Ohio Sucks!
March 3, 2008
That is according to the mainstream media. Over the past week or so we have been bombarded by scores of news reports about how awful things are in Ohio. If you believe the reports Ohio is a nightmare. Last night 60 Minutes dedicated a full segment to the woes of the apocalyptic state of Ohio. The hard-hitting news program assembled a cross section of Ohio residents and asked them to describe the state of the state. To start these people are all unemployed or at the very least under employed making as little as a third of what they made in the 90s. All the high paying, manual labor jobs, have moved to China or Mexico over the years. It just isn’t fair. 100% of the assembled residents had not been on a vacation in the past five years! Some of them are driving used cars with more than 175,000 miles on them. Most didn’t have health insurance, and if they did, they couldn’t afford the deductibles. Based on the descriptions most Ohio residents are homeless, jobless, insuranceless ~ I suspect that most don’t have TIVO. What a nightmare!
As I watched the 60 Minutes segment I waited for the punchline, “The problems in Ohio started ten years ago when the governor erected a 20′ high wall around the state to keep the miserable people of Ohio from leaving.” Of course a wall was never built, surely things weren’t as bad as the mainstream media would suggest. Wouldn’t people leave if there were no jobs, no hope. Right?
I decided to take a look at immigration, unemployment and gross domestic product statistics comparing Ohio to the rest of the country and for fun the rest of the world. The first statistic were the immigration numbers. You would assume people would be fleeing the state in droves, but just the opposite is true. From 2000 to 2007 almost 100,000 foreign born immigrants moved to the state. By 2050 more than two million foreign born immigrants will reside in the state according to FAIR. Why are people moving TO Ohio?
Perhaps the immigrants were THE problem, taking jobs from salt of the earth Ohio residents so I looked at the unemployment numbers. Ohio has an unemployment rate of 5.5%, a rate considered in the range of full employment. Ohio’s unemployment rate is nearly twice as good as the entire European Union (Europe is a great place right?). Ohio has lower unemployment than countries like Australia, Belgium, Canada, Finland, Germany, France and China. Maybe Ohio’s problem is their economy is too good? Lower unemployment increases labor costs for companies.
I decided to check out the size of Ohio’s GDP. Turns out Ohio’s GDP was $461 billion dollars in 2006 ranking it 7th in the nation. If Ohio was its own country the state would rank 17th in the world ahead of countries like Belgium, Sweden, Saudi Arabia, Poland, Norway, Denmark and more than 100 other countries. I thought Belgium was a nice place, but with higher unemployment and lower GDP than Ohio we better send in the U.N.
UPDATE: This morning I just heard that Ohio placed FIRST among states for Corporate Moves (Texas is 5th). Why are companies moving to Ohio? Haven’t they heard? Ohio Sucks!
In this context I thought Michelle Obama’s statements while she was visiting Ohio were compelling. Byron York reported on the visit and I can’t help but simple reprint his article here without comment:
Michelle Obama: “Don’t Go Into Corporate America” [Byron York]
I have a new story today about Michelle Obama’s visit to Zanesville, Ohio, where she met with a group of women at a local day care center. According to the U.S. Census, Muskingum County, where Zanesville is located, had a median household income of $37,192 in 2004, below both the Ohio and national averages. Just 12.2 percent of adults in the county have a bachelor’s degree or higher, also well below the state and national averages. About 20 percent don’t have a high school degree. Nevertheless, Mrs. Obama urged them to foreswear lucrative professions like corporate law or hedge fund management and go into the helping industry, even if the sacrifice is great:
As she has many times in the past, Mrs. Obama complains about the lasting burden of student loans dating from her days at Princeton and Harvard Law School. She talks about people who end up taking years and years, until middle age, to pay off their debts. “The salaries don’t keep up with the cost of paying off the debt, so you’re in your 40s, still paying off your debt at a time when you have to save for your kids,” she says.
“Barack and I were in that position,” she continues. “The only reason we’re not in that position is that Barack wrote two best-selling books… It was like Jack and his magic beans. But up until a few years ago, we were struggling to figure out how we would save for our kids.” A former attorney with the white-shoe Chicago firm of Sidley & Austin, Obama explains that she and her husband made the choice to give up lucrative jobs in favor of community service. “We left corporate America, which is a lot of what we’re asking young people to do,” she tells the women. “Don’t go into corporate America. You know, become teachers. Work for the community. Be social workers. Be a nurse. Those are the careers that we need, and we’re encouraging our young people to do that. But if you make that choice, as we did, to move out of the money-making industry into the helping industry, then your salaries respond.” Faced with that reality, she adds, “many of our bright stars are going into corporate law or hedge-fund management.”
What she doesn’t mention is that the helping industry has treated her pretty well. In 2006, the Chicago Tribune reported that Mrs. Obama’s compensation at the University of Chicago Hospital, where she is a vice president for community affairs, jumped from $121,910 in 2004, just before her husband was elected to the Senate, to $316,962 in 2005, just after he took office. And that does not count the money Mrs. Obama receives from serving on corporate boards. She would have been O.K. even without Jack’s magic beans.
Mrs. Obama also bemoaned the amount of money she has to spend — nearly one-third of the median household income in Zanesville — on piano, dance, and other lessons for her two children. But she was grateful for the concern her husband’s supporters have shown for her. “Everywhere I go, no matter what, the women in the audience, their first question for me is, ‘How on earth are you managing it, how are you keeping it all together?’” she told the women.
