Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Fact Checking: Corbett's First Campaign Ad Is Out And George Orwell Would Be Proud

Governor Corbett's first campaign is out and copies President Reagan's famous Morning In America commercial.  The ad claims Corbett is putting Pennsylvania back to work and explicitly states that Corbett created 116,000 "private sector" jobs, since January 2011.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cByVyg6F2-E.

Fact checking this ad reveals that George Orwell may be alive and well.  To begin, apparently public school teachers, police, firefighters, gas drilling inspectors, mine inspectors, and many more public employees literally don't have jobs in Corbett's math.  That is convenient for him, since his attacks on education alone have destroyed 19,000 education jobs. 

If you are a teacher, police officer, firefighter or public employee, your job does not count in Corbett math. If you feel insulted, your best reply is voting in 2014.

Instead of using Corbett math, let's look at all jobs and official BLS data to see what is going on with job creation in Pennsylvania.  Doing so reveals that Pennsylvania has just 74,000 more jobs since January 2011 or in 29 months, even as the nation created about 5 million during that period.

Even more troubling is the truth that the longer Tom Corbett governs the worse Pennsylvania's jobs performance gets. Pennsylvania has lost jobs so far in 2013!  We actually had less jobs in May 2013 than in January 2013, despite the nation adding 175,000 jobs per month on average.

Indeed, Pennsylvania has created less than 5,000 jobs in the last 12 months.  Read and weep.

The facts show that Corbett's ad is false across the board.  In fact, under Corbett, Pennsylvania job creation has fallen from 7th in the nation during 2010 to now 46th at best over the last 12 months.

During the last 12 months, Pennsylvania has created less than a pathetic 5,000 jobs.  New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Ohio, Illinois, California, and even tiny Delaware have created more.  New York generated 95,000 jobs and California 260,000 jobs just from May 2012 to May 2013.

America is now creating 2 million jobs per year, or about 5 million total since Corbett became governor, but virtually none of them are in Corbett's economy.  Had Pennsylvania just gotten its share of the 5 million jobs created nationally since Corbett became governor, Pennsylvania would have added approximately 200,000 more jobs from January 2011 to today!

In summary, Pennsylvania had 5,666,000 jobs in January 2011, according to  revised BLS numbers.
http://bls.gov/news.release/archives/laus_03132012.htm 

As of May, 2013, Pennsylvania had 5,740,000 jobs or just 5,000 more than a year ago.
http://bls.gov/news.release/laus.t05.htm

Since Tom Corbett became Governor, Pennsylvania has among the poorest job creation records in the nation.  To make that ugly fact worse, the longer Tom Corbett governs, the worse Pennsylvania's jobs performance gets.  That is what happens when a Governor misses three transportation construction seasons, attacks education, blows an energy boom, and damages hospitals by refusing Medicaid expansion.


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