Tuesday, January 23, 2018
The decline they predicted
Since I moved to Minneapolis, I have read the dire warnings of Republicans that "socialist, job-killing" policies of this area--such as embracing Obamacare and raising the minimum wage--will lead to unemployment. Nonetheless, we trudged ahead towards socialism.
And look what happened! Now we have an unemployment rate of 2.4%, and they can't find people to hire for the Super Bowl. Admittedly, unemployment is down all over (which may be in part a function of the immigration actions taken by the Trump administration), but we still are doing better than our neighbor Wisconsin, which took the opposite tack from Minnesota under Governor Scott Walker. And what about those "super pro-business" states where the politicians do whatever the Koch Brothers like? Well... Mississippi has a 4.9% unemployment rate, Alabama, Arkansas, South Carolina, and Kansas are at about a 3.6-3.9% rate, and Texas sits at 3.9%.
The economy has been growing, but mostly it is growing in blue counties in states which have embraced policies opposite to those that Republicans have promoted, and "counties that voted for Hillary Clinton against Trump in 2016 accounted
for nearly three-fourths of the nation's increased economic output and
almost two-thirds of its new jobs in the years leading up to his
election," according to a study by the Brookings Institution, as reported by CNN.
But, employed or not, Minnesotans are kinda down about that football game on Sunday...
