[StBernard] Government's Own Statistics Show Claims Of Limited Moratorium Impact Are Lies

[Westley Annis]

Government's Own Statistics Show Claims Of Limited Moratorium Impact Are
Lies

Posted by: MacAoidh on Wednesday, April 27, 2011, 16:11

Today, the Bureau of Labor Statistics put out a spate of unemployment
information broken out by metropolitan area, and the table it released
enables us to compare unemployment rates from last month to March of 2011.

It's quite obvious, from looking at the Louisiana data, that claims by the
Obama administration and the Left of a limited or nonexistent impact on jobs
arising from the president's post-Deepwater Horizon policies are simply
untrue.

The moratorium on offshore drilling, and the subsequent permitorium in which
oil and gas exploration in the Gulf has been strangled by federal red tape
in the permitting process, has had a devastating effect on the state's
economy. Unemployment is up from 2010 in every one of the state's markets.

Take, for example, the New Orleans area. In March 2010, that market was
sitting on a 6.6 percent civilian unemployment rate. This year, it's at 7.9
percent. That's a 1.3 percent jump in 12 months, which is gigantic. In fact,
it's one of the largest jumps in the country.

But New Orleans' ugly number isn't the worst in the state. That would belong
to Baton Rouge, which saw a jump from 6.6 percent to 8.2 percent. That 1.6
percent jump was the worst in the United States over the course of the
one-year period. That makes Baton Rouge the worst job market collapse in the
United States of America over the last 12 months.

In Lafayette, the jump was sizable as well - from 5.5 percent to 6.3
percent. Things were even worse in Lake Charles, which went from 6.3 percent
to 7.2 percent. In Houma, the figure went from 5.0 percent to 5.8 percent.

North Louisiana didn't fare any better. In Alexandria, the jump was from 6.5
percent to 7.7 percent, in Monroe it was from 7.1 to 8.4 and in Shreveport
it went from 6.3 to 7.2.

On the whole, Louisiana saw its unemployment rate go from 6.8 percent in
March of 2010 to 8.0 percent last month. The number of unemployed reported
in March 2010 was 139,500; last month it was 164,600. That's a jump of
25,000 jobless folks in 12 months. Are there factors other than the
moratorium driving unemployment? Probably. Some of those might be positive
factors, though. If there is another major economic driver which has moved
the state's economy south other than the federal government's shutdown of
the state's leading industry in the last 12 months, we're not aware of it
and we probably would be since we tend to watch this stuff pretty closely.

The eight metro areas in Louisiana are eight of the 11 worst-performing
areas in the country in terms of unemployment jumps. The only three
non-Louisiana markets at the bottom of the chart are Idaho Falls and two
border towns ravaged by the Mexican drug cartel war - Brownsville-Harlingen
and Yuma.

We already know that the state's unemployment rate in April was 6.2 percent.
Our economy was moving up fairly rapidly last spring, and it was the energy
industry leading the way.

During the course of the Obamoratorium/Permitorium saga, defenders of the
president's policy have repeatedly said it didn't have an impact on the
economy of the region. Those include the partisan shills at the Baton Rouge
Advocate, who in February put out a propaganda piece to the effect that what
the administration is doing to the oil patch has had little effect on the
economy when that was clearly fantasy.

Louisiana's economy is being bled to death by this administration and its
policies on energy production. That's pretty clear in the administration's
own numbers. Isn't it about time somebody started telling the truth about
it?