On August 31, with job creation grinding to a complete halt,
U.S. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis was asked this question: “Why do
you think there have been so many jobs created in the last decade
in Texas?”
She laughed and said, “Come again.”
The questioner rephrased his query, adding a citation:
“The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas estimates about half of the
jobs created in the U.S. in the last decade have been created in
Texas. Why do you think that is?”
Replied Solis, “I haven’t done a lot of research in terms
of the economic growth in Texas.”
It appears that Labor Secretary Solis had no interest in
looking at how a state with 8 percent of the nation’s population
had created nearly half of the nation’s new jobs over the past 10
years.
That interchange occurred on the final day of a month in
which the United States experienced zero net job growth — the
first time that’s happened in the U.S. since 1945.
Extending her reply about not doing much research on job
growth in Texas, Solis added, “I do know that they have different,
ah, scales of pay.”
Everyone, of course, has “different scales of pay,” even
the old commies in Cuba.
“Um, it’s a right-to-work state, I know that,” continued
Solis, sounding more like a struggling student than a U.S. Labor
Secretary.
“We’re also aware that the oil industry has done very well
in this recession and those jobs continue to increase,” said Solis,
“and that’s another area that continues to grow during this
recession.”
There could have been good follow-up questions at that
point, but they weren’t asked: If right-to-work and oil are the
reasons for extraordinary job creation, why does the Obama
administration oppose both? With jobs so hard to come by, why is
the administration blocking off-shore drilling, and why is the
National Labor Relations Board doing everything it can to shut down
the new Boeing plant in right-to-work South Carolina?
“I would just say, on the whole, that’s my understanding,”
continued Solis, referring to oil and right-to-work.
She didn’t mention that Texas had enacted pro-business
tort reforms and regulatory rollbacks. She also didn’t mention that
Texas has no personal income tax and no corporate income
tax.
Solis concluded by saying she was invited to Texas some
time back by “advocates” and “stakeholder groups” and held a
“summit” in which they talked about things like “wage
theft.”
I don’t know what “wage theft” is, but I doubt if it’s as
important to job growth as a business-friendly regulatory approach,
tort reform, zero corporate income taxes, and zero personal income
taxes.
Criticizing Texas from a different angle, a
Bloomberg View editorial in July said, “Texas created
almost 250,000 jobs in the past two years, nearly as many as the
other 49 states combined,” but that “it would be a mistake to think
the state might serve as a national model.”
The problem was wages at the bottom: “In high-skill
professions, such as management and petroleum engineering, Texas
salaries often exceed national norms,” but “hourly workers have
earned 4 percent to 7 percent less than their counterparts
nationwide.”
The Bloomberg editorial left out that the cost of
living in Texas is 12 percent lower than the U.S average, so that a
Texas dishwasher, on average, can buy more pizzas
and movie tickets with a day’s work than his dishwashing
counterparts in the rest of America.
Bottom line, there’s no shortage of amateurish thought
when it comes to understanding basic economics and how jobs are
created and destroyed in the private sector of the U.S.
economy.
President Obama started this term in office with no
experience in the private sector, no experience in job creation,
and seemingly no understanding of how something like Obamacare
throws a wet blanket on private sector investment, economic growth,
small business expansion, entrepreneurial start-ups, and overall
job creation.
With that hole in his knowledge, especially on the top
issue of the day, it would have been wise to pick a Labor Secretary
who didn’t mirror his own inadequacies.
