by Hugh Jackson, Nevada Current
“Nevada has experienced 10 straight months of employment growth under Governor Joe Lombardo’s leadership,” the Lombardo-adjacent Better Nevada PAC tweeted this week.
That’s one way to look at it.
Here’s another:
Nevada has experienced 34 straight months of employment growth under President Joe Biden’s leadership.
According to monthly state employment statistics through October 2023, seasonally adjusted employment in Nevada has fallen once this year, in April, and non-seasonally adjusted employment has dropped twice, once in January and again in June.
Since both measurements never went down in the same month, it can be declared, as Lombardo’s PAC and the state employment department have, that the number of Nevadans with jobs – if not by one measure than at least by the other – has grown in every one of the 10 months since Lombardo’s inauguration.
And by the same standard, and according to the same state employment statistics, Nevada employment has grown in every one of the 34 months since Biden’s inauguration.
But ah, you may say, when Biden took office in January of 2021, the nation and especially Nevada were only beginning to recover from the pandemic’s deepest economic depths. Nevada was hit harder than any other state, so had nowhere to go but up.
That’s true. Nevada employment didn’t recover to its February 2020 pre-shutdown employment peak until January 2022. (And it took the leisure-hospitality sector until July 2023 to reach February 2020 employment levels, which is weird because the resort industry was racking up so much profit it was spending billions on stock buybacks well before then. Go figure.)
But the ten months of employment growth the Lombardo-adjacent PAC is crowing about reflects nothing whatsoever about any economic policy that Lombardo has or has not implemented. Effective and meaningful state-level economic policies are long-term affairs requiring long-term investments in the public good. Lombardo hasn’t been governor long enough for such initiatives to begin rippling through the economy even if he had implemented any, which he hasn’t.
That’s not really a rap on Lombardo. He’s a Nevadan, and Nevada doesn’t really do economic policy. It does gimmicks. That helps explain why despite seeing the nation’s fastest job growth, Nevada paradoxically over much of the same time has had the nation’s highest unemployment rate.
The Better Nevada PAC hasn’t assigned Lombardo any of the credit for that.
The economic insignificance of Joe Lombardo
Meanwhile, anyone taken in by pronouncements heralding Lombardo’s imaginary economic impact as real would get a more trenchant perspective on employment growth, and the contemporary Nevada economy in general, by considering the state of play before either Lombardo or Biden was inaugurated.
In the summer of 2020, Nevada legislators and Gov. Steve Sisolak took a cleaver to the state budget.
Hundreds of millions of dollars were ripped from education, health, and human services programs. Some programs were simply eliminated.
For all the budget cutting, when the state’s economic forecasters met late in 2020 to assess the state’s budget, which of course is reliant on the state’s economy, the outlook was brutally grim.
And yet two years later, in December of 2022, a Nevada Current headline read “Nevada revenue exceeds projections by $1 billion,” with the subhed, “Good news for whoever’s governor next year.”
The story beneath those headlines included the following statement made to the state’s Economic Forum by Michael Nakamoto, a fiscal analyst with the Legislative Counsel Bureau. And the closer the 2024 election gets, and the more the economy weighs on voters’ minds, the more important it seems to re-up Nakamoto’s December 2022 observation:
“If any of us had come into the last meeting back in December of 2020 or May of 2021 and said that we would have consecutive months of gaming win above a billion dollars per month, or taxable sales would be growing by double digits, or that inflation would be where it has been, I don’t know if any of those forecasts would have been taken seriously.”
So what happened to heat up the economy in such a surprising, and surprisingly quick, manner?
Obviously there was going to be natural rebound as the economy began to emerge from the pandemic.
But on a policy level, the game changer was when a Democratically controlled Congress passed the Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan Act in March of 2021.
Lombardo, the “whoever’s governor next year,” and his PAC would never want to give former Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak and Democratic legislators credit for bestowing such a rosy budget scenario on the new governor.
And they shouldn’t. Notwithstanding laughably ludicrous claims to the contrary from Democratic Assembly Speaker Steve Yeager, neither Democratic legislative leaders nor Lombardo’s Democratic predecessor had jack doodley squat to do with Nevada’s economic rejuvenation and its accompanying plumpy state budget.
Nevada’s economic and budgetary recovery occurred with the speed and scale it did thanks to Biden and Democrats in Congress.
Lombardo and his PAC contend his ardent support of business-friendly “economic development” policies are why Nevada’s workforce has grown.
“His pro-jobs agenda is getting results for communities across our state,” the Better Nevada PAC tweeted.
And last week Lombardo’s office issued a release touting the latest round of tax giveaways to businesses. “Since January,” Lombardo said, “we have assisted 25 companies that will create 5,208 jobs in their first five years of operation.”
Wow. Five thousand jobs. Over five years.
In a state where the workforce in October numbered roughly 1.6 million.
Let’s leave aside those Lilliputian employment returns on investment. Let’s also leave aside the fact that there is no proof whatsoever that the tax abatements Lombardo was touting make a difference to relocating or expanding companies, and a fair amount of evidence that they make no difference at all.
Even if you believe those abatements constitute sound economic policy, and not just needless giveaways to companies that don’t need giveaways, the abatement policies and programs responsible for the growth listed in Lombardo’s release are effectively identical to those that were in place under Sisolak.
The second Tesla giveaway that happened under Lombardo’s watch – and that Lombardo attempted to take credit for – also would have happened if Sisolak had been reelected. The same goes for the gimmick masquerading as economic policy enacted as a result of Lombardo’s economic “leadership,” the public subsidy for the baseball field.
Lombardo blasted “Bidenomics” during his campaign. Those Lombonomics mostly consisted of dumbed-down complaints about the price of gas.
Now he and his PAC want to take credit for Nevada employment growth that would have happened no matter who was governor, thanks to Biden.
Governors spinning economic news in an attempt to make themselves look good whatever the facts is not unique. During Nevada’s long struggle to recover from the Great Recession, the state’s employment department doubled as a sunshine-flinging public relations agency for former Gov. Brian Sandoval.
And while it’s absurd and a little comic to see Lombardo and his PAC cuddling up to Biden’s policy coattails, it could also be viewed as an improvement. As a rule, Lombardo prefers cuddling up to Trump.
Nevada Current is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Nevada Current maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Hugh Jackson for questions: [email protected]. Follow Nevada Current on Facebook and Twitter.
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