jack Markell’s job creating prowess.
It starts off staid enough, comparing Delaware’s recent job losses to national job gains.
Even as the national jobs picture brightened on Friday, Delaware’s economic recovery showed signs of weakening, with layoffs continuing across the state into the first month of 2011.
Employers here shed a net 700 jobs in January, according to state labor data released Friday. The state’s unemployment rate, which has slowly ticked up since last summer, hovered at 8.5 percent in January.
…in Delaware is gloomier. Here, job loss was felt across several sectors in January, and no sector recorded more than marginal gains. Retailers cut 800 jobs, while the health sector, Delaware’s most prominent long-term job creator, slashed 600 jobs.
Restaurants also seem to be having a tough run in early 2011. The leisure and hospitality sector posted a loss of 500 jobs in January.
Then Starkey makes like Walker Texas Ranger roundhouse kicking some perps.
Federal labor data show that Delaware employers shed 4,900 jobs from July 2010 to this January.
“There’s no putting a happy face on the January numbers,” said George Sharpley, an economist with the state Labor Department. “They’re by and large disappointing.”
But more than 36,000 Delawareans who want work remain jobless. Michael Bratus, an associate economist at Moody’s Analytics in West Chester, Pa., who studies Delaware’s economy, said no state in the U.S. has a worse net job-creation record than Delaware over the last several months.
“Job growth has been so weak, it’s been unable to absorb the job seekers who are re-entering the labor market,” Bratus said.
Bratus and others largely blame Delaware’s economic turmoil on the state’s financial sector — which added 200 jobs from December to January but is poised to post big losses in coming months.
No quote from CRI? Starkey was phoning this one in I guess.
Anyway, the article does not go into possible fixes for Delaware’s sluggish job growth. Perhaps because the solution has been so well covered that we all know it by heart: Cut a bunch of state jobs and keep Charlie Copeland’s taxes laughably low.
Plus, a partially employed, minimum wage employee with a couple of kids can get the equivalent income of a fully employed $60k/year employee with a couple of kids. One just needs to know the right websites. Why bother to work?
Haven’t read the article yet, but it’s hard to blame Delaware’s lack of job diversity on Markell. Live the sword, die by the sword: For years, Delaware’s unemployment rate tracked a point or two lower than the national rate because we’re so dependent on the financial sector. Once the crash took its toll on that sector, we lost that advantage; indeed, it became a disadvantage. Remember that even in the financial field, we’re most heavily dependent on credit card lending, which has taken a big hit as consumers have cut back on spending.
CRI actually has a relatively unbiased (for them) piece by Stapleford on this, picking up on a CNBC ranking of states for business climate. We’re No. 1 in “business friendliness,” but rank so low in other areas that we’re well down the list overall.
“We’re No. 1 in “business friendliness,” but rank so low in other areas that we’re well down the list overall.”
Huzzah!!
This article seems pretty objective to me. Nationally, we’ve added hundreds of thousands of jobs over the past few months, while in Delaware we’ve lost jobs. This is the greatest challenge facing our state right now. Though the Governor has done a good job in attacking this problem, there is room for improvement. It would be unfair to blame the Governor for all of our economic problems. But we ought to hold him accountable and his feet to the fire so he does more. If fact-based articles like this help us do that, then I, for one, welcome them.
Yes. Okay. Taxes are too high or something.
That CRI article still has its problems. Not the least of which is that there are no links to the CNBC survey. So you won’t know that the data Stapleford links to is the 2010 survey and a new one (with different weightings) is coming in June. But look at the differences between the #1 ranked state, Texas and then Delaware. There is a 13 point difference between these two states in the top two categories (Cost of Doing Business and Workforce). We clearly fall out in the Quality of Life Category, which rounds out the top 2 highly weighted categories. Texas gets to the top because it ranked very high on lesser weighted categories except for Education and Business Friendliness. So it is odd that the top ranked state for business has a middling ranking for Business Friendliness.
This is what goes into those rankings, although you have to look at the state by state summaries to see where their data comes from. And that data is coming from all over the place. That means that assessing the data quality here is almost impossible. But I think that there is a pretty big clue in the intent of this survey when CNBC tells you that they adjust their rankings each year on what it is that *states are selling about themselves* to business. This isn’t a survey of *businesses*.
Which isn’t to say that there isn’t anything useful about this data. I just can’t figure out what it is, other than adding to the race to the bottom pressures that all state governments are getting from businesses.
Cass: Agreed on all points. But I think most of the flaws are in the survey rather than in Stapleford’s interpretation of the “data.” I read the survey when it first came out and filed it under GIGO.
GIGO is good.
I think that if you purport to be employed with a think tack that part of your job would be to make sure the data you are working with makes some sense to the argument that you want to make. Of course, the CRI doesn’t exist so much as a think tank but more of a “serious” source to get wingnut talking points into the ether here. Good data doesn’t mean as much to them as just making some argument that tejadis will uncritically repeat. But if you are basing your “research” on bad source material then that author’s work is probably doubly as bad.
Fisker is creating jobs. duh