Remember a couple of years ago, when North Carolina’s unemployment rate was falling rapidly? Critics of the Republican-led legislature and Gov. Pat McCrory denied that the state’s labor market was truly getting better. Instead, they said, discouraged workers were simply dropping out of the workforce, which had the artificial effect of making North Carolina’s unemployment rate look better.

This was never a particularly good argument, either when made by critics of Republicans in North Carolina or critics of Democrats in Washington. As I pointed out at the time, no guesswork is needed here. There are good measures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics that take discouraged workers and other workforce dropouts into account.

Now that North Carolina’s “headline” unemployment statistic, the U-3 rate, has ticked up for several months, the same Democratic politicians and liberal activists who once treated the statistic as misleading are now citing it authoritatively as evidence that conservative fiscal and regulatory policies are hurting North Carolina’s economy. Thus you can add inconsistency to the list of errors they are committing in their efforts to dismiss and disparage the governor and legislature.

I’ve committed my own share of errors over the years, typically when trying to tackle a challenging subject on a short deadline. But I believe that at least I’ve been consistent (yes, some of my email correspondents would say, “consistently wrong.”) In the interest of consistency, then, let’s take a look at broader measures to see how North Carolina’s economy is really doing.

First, the broadest measure of the labor market is called the U-6 rate. It includes not just those out of work who are actively looking for jobs, but also discouraged workers, those who have stopped look for work for other reasons (such as going back to school or relocating to another state), and those who are working part-time but would rather be working full-time (often called the “underemployed.”)

This rate is computed for every state on an annualized basis, updated every quarter. As of June 2015, North Carolina’s U-6 rate was 11.6 percent, a bit higher than the national rate of 11.3 percent but well below the rates of nearby states such as Georgia (12.5 percent), South Carolina (12.8 percent), and Florida (12.3 percent). Virginia’s 10 percent rate is much better, with Tennessee’s 11.9 percent only a bit higher than ours.

Moreover, over the past two years North Carolina’s U-6 rate has fallen by 3.2 percentage points. Only two other states in the nation (Nevada and Colorado) experienced larger labor-market improvements during the period. Even if we confine the trend to just one year, North Carolina’s 1.4-point decline is higher than the regional average.

Another broad measure available on a timely basis is called the Coincident Index. Computed by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, it combines the U-3 unemployment rate, employment, wages, and hours worked. When the values for June 2015 came out, I looked at the year-to-year growth in each state’s index.

North Carolina’s growth rate of 4.6 percent exceeded the national and regional averages, and ranked our state 13th overall. What kept us out of the top 10 was our relatively weak wage growth, which is indeed a problem that politicians and analysts of both parties should take seriously. (By the way, oil-producing states such as Alaska and North Dakota are no longer in that top 10, which just goes to show that diversification is as good a thing for state economies as it is for stock portfolios.)

What role state tax cuts and regulatory reforms have played in North Carolina’s recent economic performance is certainly debatable. Based on the preponderance of research on the topic, I’m persuaded that they’re playing a positive role. Perhaps you disagree.

It is contrary to the facts, however, to allege that North Carolina’s labor market is performing poorly. Upticks in the unemployment rate really do appear to be primarily related to folks reentering the market, not to job losses. And on measures such as underemployment and the employment-to-population ratio, North Carolina’s compares favorably with our regional competitors.

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Hood is chairman of the John Locke Foundation. Follow him @JohnHoodNC.