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NC Budget and Tax Center
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Another new jobs report, the same old story for North Carolina’s metro areas–too many of the state’s urban centers are struggling to create jobs and meaningfully create opportunities for the unemployed. Some of the low-lights from yesterday’s June report on local area unemployment include:

  • 13 out of 14 metros saw their labor forces decline since June 2013, suggesting that too many workers are unable to find work and continue to drop out of the workforce.
  • 8 out of 14 metros saw their unemployment rates drop because the majority of unemployed workers moved out of the labor force rather into jobs. That means that the unemployment rate isn’t going down because things are getting better for workers, but rather because things are getting worse.
  • 3 metros (Fayetteville, Hickory, and Jacksonville) have fewer people going to work in June 2014 than they did last year.
  • Only 4 metros (Durham, Raleigh, Charlotte, and Wilmington) have created enough jobs to fully replace the jobs lost during the Great Recession. After five years, 10 metros have yet to fully recover from the recession.
  • For 10 metros, it will take more than a year to fully replace those lost jobs, if they create jobs at the current pace.
  • One metro, Hickory-Lenoir, will take almost a half century to fully return to pre-recession employment levels if they maintain their current pace of job creation.

All told, this is a dismal jobs reports for our state’s metro areas, far removed from recent claims about the state’s supposed economic renaissance.

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120px-Tom_Barrett_talking_with_construction_workers

This morning consumer advocacy group Families USA released a report along with the NC Community Health Center Association and the NC Justice Center showing that most people who stand to benefit from closing our state’s health insurance gap are working. Many of these folks are in low-wage service jobs. The report also examines the top occupations in North Carolina where employees would benefit from Medicaid expansion.

There are 59,000 construction workers who would benefit from Medicaid expansion and 56,000 food service workers. When these employees are in good health we are all better off. Construction workers at home with a serious illness and food preparers with untreated diseases decrease productivity and threaten public health.

Chid care workers and home health aides are also disproportionately impacted by our state’s stance on Medicaid expansion, which means that the people who help nurture our children and tend to the elderly can’t take care of their own health needs.

It is a positive sign that Gov. McCrory says that he is keeping the door open to Medicaid expansion in the state. Still, this passive stance will not move us anywhere. If we are going to prevent unnecessary deaths, extend needed preventive care, and help the people who make our food and care for our kids then we need the Governor to lead.

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Jobs ImageAs state lawmakers continue to go about the business of overhauling important aspects of state government “on the fly” with complex, last-minute proposals that receive only superficial review in kangaroo committee meetings — see, for example, the Senate’s latest mad effort to privatize the state’s Medicaid system in the waning days of the 2014 session — here’s something new and unusual: an actual thorough and thoughtful report on a critically important and under-reported subject that’s not just a collection of soundbites.

The report, not surprisingly, comes from the good folks at the N.C Budget and Tax Center and it deals with the unsexy but vital subject of how North Carolina rebuilds its middle class. The central finding: We ain’t gonna’ succeed by trying to do it on the cheap and/or relying upon race-to-the-bottom tax cuts and low-wage jobs. This is from the release that accompanied the report this morning: Read More

NC Budget and Tax Center
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Jobs11-5During the debate over last year’s billion-dollar-a-year tax cut plan, supporters made a lot of big promises about the supposed economic benefits of cutting corporate and personal income taxes for wealthy individuals and highly profitable corporations. The problem—as many warned at the time—is that tax cuts almost never live up to their promises.

And that’s the point made in a recent piece by the well-respected Fiscal Times. In order for the tax proponents’ claims to be true, North Carolina would have needed to generate job growth that is significantly better than other states and the national average. According to the Fiscal Times:

The trouble is that the promised job growth hasn’t really materialized.

To be sure, with the U.S. economy as a whole adding jobs at a pace of 250,000 per month, there aren’t many states seeing a downturn in employment anymore. But the promises that went along with the tax cuts and reduced spending weren’t about keeping up with the rest of the country, but about surging ahead.

The Fiscal Times examined the job creation record of North Carolina and two other states that have experimented with deep tax cuts—Kansas and Wisconsin—and found that:

The dramatic tax cutting doesn’t appear to have done nearly as much for job growth as promised.

Wisconsin and Kansas, for example, have actually lagged the national average in job creation since their big tax cuts and budget cuts were enacted:

Read More

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Dean BakerEarlier this week, we cross-posted a brief essay by one of the nation’s best economists, Dr. Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in which he thoughtfully and professionally dissected and demolished the claims made by a Raleigh conservative think tanker in a Wall Street Journal piece. The think tanker’s central claim was that the state’s harshest-in-the-nation cuts to unemployment insurance had spurred all kinds of wonderful economic results in North Carolina.

Apparently not content to be put in his place just once, the think tanker posted a fairly snarky attempt at a response yesterday and today, with an almost audible virtual sigh, Baker took to his keypad (and the CEPR blog) to provide a few more lessons in basic economics. We’ve cross-posted his addendum below:

Addendum:

I see John Hood has replied to my post. Apparently he thinks that if we play games with the start and end dates we can say cutting benefits worked.

Okay, I don’t know what games they play in North Carolina, but let’s just remember what is at issue. The argument for cutting benefits was that if the state pushed people off unemployment insurance (UI) they would be motivated to get a job. We know that North Carolina pushed lots of people off UI. The question is whether there is any evidence this led more people to get jobs.

That gives us two numbers to focus on, Read More

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