Tom Pauken,Floyd Reports
In a print ad published in 41 newspapers across the state of Texas on October 5th,the so-called Back to Basics political action committee (PAC) claims that “the Texas unemployment rate has even grown more than the nation’s as a whole.” This is the same charge that Democratic State Representative Jim Dunnam made at a hearing on September 27,2010,when I testified as Chairman of the Texas Workforce Commission before the House Select Committee on Federal Economic Stabilization Funding. I explained then to Chairman Dunnam that he was making a faulty comparison and that,in point of fact,the Texas economy was faring better than any other large labor market state and the nation at large.
Had the anti-Perry PAC bothered to consult with the Texas Workforce Commission,it would have discovered that the data being used by Representative Dunnam – which it parrots in order to make the Texas economy look worse than the national economy – made for a misleading and disingenuous comparison. To use an analogy,what Representative Dunnam and the Back to Basics PAC are attempting to do is to compare apples and oranges. They take data from a period from February 2009 through August 2010,which purports to show that the Texas unemployment rate grew faster than the national rate (even though the Texas unemployment rate was—and remains—much lower than the national unemployment percentage).
At the hearing chaired by Representative Dunnam,the Director of our Labor Market and Career Information (LMCI) division and I both pointed out that this was a distorted comparison.