Keller @ Large: Patrick Needs To Tell Truth About Jobs
BOSTON (CBS) - You may or may not like Gov. Deval Patrick, but it was quite obvious in the 2010 election that most people here do.
Listen to Jon's commentary:
And I think one of the reasons even non knee-jerk Democrats feel that way is they have the sense that the governor, in addition to being personally honest, tries hard within the constraints of everyday politics to be honest with us about the problems we face.
Just off the top of my head I can recall him speaking candidly about our infrastructure crisis, our Big Dig and MBTA debt, and our unaffordable pension and health-care spending.
While he always puts in a good word, as he should, for honest, hard-working public employees, he has been appropriately blunt about his disgust over the abuse of taxpayer dollars and trust that too-often occurs.
So it was with an expectation that he would also insist on candor about job creation in our state that I was disappointed to see the ridiculous spin coming from him and his aides yesterday when we learned that they've been dramatically overstating job growth here for some time now.
Revised job data released by the administration shows we added 12,200 jobs in 2011 – 28,500 fewer jobs than state labor officials originally claimed.
That's a yearly job growth rate of 0.4%, far below the national growth rate of 1.5% during the same period.
The response from state labor secretary Joanne Goldstein was to evade and finger-point, claiming without evidence that the feds have botched their job growth calculations, and insisting that we're doing "very well."
She even took a potshot at the Romney administration, which suggests a possible motive for the number-fudging they've been doing.
And the governor himself says, well, "the numbers have been all over the place….[our] strategy's a winning strategy."
I'd have more confidence in that if they were candid about the anemic growth, and simply asked for patience.
Instead, we're left to wonder if politics has overtaken the governor's commitment to the economic truth.
You can listen to Keller At Large on WBZ News Radio every weekday at 7:55 a.m. and 12:25 p.m. You can also watch Jon on WBZ-TV News.
