· October 29, 2012

Romney Campaign’s Assault on the Truth of the Auto Bailout – IO Answers

An op-ed piece co-authored by IO’s Janetta King and Tom Perriello of the Center for American Progress is running in the The Plain Dealer today. It clearly answers the question: “Who is right on the auto rescue debate raging in Ohio?” Poised on either side of the debate are President Barack Obama and Gov. Mitt Romney (Romney, aided and abetted by Ohio Gov. John Kasich). The answer to the question is: The President. From the op-ed:

Let’s start with jobs. In the spring, Kasich claimed the rescue was responsible for creating only 1,800 direct jobs. A few weeks ago, Kasich went even further — with the preposterous claim that Ohio is now actually losing auto industry jobs. In making these arguments, Kasich uses two statistical sleights of hand. To reach the 1,800 job number, the governor starts counting jobs in January 2011 when he took office — and inexplicably stops counting in September 2011, just nine months later. But 110,000 Ohioans were employed in the auto industry before the onset of the Great Recession in late 2008. By June 2009, 40,000 of those jobs were gone. Then the Obama auto rescue kicked in. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, nearly 12,500 Ohio auto employees went back to work in the 27 months between June 2009 and September 2011. In the six months that followed, an additional 5,000 jobs were created, bringing the total to over 17,300 since the auto rescue began. So how can Kasich claim Ohio is losing jobs? By (a) switching to statistics drawn from a different (and less comprehensive) Bureau of Labor Statistics data set, one in which only a sample of employers offer estimates of monthly employment across different industries; and (b) continuing to count only those jobs created between January and September of 2011. In other words, instead of using the bureau’s Quarterly Census — which surveys nearly all employers and reports actual job numbers — Kasich arbitrarily limits the time frame and uses statistics derived from monthly guesses by a relative handful of companies.

Put simply, Kasich is misleading Ohioans in order to support the Romney campaign’s deception that the auto rescue had little effect on jobs in our state. On the auto jobs numbers, Kasich is cherry picking the data and he’s using a timeframe that makes no practical sense in terms of judging the impact of the rescue. Another important point made in the op-ed today is that even auto executives from the time are saying that during the height of the financial crisis – when the ‘bailout’ was implemented – the normal, private sector credit alternatives (ie. banks) were unavailable to Chrysler and GM. Read the entire op-ed here.