Kasich/JobsOhio Continue To Conflate Job “Commitments” With Actual Jobs

By all real measures used by actual economists, Ohio’s job growth stalled two years ago – right about the time that JobOhio, Kasich’s non-transparent and unconstitutional money hole, started handling economic development for the state.

While the U.S. has regained all of the jobs lost during the Great Recession, economists calculate that Ohio is still down 139,900 jobs from our pre-recession peak.   Not surprising since Ohio’s job growth has lagged the U.S. average for almost 20 months in a row.

But Kasich isn’t going to let facts get in the way of him continuing to push his Ohio Miracle story.   Especially not when he has out-of-context quotes from local business magazines on his side.

Here’s what he posted on his Facebook page earlier today:

The first obvious problem with this sentence is that it tells us absolutely nothing.   “In recent memory” is a phrase writers use when they are too lazy to actually research the facts of a story and instead opt to just believe and republish some numbers the guy from JobsOhio told him/her during a press conference.   This is a practice that would never actually pass muster anywhere else except a business journal (or maybe Fox News).

The quote was taken from  titled  “JobsOhio: State economy is picking up”, which turns out to be nothing more than a rah-rah-go-team puff piece full of Kasich-friendly messaging from JobsOhio employees.    The “jobs announcements” in question turn out to be new, recently announced projects with Prologis and Fuyao Glass.   If implemented, the companies claim these projects would create about 800 jobs each.    The key phrase here is, of course, “if implemented.”

Unlike the author of this article, my memory goes back a little further.

Specifically, I remember some other large “jobs announcements” from the Kasich administration like JP Morgan Chase, for example.   Kasich appeared at the company’s campus to announce 500 new job commitments.  One year later, JP Morgan Chase had actually fired nearly 900 people.  He also gave big incentives to Diebold and American Greetings with the promise of new jobs.   At least 1,100 jobs were lost at Diebold and over .

Job commitments are not Jobs.  Job announcements are not Jobs.

Jobs are jobs.

Right now  in job growth nationally and we’ve had  of job growth below the national average.  The jobs we have recovered than the ones we lost.  And we found out this morning that last week, despite a decrease nationally.  For the week ending July 5th, Ohio ranked third in the nation for new initial unemployment claims.

Kasich and JobsOhio’s leaders can travel the state doing interviews, telling stories, holding press conferences and making new job announcements.

But the numbers don’t lie:  Kasich and the boys at JobsOhio are not living up to their promises, and it’s Ohio’s workers who are suffering as a result.