JobsOhio Bureaucrats Claim Success Knowing We Have No Way to Verify Their Claims
Talk is cheap-JobsOhio's only real defense of Ohio's weak job growth is “Well it would have been worse without us!,” which is yet another unprovable claim and the safe harbor of charlatans and frauds.
I’m a brass tax kind of guy. When it comes to JobsOhio, that means a very, very simple and verifiable metric: how many private sector jobs has Ohio added since it began? Every month, the U.S. Bureau Labor Statistics (BLS) provides us with that data. JobsOhio came into existence on February 18, 2011, when Governor John Kasich signed House Bill 1 into law. Assuming it took JobsOhio six months to get set-up and moving, as of September 2011, Ohio’s private sector possessed 4,355,000 jobs. As of last month’s preliminary data, Ohio’s private sector now has 4,926,900 jobs. That means for the roughly fourteen years it has operated, Ohio’s private sector netted 571,900 jobs, or just 40,850 per year. Press releases and wild claims aside, that bottom line is all we truly have with which to judge JobsOhio’s success…well, that and the spectacular failures I previously covered.
In fourteen years, JobsOhio has helped Ohio net 571,900 jobs. As a point of reference, during the same span, Georgia, North Carolina (slightly less populous states), and Indiana (nearly five million fewer people) netted 1,047,100, 1,094,800, and 414,700 jobs, respectively. Thus, Ohio is far behind similarly-populous states and a bit ahead of far less populous states (in raw numbers only—Ohio is well behind Indiana after normalizing for population—see the bottom chart here). That seems like a record worth bragging about?
(To see private sector job totals in Ohio for a particular month, subtract the number in a particular box (i.e., September 2011) in the second table (government jobs) from the same box in the first table (non-farm jobs) to get total private sector jobs for that month)
Now, JobsOhio bureaucrats make lots of claims about number of deals, billions in new invested capital, billions in new annual payroll, average returns on its investments of less than eighteen months, and hundreds of millions in tax payments to Ohio. Maybe those claims are true. Unfortunately, because JobsOhio and its creators made its records exempt from transparency and accountability laws, we have no way to verify that what those bureaucrats claim is in fact true. One claim they make, however, that we can kind of gauge is net new jobs due to their work. JobsOhio claims that have brought 350,000 net new jobs to Ohio during their fourteen years.
So, let’s return to the one hard fact we know: Ohio has netted 571,900 jobs since JobsOhio started its work per the BLS. Based on JobsOhio’s claims of adding 350,000 jobs, that would mean JobsOhio is responsible for 61.2% of all jobs added in Ohio since September 1, 2011. Do you think that is possibly true? Think about all of the companies in Ohio that existed BEFORE September 1, 2011, and those created since that have had nothing to do with JobsOhio (i.e, the vast, vast majority). The growth of those companies wouldn’t count in JobsOhio’s 61.4% claim, so JobsOhio wants us to believe that the job growth at the thousands of companies that haven’t received a penny from JobsOhio accounted for just 38.8% of all net jobs added in the last fourteen years. For that amount of time, JobsOhio's totals come to just 25,000 net jobs per year in a state of 11.8 million people with a private sector of 4.925 million workers. So, the 25,000 net jobs per year average equates to 5% of Ohio’s private sector per year. Sorry if I’m not bowled over that spending billions results in an annual uptick of 5% of private sector growth.
One of its unverifiable claims is that is had put together 4,500 successful deals. Let’s assume that number is true, so that 4,500 deals led to 350,000 net jobs added. That would work out to just 77.8 jobs per deal, or a measly 5.6 net jobs per year per deal. Do you remember all of the front page news items and photos showing ribbon cuttings at such small deals? I don’t either. In contrast, we have constantly been fed news about the “big deals” that would generate thousands of jobs like the five projects I highlighted in my last piece—the cracker plant in Belmont County, the Peloton plant in Wood County, the Intel plant in Licking County, the LG Energy Solutions-Honda plant in Fayette County, and the Anduril Arsenal-1 plant in Pickaway County. Combined, those five “big deals” have led to about 400 permanent, non-construction jobs in Ohio so far. That is it.
Did we really make a quasi-government entity immune from transparency and accountability laws to replace the work done at the Ohio Department of Development (ODD) for such thin gruel? Is there any proof that ODD couldn’t have gotten similarly unimpressive results without spending so much money bribing companies to come here and without paying so many bureaucrats huge salaries (see below)? Look at the chart above again—Ohio’s best job growth ever occurred back in the 1990s under Governor George Voinovich when our private sector netted 610,000 jobs in eight years with ODD doing the economic development work for Ohio. Ohio had 700,000 fewer residents back then and a private sector of 4.088 million workers, so Voinovich’s job growth as a percentage of population and the private sector was more impressive.
Keep in mind, according to the Small Business Administration (SBA), 99.6% of Ohio businesses are small businesses (under 500 employees) covering roughly 2.2 million Ohio workers (43.8% of all workers). JobsOhio has little to do with most of those entities, yet those entities netted 117,778 jobs from March 2022 to March 2023. The SBA claims from March 2023 to March 2024, small businesses netted another 75,391 jobs. In those two years, small businesses added nearly 200,000 jobs, which means along with JobsOhio’s 350,000 jobs, nearly all of the net new jobs since 2011 are accounted for, which is absurd. It appears everyone is claiming responsibility for creating Ohio’s 570,100 net new jobs since 2011.
More critically, again using the only hard numbers we can verify (i.e., net jobs), Ohio’s private sector hasn’t gotten stronger the longer JobsOhio had operated; rather, it has gotten weaker. As I previously wrote:
If JobsOhio was actually working, Ohio should have seen stronger job growth the longer it did its work and should have had one of the top recoveries from the global pandemic. Instead, the private sector job totals declined over the years and Ohio’s recovery from the pandemic is in the bottom third of all states. Specifically, excluding the 2021 recovery of jobs shuttered due to the severe pandemic shutdown issued by DeWine, Ohio’s job growth has not matched the single year growth (93,400 jobs) added in 2011 when JobOhio was created. In the eight years after its launch, Ohio added a meager average of just 54,613 jobs a year. After recovering the 250,600 jobs lost from the pandemic shutdown, Ohio has only netted 112,300 private sector jobs in four-and-a-half years, or just 24,956 jobs per year on average.
A net of 112,300 jobs since 2019!!!!! I’d like to hear JobsOhio bureaucrats explain those unequivocally negative data points: (1) since 2011, Ohio’s job growth has gotten weaker and (2) since the pandemic, Ohio’s job growth is among the bottom third in America. Yet, not one JobsOhio bureaucrat has the guts to go on the record to explicitly explain why their work has resulted in (1) and (2) and has not resulted in Ohio’s private sector looking more like Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Texas, and Utah—meaning, job growth gets stronger each passing year rather than weaker. According to the Ohio Department of Jobs and Family Services’s “Ohio Job Outlook Employment Projections 2020-2030,” "Overall, the Ohio economy is expected to add 257,000 additional jobs between 2020 and 2030.” Does anyone think adding 257,000 jobs over a decade in a state with 11.8 million people and a private sector of 4.925 million workers is successful? For the record, at 112,300 jobs so far, we won’t even reach that fairly low projection for a state as big as Ohio.
WHAT THE HELL DO YOU SAY TO THAT JOBSOHIO??????? Stop throwing claims at me that I cannot verify because you hide behind your exemption from transparency and accountability laws. Does JobsOhio have literally nothing to say about why Ohio’s private sector lags behind so many other states? Has it any ideas on how to make Ohio more economically competitive? The brass tax figures indicate it is a total failure. Period. End of Story.
As the Ohio Capital Journal (OCJ) reported re JobsOhio’s ballooning payroll, "Over the same period [2011-2021], the JobsOhio payroll increased from $2.5 million to $19.1 million — more than sevenfold — and its 106 employees in 2021 pulled down an average compensation package worth $180,000. By 2023, the agency was paying $26.3 million in salaries and benefits, according to its annual report.” Must be nice to work for a quasi-government entity exempt from transparency and accountability laws and to get paid on average $180,000 per year. OCJ also noted that "Gov. Mike DeWine is touting enormous tax breaks to energy-guzzling data centers even after a Microsoft executive told the New York Times, 'I can’t think of a site selection or placement decision that was decided on a set of tax incentives.' Those comments fit with research indicating that in at least 75% of cases, tax incentives don’t make the difference as businesses decide where to locate.” Whether tax breaks make a difference or not, Ohioans should be getting far more than 25,000 net jobs per year and a private sector getting weaker, not stronger, over fourteen years, as well as one of America’s weakest recoveries from the pandemic.
Talk is cheap, my readers. Spin aside, Ohio’s private sector has been among America’s weakest throughout JobsOhio’s existence and getting weaker. As I’ve stated before, their only real defense of that weakness is “Well, it would have been worse without us!,” which is yet another unprovable claim and the safe harbor of charlatans and frauds.
P.S. For more on why nationalizing Intel is a terrible idea, see the Wall Street Journal article above. Also, don’t expect Taiwan-based TSMC and the U.S. companies to whom it provides semiconductors (i.e., Apple, Nvidia, etc.) to sit by idly while its chief competitor Intel gets special treatment by Trump. TSMC’s pledged $165 billion investment in America far outstrips Intel’s planned $100 billion investments. Those investments could be put in play if Trump does nationalize Intel. After all, why should TSMC make such a huge investment in America if America is going to supercharge its prime competitor with taxpayer funds like China does? What comes after Trump’s nationialization of Intel—forcing companies to buy its products and use its facilities? Again, what Trump does today will be put on sterioids by the Left when it gets the reins of the federal govenrment again, which it will eventually.
