Indiana’s Economy Isn’t The Conservative Success Story Mike Pence Is Telling

[applegrove]

Indiana’s Economy Isn’t The Conservative Success Story Mike Pence Is Telling

BY BRYCE COVERT at Think Progress

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2016/07/21/3800586/mike-pence-indiana-economy/

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Unemployment rate

A better measure of the health of the job market might be the unemployment rate. And the rate has dropped under Pence’s tenure. But it was already on a downward trajectory when he took office: It had fallen from a recession peak of 10.9 percent to 8.4 percent in January 2013. Meanwhile, the state’s rate has mostly just followed the national average without performing significantly better. The state’s unemployment rate fell 3.4 percentage points between January 2013 and May 2016, about the same as the 3.3 percentage point drop across the country.

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Job growth

Indiana has added 147,800 jobs between when Pence took office in January 2013 until May 2016. But that performance isn’t particularly exceptional. According to FactCheck.org, 18 other states added more jobs than that during the same time. That includes many larger states, such as California, but also smaller ones like South Carolina.

Pence particularly touted a supposed drop in his state’s government employees, but that doesn’t seem to match the data, which shows the number of state employees has increased since 2013. Meanwhile, the job gains look less impressive without public sector jobs. When looking at just the private sector, Indiana’s job growth rate lagged behind 20 states and Washington, D.C., according to FactCheck.


Hunger

An economy’s health is about more than just who has a job and who doesn’t, however. It’s also about whether people are able to make ends meet and afford the basic necessities. The Department of Agriculture found that between 2012 and 2014, nearly 15 percent of Hoosiers experienced food insecurity at some point in a given year, meaning they can’t get adequate food due to lack of money. That represented a 1.4 percentage point increase over the previous three-year period at a time when the country on average was seeing a decline, as well as a 4.5 percentage point increase from a decade ago. Yet Pence decided to reinstate a work requirement for food stamps that kicked tens of thousands of people off the rolls in 2015.
Tax cuts
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