I know Christmas Day has come and gone, but we ought to try to retain the holiday spirit as long as we can. That’s why I’m urging compassion for a downtrodden group that doesn’t often receive it: North Carolina’s liberal commentators.
Over the past four years, they’ve shouldered a heavy rhetorical burden. They’ve had to argue simultaneously that 1) President Obama’s economic policies are more successful than they appear, while 2) the Republican General Assembly’s economic policies are less successful than they appear.
I’d call this a Herculean task, but Hercules actually proved to be capable of killing hydras and cleaning stables. Theirs is more of a Sisyphean task. Sisyphus was the chap cursed to spend eternity in Hades pushing a boulder up a hill and then watching it roll back down.
Consider the pathetic spectacle just produced by the liberal editorial board of the Raleigh News & Observer. On December 23, it published a spirited defense of the Obama economy, citing standard measures such as job creation, unemployment rates, and growth in gross domestic product. “If this were the second year of a Mitt Romney presidency instead of the sixth year under President Obama,” the editorial argued, “there would be parades in the streets and praise for the president from some of Obama’s perennial critics.”
Two days later, on December 25, the N&O’s left-leaning editorialists took after Senate leader Phil Berger and other Republicans for trumpeting North Carolina’s recent economic performance. “In truth, while the unemployment rate has gone down and the state is adding jobs,” the editorial stated, “things are not what they seem.” It went on to credit any good news to the national economy (see above) while savaging North Carolina Republicans for trying to sell “the idea that things are great and people are better off” because “it’s not true where most North Carolinians live.”
Even one brimming with Yuletide generosity cannot reasonably assume that two completely different groups of individuals wrote and approved these N&O editorials. Somehow, the authors fooled themselves into believing that the two arguments were consistent — or, even more foolishly, believed that readers wouldn’t notice the contradictions. Perhaps they wouldn’t if the two pieces had run months or even weeks apart. But two days apart?
It would, of course, be conceivable for the national economy to be performing comparatively well while North Carolina lagged behind. The opposite is the case, however, according to the bulk of the statistics that the N&O cited in its initial editorial. So far in the Obama presidency, growth in jobs, incomes, and inflation-adjusted GDP has been significantly lower than during the comparable periods of the Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton presidencies. By historical standards, America is hardly experiencing a boom.
On the other hand, North Carolina is experiencing faster economic growth than the nation as a whole by nearly every measure. Since mid-2011, when the new GOP-led legislature’s first policies went into effect, North Carolina has seen its employment, real GDP, and per-capita income grow faster than the national average, while its unemployment rate has fallen more quickly (even if you account for workers dropping out of the labor force).
Do these measures capture everything we’d want to know about the economy? No. Like all statistics, they are at best imperfect reflections of reality. But their flaws aren’t just manifest in the North Carolina data. You can’t use official scoring to claim victory in one game and then deny the significance of official scoring in another — at least, not without earning ridicule.
For example, labor force participation is clearly lower in North Carolina than during past recoveries. But this is a national phenomenon, one that is particularly pronounced in the Southeast. As of November, 56.6 percent of North Carolinians over the age of 15 had jobs. Although hardly impressive, this employment-to-population ratio was still higher than the regional average (55.1 percent).
So as the rest of us continue to walk, however figuratively, through our Winter Wonderland, please try to remember the plight of those less fortunate than ourselves — North Carolina’s liberal elites, who remain trapped a different Wonderland of rabbit holes and jabberwocky.
John Hood is chairman of the John Locke Foundation.