An election year is upon us, and Georgia Democrats will try to make it a referendum not just on Gov. Nathan Deal but on the first decade-plus of Republican control.
Jason Carter, the state senator seeking to move into the same governor’s mansion where his grandfather once resided, touts the theme “Georgia at its best.” A (try not to laugh) nonpartisan group that attacks Republicans, and Deal in particular, at every turn calls itself Better Georgia. The implication is clear: Our state was peachy-keen back when Democrats were in charge, and will be again after a liberal restoration.
Fair enough; politics ain’t bean bag. But if we’re going to look at trends, let’s also look back to those yellow-dog days when Dems still ruled the roost.
Georgia’s per capita GDP, a key economic indicator, has indeed slid since peaking in 2005. It has also been falling behind relative to the national average. But the latter trend didn’t start when Gov. Sonny Perdue and Senate Republicans took over in 2003.
The federal Bureau of Economic Analysis tracks inflation-adjusted, per capita GDP in the states back to 1987. Georgia’s has been falling as a share of the U.S. average since 1997, resuming a trend that also ran from 1988 to 1990.
What happened in between? In 1990, Atlanta was awarded the Summer Olympics for 1996. The pre-Olympics construction boom helped the state’s economy boom for more than half a decade. But we didn’t sustain that momentum.
While Democrats haven’t yet explained how high they would raise taxes to fund their many ideas for the economy, they clearly suggest GOP tax cuts — for “the rich”! — have hurt rather than helped the state.
You may wonder when these tax cuts kicked in. So do I.
Again using inflation-adjusted figures, this time from the liberal-leaning Tax Policy Center, we can see state and local general revenues per capita continued their march upward through 2007. After that, the housing crash and resulting recession hit our particularly housing-dependent state — not just construction here, but lumber and floor coverings shipped elsewhere — particularly hard, taking state and local revenues with them.
Looking more deeply at the numbers, individual income tax per capita also peaked in 2007, while property taxes didn’t hit a new high until 2009. The average Georgian’s sales tax bill was highest in 2000, though the amount in 2006 and 2007 was just $1 a week lower. One supposes liberals think we should have raised taxes in the face of a deep recession.
State income and sales tax rates of course haven't changed since the GOP took over. Nor have there been a host of broad new tax exemptions. In fact, those are sore spots for conservatives who believe our Republican leaders were wrong to stand by while other states cut their tax rates and/or flattened their tax codes.
Are they right? Or does Georgia’s mediocre record of late, even if predates the GOP takeover, show something’s amiss with conservative governance?
Going back to per capita GDP, Georgia’s growth rate between 2002 and 2012 trailed that of every state but Michigan. (Let’s not debate today if Michigan Democrats demonstrated a fatal flaw in liberalism.) The average growth rate nationally for those years was 6.5 percent, and just 16 states managed double-digit growth. Which party controlled those highest-performing states?
The top state, North Dakota, was under total GOP control during that decade. The No. 2 state, Oregon, had a Democratic governor the entire time and a Democratic-led legislature 60 percent of the time.
Overall, those 16 states had Republican governors 56 percent of the time, Democrats 44 percent. They had Democratic-led legislatures exactly half the time, GOP-led 47 percent of the time, and split their chambers the other 3 percent. (One of the states, Nebraska, has a unicameral, nonpartisan legislature.) Not exactly an ideological body slam either way.
The future of our state is an absolutely appropriate topic for this year. But let’s be clear-eyed about the past.
