Governor Perdue’s administration has some strange standards for excellence. Going out to her email subscribers is this following article:
A decade of excellence
For the ninth time in 10 years North Carolina has been declared the state with the best climate for business by the highly regarded Site Selection magazine.
As part of the ranking, the magazine surveys corporate executives that help businesses select new locations. This year, those executives ranked the Tar Heel state as the top for ease of doing business. The magazine cited Gov. Bev Perdue’s efforts to recruit business and create jobs.
“People across the state and many businesses around the country know that I’ll take any call and go anywhere to bring a business to our state or expand a business or create a small business in North Carolina,” Gov. Perdue said in the magazine’s cover story. “We have been very aggressive, and that has paid off.”
I’ve written before about how receiving a high ranking from Site Selection is actually something only a corporatist could be proud of. But to continue to crow about a magazine ranking the state’s business climate so high, shouldn’t there be some results to back it up?
The actual results from this “decade of excellence” don’t look so great. Since 2000, the number of unemployed in NC has tripled, while the number of private sector workers shrank by 134,000. Similarly, NC’s private sector’s job performance during the last ten years was worse than all but 15 states.
It shows to me quite a disconnect that Perdue would so boldly boast of the state’s use of corporate welfare in light of its dismal job record.
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