It always helps to know all the facts

KENNETT, Mo. -- The title of this piece may remind you of the old Joe Friday line in "Dragnet" (Just the facts, ma'am), but facts have been found to be 98.7 percent effective in removing doubt, fear and panic from the public's mind whenever critical public questions are being discussed.

An issue in point is the current concern over the drop of services in Missouri's state government or rather the threat of a narrowing of these services in a national economy that is undergoing several degrees of change, even transformation, and has the scattered interest of the bears on Wall Street.

During the past couple of weeks it has been bewildering to hear the anguished cries of scores of alarmists, most of them around the state capital, decry the inability of Missouri's leaders to fund fully the hundreds of programs that have grown year after year into mountains of accounts payable for the state as whole. The growth, sometimes rapid and sometimes not, has been nothing short of unbelievable, and while it is a legitimate argument against some of these programs, most have stemmed from public demand, not from fanciful thoughts of ambitious politicians.

Thus we start with a critical public that originated the process and now has become its principal critic. In some quarters, this is known as having your cake and eating it too, a trait that seems greater in affluent nations than poorer ones.

Despite the reductions in state programs that have received much publicity in recent days, I'm happy to report after a recent visit that Jefferson City is still alive and well and performing its necessary role as the vortex for virtually all of Missouri's politics and the sponsor of most of its public service programs.

Despite what you may have read or heard, the state's assistance programs will remain intact, amended slightly to end programs no longer deemed essential or found to be useless during their existence. As an eternal optimist, I am convinced God created recessions to weed out the nonessential and created recoveries to pay for the corrections. And in spite of some statements coming from the Capitol, our state is one of a vast majority (35) currently reporting a net loss of jobs between March 2001 and November 2002. Currently Missouri has the largest percentage decline in nonfarm jobs (3.28 percent) but there are five states with a greater absolute number of jobs lost. Ironically the state that has provided us with two of our last three presidents has suffered the most in absolute numbers, followed by New York, Illinois, Georgia and Ohio.

Before we write off the state's smoke-stack industries, it should be noted that manufacturing job losses are no longer the major culprit in our state. There are now 20 that have lost a greater percentage of factory workers than Missouri and the percentage of manufacturing employment losses in the state is also below the national average.

Perhaps as telling as any statistic is the discovery that the bulk of our state's job losses in manufacturing came in the 1998-2001 period, ahead of the national recession. Since the spending of income from higher-wage manufacturing jobs supports many service-sector jobs, what we are obviously witnessing in 2003 is an additional "echo" effect of this development in addition to recent national trends. This is born out in job losses (100,000 workers in the services sector) that are significantly greater than the national average.

The loss of nonmanufacturing and particularly service-sector jobs last year is a complete shift from what many policymakers in the state currently perceive to be the source of the employment problem, when in real terms, the state's manufacturing segment stabilized a great deal in 2002. A failure to recognize this fact (and in political circles myopia is a contagious disease) could have far-reaching effects in the state in the months ahead.

It is virtually impossible to place blame for the state's current job loss on an unfriendly business climate unique to Missouri. Based on analyses of business climate rankings and data regarding historic job growth, it appears Missouri's business climate is typically average to slightly above average in comparison to other states.

Today's doomers and gloomers never seem to get around to the fact that at the height of the nation's economic expansion (1994-2000), Missouri added 266,000 net new jobs in the state, or an 11.1 percent increase. Thus, during the current recession, we have given back only about one-third of the increases experienced during the expansion period of the 1990s. The new jobs were exactly the type of high technology industries and support services that states were, and are, vying for. Obviously there was nothing wrong with the state's business climate when there was a 38.6 percent growth in business services and a 30 percent growth in special trade construction and a 36 percent growth rate in communications and a 39.3 percent growth rate in air transportation and a 29.5 percent growth in securities and commodities.

Based on this data, it is entirely possible that the state's job loss might be as much a result of the state's economic development successes in recent years as it is of any economic development failure.

Before hand-wringing becomes epidemic in Jefferson City, it would be well to recognize that in 2002 Missouri ranked 24th among the states, up from 35th in 1999, in the Washington-based Progressive Policy Institute's "New Economy Index" report. The report compares states on measures of knowledge jobs, economic dynamism and competition, globalization and transformation to a digital economy.

We're going to make it, Missourians, despite the doom forecasters and those who place politics ahead of reality.

Jack Stapleton is the editor of Missouri News & Editorial Service.