The Federal Government released yesterday its monthly “Regional and State Employment and Unemployment” report of January. (The State numbers are released 4-6 weeks after the national numbers are out).
Here are some interesting numbers about January – the latest month available:
– The unemployment rate in Texas (5.7%), Utah (3.9%), South Dakota (3.6%), and in North Dakota (2.6%) are well below January’s national UR of 6.6%, while the UR in Illinois (8.7%), California (8.1%), and New York (6.8%) are higher than the national average. A key issue that empowers the first half state over the second half is energy production: ND and TX have massively increased their production in recent years while NY and CA have both cut their natural gas and crude oil production since 2008.
– In terms of jobs, Texas added 778,600 jobs in the last five years starting with February 2009 (Obama’s first full month in office), while California produced 644K jobs in the same period. New York State came in a distant third with 270,500 added jobs. ND in this same period produced about 85K jobs. Remember: ND does not even have close to 1M people living there while NY has almost 20 million and CA almost 40 million!
- The 863,600 combined jobs created in two of the most energy-producing states (TX-ND), account for 24.3% of the net jobs created since Obama’s first full month in office. Meanwhile, NY and CA, two energy-regressive states with a combined population more than double of TXND, produced only 25.7% of the jobs over the same period.
Considering that the jobs data are based on surveys and rough estimates subject to endless revisions, it’s fair to say that job gains in NYCA are essentially the same as in TXND despite boasting 58M people to the 27M of TXND.
If only the people running GOP messaging had the brains to showcase those numbers during the 2012 election.
Democrats try to dismiss these numbers by claiming that those jobs are low-paying. Putting aside the fact that by saying this, the Democrats are trashing a BIG percent of the Obama-era jobs, the fact is that of all the state that income to the bottom 5% fell since the recovery began, it dropped least in TX. Better yet, of the three states that income to this class actually rose, it did best in ND!
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