tazzygirl
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~FR
Ever since he jumped into the presidential race, Perry has touted his job creation record in Texas as a model for a national turnaround.
Perry, Sept. 7: What Americans are looking for is someone who can get this country working again. And we put the model in place in the state of Texas. When you look at what we have done over the last decade, we created 1 million jobs in the state of Texas. At the same time, America lost 2.5 million.
It's certainly true that Texas has done better than the country as a whole in terms of job growth. When Perry stepped into office in December 2000, employment in Texas was at 9,537,900 and rose to 10,619,800 as of July 2011. That's just over a million jobs, as Perry said. And it's an 11.3 percent increase. Over that period, only four states grew jobs at a faster rate: North Dakota, Wisconsin, Alaska and Utah.
Perry's comparison about U.S. job losses at the same time, however, requires some selective picking of years. If you look at the jobs in the U.S. at the start of Perry's term as governor (December 2000) and compare it with January 2011, Perry is close to being right — over that span the country lost nearly 2.2 million jobs. But that ignores the job growth over this year. If you look at the U.S. employment numbers from December 2000 to August 2011, the loss is closer to 1.4 million jobs. That's still a big difference, just not quite as dramatic.
There are also some caveats to Perry's job creation record in Texas, which we explored recently when Perry claimed that since June 2009, Texas is responsible for more than 40 percent of all of the new jobs created in the U.S. We concluded that while the statistic is accurate, there's more to the story. The increase in jobs hasn't kept pace with the rise in the state's population — so the number of jobless Texans also has risen, along with the state’s unemployment rate. Under Perry, the unemployment rate went from 4.2 percent in December 2000 (a little worse than the national unemployment rate of 3.9 percent) to 8.4 percent in July 2011 (better than the national rate of 9.1 percent).
Also, as critics have repeatedly noted, Texas is tied with Mississippi for the highest percentage of hourly workers paid at or below the minimum wage. And, as we discussed in our article, Texas also has some unique factors that helped it fare better than most states during the recession. Its economy has benefited from high fuel prices, and Texas didn't experience the big housing bust.
http://factcheck.org/2011/09/spinning-job-growth-by-the-numbers/
Analysis
Fact: Texas is responsible for 40 percent of the nation's job creation since June 2009.
Perry, South Carolina, Aug. 13: Since June of 2009, Texas is home to 40 percent of all the jobs added in the United States.
Perry has touted this statistic several times, and with the economy and jobs monopolizing the political discourse these days, it's little wonder this has become a major talking point for the governor. On top of that, it's true — even if there are some not-so-rosy-sounding statistics that go along with it. More on those in a minute.
Texas has done a fine job of adding to its employment numbers. Since June 2009, which marked the official end of the recession, until July 2011, the number of jobs increased in the state by 328,000. Nationally, the job growth in that time period was 697,000, according to figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That means Texas jobs made up 47 percent of the national net job creation.
What about Perry's entire tenure as governor? Texas still looks better than the country overall. The state has added 1,081,900 jobs since December 2000, the month Perry took office. It's an increase of 11.3 percent during his time as governor. Nationally, employment has gone down in this time frame, declining by 1,295,000, a nearly 1 percent drop.
Perry's record is part of a long-term trend. Texas has done well in the jobs department for decades. "This point goes neglected," says Bernard L. Weinstein, professor of business economics in the Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. "Yes, Texas has created more jobs than any other state" in the last two years. "But that’s been true since 1970. For the last 41 years Texas has added more jobs than any other state, and in most years, has led the nation in job creation," Weinstein told us. "So Gov. Perry can claim that these jobs were created on his watch, but they were created on everybody else’s watch too."
The San Antonio-Express News recently pointed out that past Texas governors have done well in terms of job creation, too. The state did even better when George W. Bush was governor; jobs went up 20.3 percent, though Bush's 1995-2000 term also came during prosperous times. "A lot of what we’re doing is growing like we always grew," Dick Lavine, senior fiscal analyst for the Center for Public Policy Priorities in Austin, a think tank that advocates for low- and moderate-income families, told us, referring to both jobs and the state's burgeoning population. "It’s a longer-term trend in Texas that’s just continuing."
Fact: Despite the job gains, Texas' unemployment rate has gone up.
While Texas has created jobs, the state hasn't created enough of them to keep pace with a rising population and labor force. In fact, if we look at the June 2009 starting point that Perry refers to, unemployment got worse in Texas – going from 7.7 percent in June 2009 to 8.4 percent in July 2011. The national rate, meanwhile, improved – dropping from 9.5 percent to 9.1 percent.
The fact is, neither Texas, nor the nation, is adding jobs at a pace fast enough to bring down unemployment to historically normal levels. And Texas' unemployment rate — while still below the national average — is now higher than that of 26 states.
The number of employed and the number of unemployed in Texas both have increased in the past three years, according to BLS data. So, while jobs have grown, the number of unemployed in the state has doubled since January 2008. How can a state add jobs while also adding unemployed workers? It simply adds population.
Texas is the second largest state, and its population — 25.1 million as of the 2010 census — has increased rapidly. It has gone up by 20.6 percent from 2000 to 2010, more than twice the rate of the U.S. overall, according to the Census Bureau.
"It’s a little hard to tell … whether job growth has led to population growth in Texas or vice versa," says Lavine.
Perry's supporters will say that people from other states have moved to Texas because of job opportunities. And that's true for some. But a little more than half of the state's population growth, 54 percent, was natural — births and deaths — from 2000 to 2009. The rest was split between domestic and international immigration, with 21.6 percent of the growth coming from people moving from other states and 23.7 percent coming from international migrants. That's according to the Census Bureau and the Texas State Data Center.
"When you have more people, you generally have more jobs," Howard Wial, an economist and fellow with The Brookings Institution, said in an interview with FactCheck.org. "When more people move in, wages don’t rise. They might fall a little bit," which, in turn, can be an impetus for job creation. "When there are more jobs created, more people want to move in."
Another look at BLS data comparing Texas to the nation shows that the state has done better than the country as a whole. But it still has been hit by the recession. Both unemployment rates have grown at roughly the same rate. The Texas unemployment rate was 4.4 percent in Jan 2008, 0.6 percentage points below the national rate of 5.0. In July, Texas’ unemployment was 8.4 percent, 0.7 percentage points below the national rate of 9.1 percent.
http://factcheck.org/2011/08/texas-size-recovery/
And, btw, its cheaper to live in PA than Texas.
< Message edited by tazzygirl -- 9/9/2011 12:38:16 PM >
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RE: 51% of Texans make McDonalds level wages. - 
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