You have to learn to take the crunchy with the smooth, I suppose.
—Billy Bragg
So I've got an apology for all of you. I've been meaning to write a post of the "5000 jobs" claim after our discussion of the matter in a thread from last month, but I never got around to it. Would you believe that I haven't had time to write because I've got nine jobs -- three of them in California, and one in Virginia? I've been running around like a crazy man!
Wait, you don't believe that? You mean that you don't count jobs that no longer exist when figuring out how many jobs you've got? Damn. I must just be a lazy blogger.
Ultimately, the Courant story on Malloy and jobs is pretty thick with figures, so while I'll have a post with fun graphs later (I really was working on this story myself), I think there's more to be added by putting the story in context.
Claiming to create 5,000 jobs is meant to do something very specific. The economy nationwide went to hell over the last couple of years, and the economy in Connecticut wasn't going great gangbusters before that, either. To say that one has a record that generated X jobs is meant to give the reader or viewer the impression that despite the collapse of the economy, one place still managed to come out ahead. But, of course, that figure only really stands if you pretend that the entire last decade didn't occur. That is to say, it's a lot of crap.
Now, there's an interesting discussion to be had that we probably won't have, because we're stuck here arguing over what is the nature of reality and the basic foundation of mathematics. Says Malloy:
"We brought 5,000 new jobs to the city of Stamford, and actually we probably brought substantially more than that,'' Malloy said last week during a meeting with The Courant's editorial board. "I rounded. Two employers, RBS and UBS, account for probably 90 percent of the 5,000. That wouldn't include all of the additional retail development, all of the other companies, such as Purdue Pharma, which we brought to Stamford. So, yeah, new jobs.''
First, the "So, yeah, new jobs" line is brilliantly awesome, and it should go immediately onto one of the campaigns' promotional materials. But more seriously, Stamford engaged in an experiment to create jobs by luring large corporations to the city, and that strategy is something that, after (at least) 15 years in effect, we can evaluate. The measurements from the CT Department of Labor (from 1995 to 2008 -- I don't have the 2009 stats that the Courant got) show that while financial and insurance industry jobs went from 9200 to a peak of 14650 in 2005 (as per Malloy's claims), manufacturing plummeted from 13000 to 4400 jobs, retail and wholesale trade dropped from a peak of over 15000 to under 9000 -- and, between 2005 and 2008, 1200 of those financial services jobs disappeared, too.
If I were Dan Malloy, I wouldn't be too alarmed by all of this. I mean, you try things, sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they have unfortunate side effects that are worse than the problems they were supposed to solve. When politicians change course in response to conditions on the ground, they are to be commended. (Obama and offshore drilling, for one; Reagan giving up on the Heritage-styled tax cuts when it turned out the Laffer curve theories were baloney is another one from recent history.)
If the big-business tax subsidy model yielded long-term results, then I'd be all for it. But, as progressive economists have argued since the dawn of time (probably since the 80s), it creates a downward spiral where communities give away the store without having dependable partners to power their economies. How can a city gain 10% in population and lose 30% of its retail jobs? The evidence is that this particular economic model did not work in Stamford, and if Dan Malloy could acknowledge that, it might well be that his insights into what would work might carry the weight of earned wisdom.
But (and this is what that Billy Bragg quote is about), that's an opportunity that he and his campaign pass up all the time. They claim success without acknowledging the costs and the sacrifices. Some examples that I have been quiet about on the FP here include:
- Promoting improvements in the Stamford public schools, but disclaiming the teachers on the payroll when he wanted to talk about shrinking the size of government
- Criticizing the state's bond rating collapse and touting Stamford's relatively low tax rate, when compromises made in the fund balance in Malloy's last year caused Stamford to be downgraded as well
- Making twelve kinds of racket about paid sick days being "the right thing to do" and a moral imperative, when a significant number of Stamford city employees didn't enjoy this benefit
- Criticizing Rell's proposal to use early retirement incentives for budget savings when Malloy offered early retirement to city employees at least three times that I could find – and claiming to do it to save money in the budget
This stuff is not totally unreasonable, but if you want credit for making tough decisions, you've got to own up to the unhappy consequences. You can be a good person with good judgement that just can't read the future on a few occasions, and on balance it won't tarnish your reputation. Blumenthal screws up every once and a while, but has earned people's trust from a long relationship. But for Christ's sake, he knows better than to launch an attack on Rob Simmons' military service! By making these kinds of claims, and launching attacks on policy matters he has substantially agreed with in the past, it seems like Malloy doesn't have the critical perspective on his service as Mayor that most people would call "experience." He did his time up on the 10th Floor, but instead of learning to adapt, grow, and improve, he learned to obfuscate, pivot, and attack.
The ad is misleading (as are the other references to "5000 jobs created," such as the one appearing on the left side of this page), and should be taken down. If anyone really wants to argue about that, well, that's what blogs are for I suppose, and comments are open. But insofar as campaigns operate on a higher plane than raw street-fighting, the moment that we should be looking for is for Malloy to acknowledge what went wrong (in the campaign and in his hometown), and tell us how he intends to do better in the future. |
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