Governor Kasich’s 250,000 Jobs Talking Point Actually Looks Bad

image of Kasich yelling

Being election season, I get campaign mailers. One mailer I got the other day was from Governor John Kasich. On the mailer, Kaisch crows about adding 250,000 jobs. Normally that would be a good thing but when you start from a 400,000 total job loss it actually looks bad.

Here is part of the scan from the mailer I got:

scan of Governor Kasich mailer 2014

You can see the last point noted:

Created Nearly 250,000 New Jobs

It cites a report from the Labor Department for the period January 2011 to August 2014.

However due to the economy crash in 2008 Ohio had lost a total of 400,000 jobs. That was an issue Kasich brought up in his campaign in 2010 against Governor Ted Strickland.

In 2010, John Kasich ran for Governor on essentially nothing more than Tea Party anger over “ObamaCare” and the roughly 400,000 jobs that were lost in Ohio during the Great Recession. Four years later, John Kasich apparently plans on running for re-election on expanding Medicaid under ObamaCare and taking credit for the jobs largely created under Gov. Strickland’s policies. It’s almost ironic. 

Yes, it’s true that they got the 400,000 figure from calculating how many jobs were lost during the entire duration of Strickland’s term. However, what Nichols conveniently omits is that the Great Recession accounted for essentially all of that number. Not once did the Kasich campaign say Ohio was already bleeding jobs before the recession because, in reality, it wasn’t. The Great Recession alone accounts for the 400,000 jobs lost figure. It always did.

Even though those first six months account for just 20% (and shrinking) of Governor Kasich’s term, as we said yesterday, the final six months of the last Strickland budget account for 28.77% of all private sector job growth in Gov. Kasich’s term.

Kasich Administration wants to be judged differently on the economy than it judged Strickland in 2010

So do the math. Adding 250,000 jobs doesn’t break even for the losses during the 2008 recession not to mention 29% of the 250,000 was before any Kasich policies took affect. And Kaisch thinks it is a good thing?

Ohio still lags behind the national average in job creation:

Monthly numbers are always preliminary and subject to revision, making it unwise to make too much of monthly fluctuations. Even with September growth and an upward revision of the job number originally reported for August, the state’s 12-month job growth rate was just 0.6 percent. The state continued to trail the nation, which reported 1.9 percent growth over the same period. While the country has recovered the jobs lost during the recession, Ohio needs more than 114,000 jobs to get back to our pre-recession job count.

“Ohio continues its ride on the job growth seesaw,” said Hannah Halbert, workforce researcher with Policy Matters Ohio. “Ohio is producing modest monthly job gains followed by modest monthly losses or months of tepid growth, but we’re not seeing momentum and we are nowhere near robust job growth.” 

Modest job gains help Ohio edge above our June peak

It is obvious that Kasich policies have been holding the state back.

*Update*

The Plunderbund blog takes the rest of the points in the mailer apart in the post Latest Kasich Mailer Full Of Half-Truths and Straight-Up Lies. Check it out.

One Reply to “Governor Kasich’s 250,000 Jobs Talking Point Actually Looks Bad”

  1. Kasich has not done Ohio that many favors. Brags about how many billions of dollars, he cut Ohio Taxes. The fact is he raised more than he lowered. Think about it with the new “balanced” Ohio biannual budget: Raised Ohio Sales tax .25%, eliminated all Roll backs on Ohio Property taxes, reinstated the income threshold for all Ohio seniors on the property tax homestead exemption, made drastic cuts to local funding, causing schools, cities, EMS squads, County Mental Health, and a ton of other local agencies to come back to the voters for additional mileage, that no longer has the property tax roll back. Pretty discouraging and costly to the property owner.

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