Job growth
Mr. Hogan said during Monday’s debate that Maryland has more jobs now than at any time in its history, and that’s true. It has been true, actually since late in former Gov. Martin O’Malley’s term, when the state finally exceeded the high point it had reached before the Great Recession. But it’s not doing quite as well as Virginia in that regard, and while both states suffered less than the rest of the country, neither is creating jobs at anywhere close to the national average now. Maryland now has about 5.2 percent more jobs than it did back in 2007, when Mr. O’Malley took office and before the recession began to be felt. Virginia is about 6.5 percent ahead of where it was then, and the nation is more than 8.2 percent above its 2007 level.
A graph of the annual increase or decrease since then shows no discernible change in the trends from the O’Malley administration to Mr. Hogan’s term. If anything, Maryland has fallen a bit further behind the pace in the last couple of years. You can make an argument that Mr. Hogan is correct that Maryland “went from losing 100,000 jobs to gaining 100,000 jobs,” if you slice the numbers in the way that’s least favorable to Mr. O’Malley and ignore both the global financial meltdown and the recovery that was well underway before he left office. But when Mr. Hogan said during the debate that “We had some of the fastest job growth in America,” it was simply not true.
There are plenty of other ways to measure the strength of Maryland’s economy. During the 2014 campaign, Mr. Hogan made much of the idea that people were fleeing the state because of high taxes and the lack of economic opportunity. The IRS publishes data on the number of people and amount of personal income that flows from one state to another based on where people file their tax returns, and it indeed shows that Maryland has historically lost both people and funds to other states. The data lag by a couple of years, so we only have a sense of what was going on through the very beginning of Mr. Hogan’s term. But the gist is this: In dollar terms, the exodus shrank to almost nothing toward the tail end of the recession and rebounded to a high of a bit more than $1.6 billion lost between 2012 and 2013 before declining again throughout the rest of Mr. O’Malley’s term. But between the 2015 and 2016 tax years (the first data reflecting on the Hogan administration), the figure jumped back up to nearly $1.6 billion.
In terms of gross domestic product, Maryland’s annual growth has lagged the national rate since the end of the recession and Virginia’s rate in the last year. There has been little if any change in that broad measure of economic growth since Mr. Hogan took office.
Finally, Governor Hogan has, for good reason, made much of his efforts to boost private sector hiring and business formation. Maryland’s dependence on the federal government is assuredly a double-edged sword, as we have seen during times of federal spending cutbacks. But the state has made little progress during the last four years in boosting private sector employment relative to government jobs. When Mr. Hogan took office, the share of government jobs here was about 22 percent higher than the national rate. Now it’s 21 percent higher.
Is it fair to think that Governor Hogan could transform Maryland’s economy in just four years? Of course not. Macroeconomic factors beyond his (or any other governor’s) control play a huge role, and nurturing new businesses from start-ups to established, major companies takes time. Moreover, Mr. Hogan has been working with a legislature controlled by the other party, so he can fairly claim that he has not been able to achieve as much as he would if he could easily pass his own legislation, or even sustain his vetoes. But that’s not what he’s arguing. Mr. Hogan says Maryland under his governorship is a national leader in economic growth. It’s not.