The sluggish and uneven "Carolina Comeback"

Published March 27, 2015

By Chris Fitzsimon

by Chris Fitzsimon, NC Policy Watch and NC SPIN panelist, March 26, 2015.

Here are a few facts that Governor Pat McCrory and legislative leaders never mention when they boast of the alleged “Carolina Comeback” and that right-wing pundits always leave out when marveling at what they describe as “sizzling” job growth in North Carolina.

The number of North Carolinians who are currently unemployed is higher than it was before the Great Recession and that increase in people out of work is larger in proportion than the nation as a whole.

North Carolina has also seen a bigger drop in the percentage of people who have a job than the country has experienced. And for the folks in the state lucky enough to have steady employment, their wages have not kept up with inflation.

The buying power of wages is down 1.9 percent for North Carolina workers when you adjust for inflation, while it is up 1.3 percent for workers nationwide.

The numbers come from a new report from the N.C. Budget & Tax Center with a headline “Growth without prosperity,” a title that seems especially appropriate when you consider that the gross state output is up 18.5 percent since 2007 but workers aren’t seeing much of that economic growth in their paychecks.

The report also includes a graph that shows that job growth in North Carolina has generally tracked the national growth rate. It’s 0.8 percent higher overall.

Add it up and you have slightly better job growth than the nation but fewer people working and a drop in real wages in contrast to a slight increase nationally.

Even looking through rose-colored glasses that hardly seems to be a picture worth celebrating or proclaim sizzling.

But that’s what all the fuss on the Right is about, that North Carolina, along with the rest of the country, has recovered from the recession.

None of the pundits have apparently considered that national economic policy has more to do with what happens in North Carolina than what legislation state lawmakers pass. The economic policies of the Obama Administration never get a nod from McCrory or the conservative spin machines in the state.

No, it’s all the state tax cuts they tell us that have caused the comeback. That and slashing unemployment benefits with less than one in five laid off workers actually receiving benefits these days.

They have to sell the anemic recovery in North Carolina. It’s what their campaigns and their ideology is based on, the incorrect assumption that tax windfalls for the wealthy and corporations always create an economic boom that provides benefits for everybody.

Economic studies show otherwise and so do the experiences of thousands of workers and families in North Carolina.

The cost of the tax cuts that McCrory promised would be revenue neutral are now creeping towards a billion dollars a year while we hear from legislative leaders that there’s not enough money to give teachers and state employees a raise or replace the cuts to public school classrooms or repair the holes torn in the safety net in the last few years.

The folks currently in charge know they have to convince us that their tax breaks for the well-to-do and the budget cuts for schools they required have created an economic miracle. Their political lives depend on it.

But the numbers tell a different story and so do the lives of people across North Carolina whose daily struggles belie any notion of a strong economic comeback.

Sell the sizzle, not the steak is an old advertising slogan. In North Carolina these days, all the Right can do is try to convince us there’s a sizzle at all. There’s no steak—or real economy recovery—to sell.

March 27, 2015 at 9:09 am
Frank Burns says:

In part we have been a victim of the lack of attention of the Obama administration to the economy. In their crowd, the word business is like a curse word. Fortunately NC is fighting the odds and crawling back despite the incompetence of the president and the Democrats in Congress. It's all about job creation, private sector job creation.