John Hood offers the following observations about the latest employment numbers for North Carolina and the nation as a whole:
The new Bureau of Labor Statistics data are out for North Carolina and the rest of the nation, and they appear to be entirely consistent with recent trends. That is, North Carolina had one of the nation’s largest declines in unemployment over the past year and one of the nation’s largest gains in employment, a net +114,500 jobs.
North Carolina added 114,500 net new jobs in 2014, an employment growth rate of 2.8 percent. The national average was 2.2 percent. The Southeast average was 1.8 percent. If NC had simply matched the regional average in job growth over the past year, about 40,000 fewer North Carolinians would have jobs right now.
Given that only a few months ago some left-leaning economists were predicting job gains about half that amount (114,500), I suspect they’ll be scrambling to salvage their arguments from the dustbin of (recent) history.
