Which Calif. governor has had the best job growth? ANS

This is an article about a scientific study on job growth under various California Governors.  Note that though Meg Whitman claims that 400,000 jobs were lost during Jerry Brown's tenure, the actual figures say 2 million jobs were gained.  Is lying a family value?
Find it here:  http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010/aug/25/which-calif-governor-has-had-best-job-growth/
--Kim

Which Calif. governor has had the best job growth?

One hint: He's never been known as Der Gubernator

By Dean Calbreath, UNION-TRIBUNE

Wednesday, August 25, 2010 at 6:41 p.m.
 

/ AP

FILE - In this Friday, Oct. 25, 1974 picture, Jerry Brown , Jr., the Democratic candidate for governor, shakes hands during a luncheon sponsored by the Watts Labor Community Action Committee where he spoke. Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown want the same job, but that's where the similarities end for the two candidates running for California governor. (AP Photo, File)

Which of California's five recent governors had the best job growth during his tenure in office? And which had the worst?

Michael Bernick, an employment specialist affiliated with Santa Monica's Milken Institute, has come up with one method of figuring that out - and the answer has already generated a little dustup on the campaign trail.

Bernick added up the number of jobs that were added during each tenure and then compared California's growth rate to the nation's growth rate. Since California represents around 11 percent of the nation's population, any number above 11 percent means we're outpacing the rest of the country.

It's probably no great surprise that the state's worst growth came under the current governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger , which arguably had much less to do with his policies than with the state's close ties to the real estate bubble and burst.

Since Schwarzenegger was elected through a recall election in October 2003, the state has lost 561,000 jobs, even though the nation added 153,000. Even though all four of his predecessors dealt with recessions, Schwarzenegger was the only governor to come to the end of his term with fewer jobs than in the beginning (unless there's some dramatic burst in employment between now and the inauguration of the next governor).

But which governor oversaw the best comparative job growth? According to Bernick, that honor goes to Jerry Brown. The state added nearly 2 million jobs during Brown's tenure from 1975-82, representing 17.3 percent of the nation's employment growth. That's despite a devastating national downturn during his final year in office that saw unemployment spike to 11 percent nationwide and 10.8 percent in California.

The performance under the other recent governors includes:

• George Deukmejian, 1983-90, 2.7 million jobs, 13.8 percent of U.S. growth. Deukmejian benefited from the boom of the late 1980s, but ended with the beginning of the post-Cold War recession.
• Pete Wilson, 1991-98, 1.3 million jobs, 7.2 percent. Wilson got hit with the brunt of the Cold War recession and the "jobless recovery" that followed.
• Gray Davis, 1999-2003,5.6 million jobs, 11.3 percent. Gray Davis was recalled from office partly because of a series of problems that impacted the state's economy, including the California energy crisis, the workers' compensation crisis, the bursting of the dot-com bubble and the jobless recovery that followed. Nevertheless, job creation in California kept pace with the state's size in the U.S. economy.

Meg Whitman's gubernatorial campaign, which has been trying to portray Jerry Brown as a "job-killer," has criticized his study as being partisan. Bernick, after all, was a college intern in Sacramento during the Brown administration and he says he has "known and personally supported" Brown ever since. He also headed the California Employment Development Department under Gray Davis. But he insists that his study - which grew out of a research for a book he's writing on the California economy, is based on easily verifiable data.

"If the Whitman campaign can show that these numbers are inaccurate or misleading, such should be done," he said.

Whitman's spokeswoman Sarah Pompei called it "a desperate attempt to cover up the fact thatJerry left office with 400,000 more unempoyed Californians than when he began." Nationally, under President Ronald Reagan, there were 10.7 million unemployed that year.

CLICK HERE for a link to Bernick's study