Romney's Massachusetts Job Record

On the October 28, 2012 This Week with George Stephanopoulos show, Newt Gingrich said – Barack Obama would trade the job creation of Romney as Governor in a heartbeat….you look at Romney’s record and it makes Obama’s record look pretty thin.    

Per Wikipedia when Romney took office in 2003 the nation as a whole was still suffering the effects of a recession. Massachusetts (MA) was losing manufacturing jobs and with an economy heavily dependent on the technology sector it had been badly shaken by the dot-com bubble collapse. When the national economy eventually began to improve, the state lagged behind the rest of the nation in job growth and employment; growth rose at a rate of 1.5% compared to the national average of 5.3%. Over the course of Romney’s term MA was 47th of the 50 states in new job creation (supports Obama’s October 27 comment). However, the annual rate of job growth was improving by his last year in office, moving MA up to 28^th place. The improved growth was in part because of the statewide health care reforms that were signed into law in April 2006 – it created a 7.6% increase in job growth in healthcare and social assistance positions. Romney also personally intervened to help attract to the state, or maintain within the state, large employers, such as Bristol-Myers Squibb and Procter & Gamble’s Gillette. Some business leaders said Romney’s policies that increased fees and corporate tax revenue drove up business costs and weakened job growth (an argument Romney uses today).  

On average unemployment rates were slightly worse in the rest of the nation than in MA. Unemployment in MA rose during Romney’s first year from a rate of 5.6% in January 2003 to a peak of 6.0% in mid 2003. It then steadily declined over the remainder of his term, ending at 4.6% in January 2007 for a net improvement in unemployment of 1.0%. However, much of the improvement reflected was in the loss of working-age adults from the labor force, many of them having left MA for other states - MA experienced one of the highest levels of net out-migration of any state during Romney's term. This exiting of the labor force brought MA from the nation’s 29th in highest unemployment to 18th by the end of Romney’s term. (People dropping out of the working force is an excuse today’s Republicans argue about the national unemployment rate dropping – talking out of both sides of their mouths seems to be a standard practice.)

Let’s see MA’s job growth increased because of health care and Romney argues the opposite today. Unemployment dropped only 1% during Romney’s governorship because of his policies. The unemployment rate in February 2009 was 8.3%, in September 2012 it was 7.8%, only a .5% drop but the unemployment rate stalled because the Republicans in the legislature killed every bill that would have improved the situation. I don’t think Romney’s record was so good.