Tuesday, August 21, 2012

The Democrats Unemployment Fantasy

Good news for Ohioans last week; we aren’t like the rest of America.

If we were, our unemployment rate would have went up the way it did in 44 states and nationally.  Despite the Administration’s best efforts, ours stayed the same at 7.2%. 

It’s worth mentioning that Ohio’s unemployment rate in July 2011 was 8.9%.  We have dropped 1.7% in the past twelve months, a significant shift in the right direction.  The national unemployment rate for the same period dropped from 9.1% to 8.3%, a drop of only .8%.

So why is Ohio greatly outpacing the rest of the country?

Ohio Democrats, in an effort to boost up Obama and soften the Governor for 2014, are going to tell you that it’s their leadership that set Ohio on the right path.  They will argue that the auto bailout and Ted Strickland’s leadership helped Ohio turn the corner well before Governor Kasich took office.

What’s the huge glaring problem with this argument?  Numbers don’t lie. 
Anyone that considers losing 400,000 jobs during Ted Strickland’s administration a step in the right direction needs their head examined.  I realize the economy was tough during his time in office, but at what point do you start taking responsibility for your actions? 

Obama also points to the auto bailout as the reason for Ohio’s recovery.  This would be great except that it’s not true.  In fact, auto-manufacturing jobs are actually down 3,200 when compared to January 2011.   

The Democrat argument that Ohio’s recovery began on their watch is ludicrous; it simply mirrored the national recovery.  Don’t believe me?  Take a look at this graph that Democrats have used to try and make their point:

         
I went into more detail in a previous post about this.  The takeaway is the chart that the ODP is using to prove their point actually proves mine.  Ohio was on pace with the rest of the country until the Governor’s budget went into effect at which time the drop in our unemployment rate began to outpace the national rate.

You might notice that our unemployment rate started to outpace the national rate in July 2011.  What else happened that month?  Governor Kasich’s Jobs Budget went into effect.  Since that time Ohio has consistently outperformed the rest of the nation.

Yet somehow Democrats continue to take credit for Governor Kasich’s success. 

If their policies are the reason Ohio’s economy is rebounding why is the rest of the nation still hurting?

6 comments:

  1. Have Republican governors hurt Mitt Romney?

    "Kasich, Scott, Walker, Snyder and Corbett have indeed managed to spark their respective state economies by enacting fiscally conservative policies that seem, by most measures, to have worked.

    The unemployment rate in each of these states has plummeted between November 2010, when the new GOP governors were elected, and now. Ohio has gone from a 9.4 percent jobless rate to the current 7.2 percent. Florida’s unemployment ratio has dropped from a whopping 11.2 percent to 8.6 percent, while Michigan’s has plunged from 11.6 percent to 8.6 percent. Similar, though less dramatic, reductions have taken place in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — both of which boast rates far below the 8.3 percent national jobless level.

    On the budget front, Walker in Wisconsin transformed the $3.6 billion shortfall he inherited into a $275 million surplus, while Snyder’s Michigan cost-cutting converted a $1.5 billion deficit into a cool $400 million surfeit. Obama, meanwhile, has exploded the national debt by $4 trillion."


    Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0812/79742_Page2.html#ixzz24Dxkox2V

    ReplyDelete
  2. For a very limited time and donation, you can join Ted Strickland in a train car hooked to his wife's pick-up. She pull the train at 35 mph from Cincinnati to Columbus, stop, then to Cleveland, stop. Then board Amtrak to California, where three weeks later ya'll take the bi-plane featured in his license plate and look down on the California phantom high speed rail line where Ohio's stimulus dollars went. You'll get to glimpse medical marijuana and Facebook's sagging stock. From there, you'll join Ted and Jerry Brown in a yeasty campaign announcement to commit to raising Ohio's regressive sales tax rates to restore moneys for Ohio's very own phantom high speed rail line. Get your drawings ready, cause they'll be another contest to draw Ted's proposed license plate for his 2014 campaign (hint, there's a bi-plane and a phantom train).

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  3. If you believe that a state's economy can turnaround merely upon the signing of a State budget, then you are just too clueless to even be taken seriously. A budget being signed into law cannot have THAT much of an impact on the economy. You're engaging in a classic post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.

    Regardless, Ohio had a much longer of uninterrupted dropping unemployment rates under Strickland's last budget than Kasich's first one. The BLS CES survey showed Ohio gained more jobs in 2010 than 2011.

    And the biggest monthly job gains Ohio has seen under Kasich were the two months following the defeat of Issue 2.

    "The Democrat argument that Ohio’s recovery began on their watch is ludicrous; it simply mirrored the national recovery. Don’t believe me?"

    I don't believe, and I looked at the graph. The graph shows Ohio's unemployment rate being well above the national rate, but then dropping below the national rate before Kasich even took office.

    That's not mirroring the national rate. Not even close. This chart refutes what you're claiming pretty starkly. You don't even have to look at the numbers to see that you're wrong, you should have been able to notice that by seeing how the pretty lines crossed around in 2010.

    And, genius, the auto industry always posts job losses in the summer as there are temporary layoffs while the factors retool for the next production line cycle during the summer months.

    Seriously, take an adult literacy course on graph reading.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I see the graph supporting your argument that Ohio's unemployment trend followed the national trend from the point where Kasich took office until July 2011, but I don't see it supporting the argument that the two trends were moving in tandem when Strickland was governor.

    Overall, there's a clear trend in the Ohio figures, showing an improvement in the rate of unemployment that is outpacing the improvement in national unemployment, and that trend is clearly established long before Kasich takes office. If you are correct that Kasich's job policies are responsible for the (good) gap on the right side of the graph, then you need to explain what closed the (bad) gap on the left side of the graph.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. They can't, Max because the facts defeat their partisan narrative.

      The post claims that Ohio's unemployment rate drop accelerated the moment Kasich's budget became law. Instead, the graph clearly shows that it went UP in June when it was signed into law and stayed up the following month. The rate dropped less in the last fifteen months in Ohio than it did in the prior fifteen months when it started to come down from its peak in the recession.

      This site is where you go to read fan fiction about how great John Kasich is. It's not a place for serious discussion of facts as this post demonstrates clearly.

      Delete
  5. He's increased the National Debt by 34%. He's increased unemployment when he promised the 800 billion dollar bill would create more jobs yet unemployment and poverty have gotten worse. He continued wars he promised to end. He started more new wars. He lieds about everything and makes Americans lives worse

    ReplyDelete

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