If It Sounds Too Good to Be True, It Probably Is
JobsOhio's claim it added nearly twice as many jobs as Ohio actually added is preposterous
In January 2011, Ohio’s private sector employed 4,292,100 Ohioans. Several months later, the Ohio General Assembly under Governor John Kasich’s direction created JobsOhio, a private economic development entity with little transparency and accountability essentially funded by liquor sales in Ohio. A decade later, Ohio’s private sector employs roughly 4,634,900 Ohioans. That means Ohio’s private sector today employs 342,800 more Ohioans than it did right before JobsOhio was created—or just 34,280 more jobs per year in a state of 11.7 million people.
As a reference point, in March 2000, Ohio’s private sector hit an all-time high when it employed 4,854,400 Ohioans, or approximately 219,500 more workers than it does today – twenty-one years later. Only two other states hold that pathetic distinction. Another vital point of reference is that in 2020 due to the global COVID pandemic, Ohio’s private sector lost 275,700 jobs.
Given these facts as laid out by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, it seems utterly preposterous that JobsOhio would claim that in its decade of picking winners and losers with more than a billion dollars, it is responsible for adding 603,630 private sector jobs in Ohio – or 173% more jobs than Ohio actually added. Yes, we understand that JobsOhio can claim that “other” jobs were lost as it defied basic economics and national trends and as it single-handedly prevented Ohio’s private sector from being a net jobs loser, but it is far more likely JobsOhio’s claims, well, don’t exactly pan out. As they say, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
After all, it gambled $70 million on a cracker plant promising “thousands of jobs” that isn’t getting built. One has to wonder how many more of those 603,630 claimed jobs never materialized. Given the hard facts above, it must be quite a few. It is time to end the bureaucrat enriching JobsOhio boondoggle before a billion more dollars gets thrown away without any objectively measurable benefit to Ohio taxpayers.