I'm still shaking my head at the fact that Nathan Deal went there.
Yesterday, the governor of Georgia actually tried to explain away this state's continuing high unemployment rate as some sort of political conspiracy among statistical experts at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. By doing so, he made himself look desperate and the state look economically unsophisticated. It didn't help any that just a few minutes ago, the BLS released data showing that Georgia, once the leading light of the New South, now has the highest unemployment rate in the country, behind even Mississippi, the previous holder of that dubious title.
But let's set that aside for a moment. Merely for argument's sake, let's even grant that the recent uptick in Georgia's numbers are some temporary statistical aberration (although blaming it on a political conspiracy remains a bridge too far.) Even if we concede that, we still have a problem: Georgia's unemployment rate has been higher than the national average for 85 consecutive months now -- more than seven years -- and there's nothing in the data to suggest that's going to change anytime soon
As it happens, on the same day that Gov. Deal was making his rather odd pronouncement, the U.S. Census Bureau released its latest state-level data on income, poverty, health insurance and other indicators. After poring through it, the Census statisticians are apparently in on the anti-Deal conspiracy as well:
-- Back in 2002, Georgia had the nation's 20th highest poverty rate. By 2012, we had the nation's seventh-highest poverty rate. And last year, the new Census data tell us, we moved up to fifth. The only states with a higher poverty rate were Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and New Mexico. Great company to be keeping.
-- In 2001 and 2002, we ranked 21st in the nation in median household income. According to Census data released yesterday, we have fallen to 32nd. In 2001 and 2002, median household income in Georgia was $442 above the national median. In 2013, median household income was $4,421 BELOW the national average.
-- Adjusted for inflation, median household income in Georgia has now fallen by almost $8,000 since 2002. Eight thousand dollars in annual household income, gone missing. A lot of lives would be different if that trend had been avoided.
-- New state-level data has also been released on labor participation rates. One theory for Georgia's continuing high unemployment rate holds that it is a function of our high labor participation rate. Well, we do not have a high labor participation rate. We once did, but not any longer. It has dropped from 68.6 percent in 2003, when we ranked 16th, to 62.7 percent in 2013, which ranks us 33rd. (Among black Georgians in 2013, it is 65.4 percent; among white Georgians, it is 61.4 percent.)
All of these numbers -- and there are more -- tell us the same thing: What we've been doing is not working. And it has not been working for a long, long time. If we let ourselves get lost in a debate about the accuracy of one month's data from one agency, we allow ourselves to get distracted from the larger, more important picture of the long-term downward economic trend in Georgia relative to the rest of the country.
The reality of that trend is not really debatable. How to reverse it ought to be.
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