Economists tussle over Brown’s jobs record
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Whether former Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown’s record on jobs was great or miserable is a matter of interpretation, experts say.
In August, a quick analysis put together by Michael Bernick, a San Francisco employment lawyer who ran the state Employment Development Department under Democratic Gov. Gray Davis, touted Brown for creating the most jobs of any of the five last governors, based on percentage of national job growth.
The campaign of Brown’s Republican opponent, former EBay Chief Executive Meg Whitman, immediately took issue with that analysis, denouncing Bernick’s numbers as phony.
On Tuesday, Whitman’s campaign pointed to an analysis by S. Brock Blomberg, an economics professor at Claremont McKenna College, and Jesse Blumenthal, an undergraduate student and former staffer to U.S. House Republican leader John Boehner.
That Sept. 27 report found that three of California’s last five governors -– Brown, Davis and Arnold Schwarzenegger ‘left office with the economy worse off than when they started.’ Meanwhile, two others -– George Deukmejian and Pete Wilson -- ‘left office with a better record than when they began.’
The unemployment rate hit 11% in late 1982 just before Brown left office, a level that was only surpassed in March of this year, with 12.6% under Schwarzenegger, the report said.
‘The data doesn’t lie: Jerry Brown’s economic record very much resembles the pain and devastation Californians are suffering from today,’ said Whitman spokesman Tucker Bounds.
Economists who specialize in California disagree. ‘It’s how you look at the numbers,’ said Esmael Adibi of Chapman University in Orange.
A governor’s economic record is shaped by timing, whether his tenure is in sync with an improving business cycle or a declining one, he said.
‘When you look at a governor coming in the midst of a national recession and leaving when the economy is in recovery, he or she will look good,’ he said. ‘What a governor does to handle state spending and taxes and prioritizing goals can influence things, but they cannot stop the course of the business cycle.’
Brown can’t be blamed for unemployment created in the early 1980s by what at the time was the worst economic recession since World War II, said Stephen Levy, director of the Center for the Continuing Study of the California Economy in Palo Alto. High or low unemployment rates have little to do with an incumbent governor and have almost everything to do with the state of the national jobs picture, he said.
‘Governors don’t determine national unemployment rates,’ he said. “Wilson didn’t create the aerospace recession [in the early 1990s], and Schwarzenegger didn’t create the current recession. Our unemployment rates go up and down with the nation.’
-- Marc Lifsher in Sacramento
