"The latest data come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It has just released preliminary job counts and unemployment statistics for December 2014 as well as revised statistics for prior months. Over the past year, North Carolina added about 114,500 net new jobs, an annual growth rate of 2.8 percent. That was significantly above annual rates of job creation for the nation as a whole (2.2 percent) and the Southeast as a whole (1.8 percent).
It’s more informative to look at these trends over a longer period of time. Consider the various rounds of state budgets, tax cuts and regulatory reforms that the North Carolina legislature has enacted since the 2010 election. The first ones went into effect in mid-2011. Since that time, the North Carolina economy has added some 300,000 new jobs, which represented an increase of 7.7 percent over those three and a half years. The nation’s growth rate during that period was 6.5 percent. The Southeast’s job-creation rate was still lower than that, at 5.5 percent."
So as North Carolina leads the nation in economic recovery while Greensboro continues to have the highest unemployment in the state, a poverty rate of 21% and is rated the second hungriest city in the nation, what does that say about Greensboro's leaders?
These are hard times for Greensboro-- we need leaders who know how to make the best of the resources we have available and create the largest opportunities for the largest numbers of people possible. Sadly, our leadership has a long and storied history of dragging down North Carolina as a whole.
