The Delaware Job Magnet has been weakening.
Mar 20th, 2008 by DavidAnderson
Our state has a relatively low unemployment rate. This is good news. The bad news is that according to the State’s economic report written in 2007, our job growth has been weakening consistently over the last decade and a half. We are in the bottom 1/3 of the nation in job creation. This is evidence that we are running on the fumes of the Republican reforms 30 years ago. It is time to refuel the tank. Here is the money quote from the report.
Looking at the Local Area Unemployment Statistics (LAUS), the resident employment data for the state, Delaware’s economy looks rather healthy. The annual average unemployment rate dropped from 4.0 percent in 2005 to 3.6 percent in 2006, and it has been even lower in 4 out of the first 5 months of 2007. All of these rates are substantially below the national unemployment rate. As measured by this data series, employment growth has averaged 1.89 percent per year in Delaware over the last 30 years. It was 1.88 percent in 2005, and 2.12 percent in 2006, and has only just fallen below that, averaging 1.67 percent through May, 2007. On the other hand, a look at job growth in the state yields a different picture. Delaware has added jobs at a 2.06 percent annual rate since 1976. It last surpassed that rate in 2004, and growth has steadily slowed since then, to a current 0.82 percent rate in 2007. Growth over the last 18 months has been positive, but only about half the long-term rate - not enough to be considered healthy.Delaware’s 1.18 percent job growth from 2005 to 2006 placed it just in front of the bottom one-third of states in this regard. There were 33 states with faster job growth, and 16 with slower job growth. With the exception of Louisiana and Mississippi, the two states hit hardest by Hurricane Katrina, all of the other states with slower job growth are contiguous and located in the northeastern part of the US. The states with job growth slower than Delaware’s were all of New England, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, then Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
Delawareans seem to be like the proverbial frog in gradually heating water. The Democrat regime is slowly strangling job creation. Will we feel the heat before we are doomed?
DA — Not only that, but since Mike Castle left office in 1992, median income nationwide has risen 17% faster than it has in Delaware.
I just don’t know how to get people to wake up.
They’re not ready for you, Dave…
Maybe we don’t have to convince the frogs that the water is about to boil, but rather we could show them the flies outside of the pot.
After all that is how the Democrats got us into the pot. They said look isn’t that some nice water, lets go for a swim. Then they keep mentioning how nice the water is, and ignore the fact that it is getting hotter and hotter. Many people won’t feel the heat, but if they are distracted by something else enough to jump out and get it, then they will realize how dangerously hot things were getting.
It is going to take some very fat flies to get the state of Delaware to jump out of the cook pot.
Well at the risk of being a broken record , I feel there are two things that are dooming us to this path of employment slow down .
First the size of our state leaves little or no room for companies to expand or for new companies to come to the state to invest on a large scale. Couple this with our state and counties attitude towards home building being our only industry , which I might add leads to even less space for creating new industries,plus drives up the cost of land to investors, and you get a slow down.
Now that we are seeing a drop off in housing we may not only experience a slow down in job growth , but we will likely start to see job loss and rising unemployment numbers.
This , I feel , is tied directly to the tunnel vision of our government in the way they have failed to attract new business to the state and focussed only on expanding developement.
This in my opinion is another case of all your eggs in one basket!
Excuse me - whose idea was it to expand the state’s economy on the credit card industry? Did you think that was going to last forever?
Depending on home sales revenue was Plan B, which worked for a while. But the housing industry only expands when homebuyers have jobs.
The failure to come up with a Plan C is a bipartisan failure.
Plan d Maufacturing base oops NAFTA WTO & other supposed free trade agreements really helped that out
noman - DEDO is not a bipartisan organization. The onus for economic development is on the administration. Now I know that it is written somewhere in unofficial Delaware law that this administration shall not be held accountable for anything, but come on.
You have a point about the onus being on Minner and DEDO… there have been lots of missed opportunities. But it’s not exactly like they have been fending off volleys of brilliant plans from the Party of Ideas. I mean, apart from busting unions and freezing the minimum wage to somehow usher in the new Golden Age.
Ideas from the Party of Ideas have not been welcome in this administration. And I think you know that.
But I’ll concede that the Party of Ideas hasn’t been up to the task in recent years here in Delaware.
I have been giving input in Dover. I think people are starting to listen, but there has to be some way to have a general wake up call. This report is not a partisan report, in fact it is to the administration from its experts.
I don’t think it was a bad idea to bring the banks in, the problem is that we were so flushed with success that we did not see a reason to keep up with new trends. That is what I mean by running off of the fumes. We need to keep the tank full or else one day we will be stranded.
Thanks for the input so far.