The Michigan Republican Party has continued Gov. Rick Snyder’s efforts to take credit for the economic improvements that have benefited the entire country, including our state. Here in Michigan, nothing has helped fuel economic growth like the resurgence of the vehicle manufacturing sector. Upwards of 60% of Michganders work in jobs that are impacted by vehicle manufacturing and, had our domestic automakers gone out of business, our state would be in seriously bad straits.
The last thing they want is for President Obama to get any credit for that so, when he visited Michigan yesterday to tout the results of the loan program that kept Chrysler, GM, and the entire vehicle manufacturing supply chain from going under, Republicans sat on the sidelines throwing spitballs.
The MIGOP posted this laughable graphic on their Facebook page and Twitter account:
The person most likely to take over the helm as Chair of the MIGOP, Ronna Romney McDaniel, niece of Mitt Romney, retweeted the image and tweeted her own comical rewriting of history:
Who is least responsible for Michigan being the #ComebackState? The Obama Administration.
— Ronna RomneyMcDaniel (@RRMGOP) January 7, 2015
(Nine days later, there’s still no word from her on the hideous racism and bigotry espoused by her fellow RNC member Dave Agema, however.)
The idea that Michigan is a “Comeback State” due only to the actions of the Gov. Snyder and the Republicans is ludicrous. The leaders of their party, including all of the Republican primary candidates for president in 2012, lined up against assisting Chrysler and GM. Mitt Romney, the guy they finally chose to be on the ticket, famously penned a New York Times op-ed with unambiguous title “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt”.
In fact, about the only Republican who supported the loan program was Gov. Rick Snyder who had this to say about the initiative:
I think there are alternative scenarios that could have worked also, but the point is, is that it’s history, and the important part is it was successful, we’re moving along, creating jobs.
Michigan had the fifth highest unemployment rate in the country when Gov. Snyder took office and it was still the fifth highest when he was reelected. It’s been clearly shown that Gov. Snyder’s actions account for very little of the job growth that Michigan Republicans are giving him credit for:
Governor Snyder…takes credit for an increase in employment that actually began under his predecessor, Jennifer Granholm. The annual average employment hit bottom in 2009 and began improving in 2010, during Granholm’s final year in office.The job growth trend began before Snyder was elected. There are now 289,000 more people working than in the depths of the recession.
As we’ve reported previously, Don Grimes, an economist at the University of Michigan, says once you factor out the effects of the improving national economy and the resurgence of the auto industry, there’s not much credit for the governor to take.
“[Out of the 300,000 private sector jobs that Snyder is taking credit for,] you’re probably looking at about a 10,000 to 15,000 job gain each year that cannot be explained by the national economic growth or cannot be explained by the strong performance of the auto industry. And that’s sort of a maximum that Governor Snyder can be really claiming, in the nature of 10,000 to 15,000 jobs,” Grimes said. […]
One of the benchmarks to determine whether there are better jobs is the median household income. Michigan, like much of the nation, has lost ground. Adjusted for 2013 dollars, the median household income in Michigan has fallen from a high of $56,204 in 2006 to $48,801 in 2013. That’s a loss of $7,403. While the median household income did begin to increase in the first two years of the Snyder administration, last year it lost ground, falling to its lowest level in more than decade. The national median household income for 2013 was $52,250.
It’s not surprising that Michigan Republicans are taking credit they don’t deserve for the actions of Democrats. Their own national leaders are doing the same. Yesterday, Mitch McConnell laughably claimed that the recent economic uptick is due to – I’m not kidding here – “the ‘expectation’ of a new Republican Congress”:
After so many years of sluggish growth, we’re finally starting to see some economic data that can provide a glimmer of hope; the ‘uptick’ appears to ‘coincide’ with the biggest political change of the Obama Administration’s long tenure in Washington: the ‘expectation’ of a new Republican Congress.
Oh, brother. McConnell is taking credit for something that happened in the third quarter – the U.S. economy grew at a 5 percent rate in Q3, the fastest rate in over ten years – by claiming it was due to something that had not yet happened (Republicans taking control of both the House and the Senate.)
Only an idiot would separate the success of our automotive sector and the massively improved national econonmy from what’s happening in Michigan.
And that idiot is, of course, the Michigan Republican Party and its leadership.
