Is there any value to citing wages as opposed to real wages? It even says "Not adjusted for inflation" in the chart showing the increase in average hourly earnings.
Real wages have increased +1.5% March 2018 - March 2019, which the article would do well to point out. Citing that growth has topped 3% for nine months is almost in some ways misleading if it turns out that growth doesn't confer a similar increase in purchasing power.
The BLS tracks real wages which is where I got my 1.5% figure. To further put things in perspective, from March 2018 through March 2019 average paychecks increased by about $30 a week. At the same time, real average weekly earnings only increased by about $5.
I don't get why they would avoid (edit: less so "avoid" more like "miss/omit") this subject completely.
Yeah, the chart is pretty strange. It is the yearly increase rate for wages not adjusted for inflation. Even if this is somehow a reasonable proxy for increases in real median wages, it seems unnecessary given that you could just have a chart of real median wages instead.
I suspect a factor is that actual changes in income have been quite small and it's nicer to have an image that shows something dramatic instead of the marginal blip that we've actually seen.
Do you know of any resources that lay out how the post inflation numbers compare when you take into account years where wage growth was less than inflation? For example, how do wages after this growth compare to the 70s and 80s?
probably because the article is written from the perspective of labour/macro- economics rather than welfare economics.
It's true it touches on where the wage gains are going (although to me that looked rather inconclusive frankly), but I think it's primarily concerned with notions of wage stickiness in labour markets, not measures of productivity or real-wage gains or welfare.
And to be fair, if the US is anything like here, official bodies have been having trouble modeling/predicting nominal wage growth and inflation over recent history.
It’s no secret; tight labor markets produce higher wages. The deleterious effects of labor gluts are felt most profoundly at the bottom: the greater the number of people seeking unskilled labor, the lower the wages for “those who need it most”.
Hence, the solution to low wages is to stop importing poor foreigners who undercut American wages. Couple that with the elimination of corporate taxes, and there will be no incentive for offshoring or inverting. Become the world's biggest tax haven, and incomes will skyrocket.
The laws of economics cannot be wished away, and the lesson is clear: cut taxes, close the borders, and prosperity will result. If we could, now, substantially cut social spending – with all these people working, it should be possible to seriously reduce handouts – then we could afford to cut taxes AND pay for the sort of infrastructure program (exclusively projects of national importance) while reducing the deficit.
This argument isn't even a little bit consistent with the facts. We don't "import poor foreigners who undercut American wages", we import products produced in countries where labor, along with human life, is valued at vanishingly low prices for abuse by capital.
Evidence is that the vast majority of immigrant labor, both skilled and unskilled, are net positives economically. There is some modest abuse in a couple of highly specialized cases where the very top end of the labor market is probably priced lower than it might be otherwise, but those are not statistically affecting the national economy.
> If we could, now, substantially cut social spending – with all these people working, it should be possible to seriously reduce handouts
What a fantastic argument in which you completely ignore the gargantuan shadow of the US War budget against our social spending programs. Cutting the programs will never come close to the money saved by producing just a few less bombs and aircraft a year.
Ask yourself, if not for market regulation + social programs, what the heck is our government even here for?
If you ask me, it's certainly not to siphon tax money out of the War budget and into politician's pockets at the expense of the general welfare of its people while engaging in a full-on disinformation campaign against them. That's such a Middle Ages approach to running a kingdom.
There is little or no evidence to support the statement that immigrants lower the wages for "those who need it most" in any way significantly - most research suggests immigration has a zero or very small negative effect on host employment and income with some papers even suggesting a very small positive effect.
This is because immigrants also create demand - for housing, food/consumables, transport, services, entertainment/leisure, etc. This demand raises prices in those areas. Immigrants are also more likely to be "complementary" - e.g. agricultural laborers or software engineers, for that matter, are more likely to migrate to somewhere where there are too few workers of their type available.
Most of the wealthiest countries sustain high immigration. If immigration impoverished the lower paid of the host countries, then this effect should be observable but it isn't. For example, Switzerland has over 3 times the US rate of immigration yet has one of the highest bottom quintile incomes in world.
> Hence, the solution to low wages is to stop importing poor foreigners who undercut American wages. Couple that with the elimination of corporate taxes, and there will be no incentive for offshoring or inverting.
You forgot to mention that we’ll also need to kill the minimum wage and a slew of laws regarding safe working conditions.
“Stop importing foreign workers.. ... cut taxes... close borders.... prosperity will result... “
- so how about importing goods from china or other countries ? Will you recommend stopping imports ? Practically everything is made in china.. almost all manufacturing jobs have moved to china or asian countries.. i hardly see anything made in USA in target or walmart or any store in any malls..
- cut taxes. Is a strong dollar a curse for unskilled/low skilled workers .. Because.. you have every company getting stuff made in china.. and you propose cutting taxes .. why would any CEO make stuff in USA when it is ridiculously cheap to make in china ? would you recommend dollar to go down ?
Your statements dont consider any of these factors... if politicians dont get back manufacturing jobs or stop importing cheap products there will be no real solution to unemployment or wage increases..
> Hence, the solution to low wages is to stop importing poor foreigners who undercut American wages.
Couple that with the elimination of corporate taxes, and there will be no incentive for offshoring or inverting.
Become the world's biggest tax haven, and incomes will skyrocket.
what happens when you cut taxes to zero and you can’t cut anymore?
wouldn’t the effect be that they would STILL outsource to countries that have effectively zero tax rate AND lower wages?
> The laws of economics cannot be wished away...
laws of which humans have created and are hence entirely under the control of what we want to do with them... economics is not physics, and i would argue a race to the bottom is, in the end, what that type of thinking is unfortunately arguing for.
> cut taxes, close the borders, and prosperity will result
That leads to a hot house. Targeting full employment and keeping capital local allows workers to bid up wages, which will create inflation, and investors will go on an "investment strike". It happened in the 70s.
Otoh, Open borders and targeting price stability allows capital to seek it's global return - inflation stays low, but inequality grows.
This turned out to be quite an angry post, so a quick preface: All of this is a knee-jerk response to a single sentence in your post. So, you know, please take with a grain of salt, not personally, etc..
I have to admit, it's a little bit depressing to see someone just use a straight-out lump of labor argument against immigration.
I can deal with people who believe immigrants tend to be criminal and who are concerned for their family's safety - they're wrong, but they're afraid, and fear's got a way of overriding statistical reason. I can deal with people who believe immigrants will bring poor institutions from their countries of origin - I think their evidence is weak, but I realize there's a lot at stake in keeping the global North rich and well-run, so I can see at least some reason for caution. I can even deal with the racists by letting my eyes glaze over for a while. People who think that brain drain hurts the country of origin too much... believe in a greater amount of responsibility that individuals have for their nations of birth than I do, but okay, at least they're coming from what they believe is a position of compassion. And so forth - I can sympathize with, understand, or at least ignore most arguments against more open immigration, even if I disagree with them.
But just "stop importing poor foreigners who undercut American wages"? What do you think makes your work valuable in the first place? I mean, I assume that like with most people in a modern economy, very little of what you consume comes from what you yourself produced. Your work is valuable because other people have demand for its results, and will exchange some of their own surplus for it. The more surplus there is to go around, the more there is for you to get. You might have to specialize more to compete in a bigger market, but you're surely capable of it. Even the poor generally are. If nothing else, in case of immigration to the USA, the natives tend to have the distinct advantage of being literate and generally conversable in English.
So please at least have the rational selfishness to ask for more surplus! Yes, the one guy who moves in to your tiny geographic area and works in the minuscule sliver of what you produce in the economy will make your life more complicated, because now you'll have to compete with them. But for that guy, there'll be thousands of others whose greater productivity you will now get to enjoy. Maybe if you were the Immigration Czar, you could be very selfish and decide that that person doesn't get to move in but everyone else does. But if you want to make a policy that lets all selfish people benefit, then you have to let everyone face more competition and get more surplus.
To in fact not undercut my own point: I'm not claiming that that's the whole story. You might believe that maybe there will in fact be less surplus overall in the long run if you open up immigration, or you might believe that the fruits of greater productivity will go to people who don't deserve them. Again, those are concerns that I can in fact see reason in. Not that many people actually believe that they live in a world where the only difference between labor in a rich country and labor in a poor country is that the former are more productive because of where they live. In more advanced territory, I might even have to deploy moral arguments, like how unconscionable it is to not let people - individuals of just as much moral worth and agency as you or I, or indeed us behind the veil of ignorance - work in your country because they were born on the wrong side of a border. But I won't do it for lump-of-labor. It doesn't show enough understanding of economics to be worth a moral argument.
This is some classic conservative dogma, here. Of course, though much of it has been demonstrated to be wrong for at least 40 years, people continue to repeat it.
For the most current example, we can look at the recent tax cuts, which lowered corporate taxes significantly. We heard no end of promises of reinvestment in the US, higher wages, etc. We got stock buybacks instead. No need to believe all the left economists like Krugman that said this would happen - the ratings agencies predicted it as well [1]. Skyrocketing incomes indeed - for the owner class.
You advise closing the borders, which not only goes against American principles, but would reduce business creation -
> “Immigrants are about twice as likely as natives to start new businesses,” says Arnobio Morelix, an analyst at the Kauffman Foundation, which promotes entrepreneurship. [2]
> 216 companies on the Fortune 500 were founded by immigrants or their children [3]
Frankly, I would expect that one of America's continuing strengths is that the people willing to make the journey here are driven folk, willing to travel hundreds or thousands of miles to start a new life in an unfamiliar place, even if they have to work endlessly when they get here.
And truly, I am confused why zeroing corporate taxes would reduce offshoring. If I can pay someone in a different country 1/10 of what I need to pay here to make my goods, corporate tax rates have no impact that I can see on this calculation, and the offshoring would be done regardless.
Is there a reason we need to reduce social spending? Or reduce taxes, as was demonstrated to have little effect in 2001, and 2009 [4], and 2017 [1]? Perhaps if you clarified what you meant by handouts, we could get to some kind of useful discussion - but then it seems frequent that "handouts" is used for a catch-all with no real meaning, and when it comes to nuts-and-bolts changes to government spending, people that advocate for reductions never seem to actually pull it off - I think we can look at Paul Ryan as the most recent example (tax cuts now, we'll figure out spending cuts later, or maybe never).
> "Perhaps the job market wasn’t as good as the unemployment rate made it look."
so basically, the politically expedient version of unemployment, u3, doesn't have explanatory power in the economy. instead we should use u6, which includes the underemployed and the discouraged [0].
so the slack of the un-/under- employed has now been eaten up and competition in the labor force is driving up prices.
Why is the focus always on "closing the border" or other actions taken on the immigrants themselves and not on cracking down - hard - on the companies that illegally employee and abuse them?
Trying to stop or even slow down immigration without addressing the incentives that drive them to leave home and come to the US seems like a doomed and inefficient game of whack a mole...
Politically expediency. Neither the democrats nor the republicans want to go after the elites. So naturally they take turns attacking illegal immigrants. But it's all lipservice. Neither the republicans nor democrats want to stop illegal immigration. They want to use it to get votes.
Stopping immigration isn't an inefficient game of whack a mole. It's been done before through american history. And it's been done in most countries around the world. If the political and business elites wanted to end illegal immigration today, we'd end it easily. It's really not difficult to stop illegal immigration if we wanted to.
>It appears as if that is exactly what is happening. In recent months, more than 70 percent of people getting jobs had not been counted as unemployed the previous month. That is well above historical levels, and a sign that the strong labor market is drawing people off the sidelines.
Interesting. If you run the numbers you will basically see that if someone isn't counted as looking for jobs and then gets a job they barely shift the unemployment figures at all compared to someone who declares himself as unemployed but is counted as looking for jobs.
The idealized scenario with a 10% unemployment rate and 100 workers would look like this.
90/100
-> 1 worker who "seeks job" gets a job
-> 91/100
-> unemployment down to 9% (-1% change)
But reality looks closer to this.
90/100
-> 1 worker who "stopped looking for jobs" gets a job
-> 91/101
-> unemployment down to 9.9% (-0.1% change)
In other words you have to be insane to base any political decisions on this number.
Wages are rising, unemployment is low, the stock market is near an all-time high.
It's probably smart to consider the broad economic landscape and make appropriate moves in the personal finance arena. In a while we'll probably consider these to be very good times, economically. (But they won't last forever.)
> The faster growth at the bottom is probably being fueled in part by recent minimum-wage increases in cities and states across the country ... wages for low-wage workers rose 13 percent in states that raised their minimum wages, compared with 8.4 percent in states that did not
I'd like to see where that 70% of job growth being from California comes from. Not that I'm trying to be argumentative, but seems to be wildly unlikely.
The top "growth" in terms of average number of employed increase doesn't seem to back that up:
[+] [-] Eleopteryx|6 years ago|reply
Real wages have increased +1.5% March 2018 - March 2019, which the article would do well to point out. Citing that growth has topped 3% for nine months is almost in some ways misleading if it turns out that growth doesn't confer a similar increase in purchasing power.
The BLS tracks real wages which is where I got my 1.5% figure. To further put things in perspective, from March 2018 through March 2019 average paychecks increased by about $30 a week. At the same time, real average weekly earnings only increased by about $5.
I don't get why they would avoid (edit: less so "avoid" more like "miss/omit") this subject completely.
[+] [-] joe_the_user|6 years ago|reply
I suspect a factor is that actual changes in income have been quite small and it's nicer to have an image that shows something dramatic instead of the marginal blip that we've actually seen.
[+] [-] harimau777|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ACow_Adonis|6 years ago|reply
It's true it touches on where the wage gains are going (although to me that looked rather inconclusive frankly), but I think it's primarily concerned with notions of wage stickiness in labour markets, not measures of productivity or real-wage gains or welfare.
And to be fair, if the US is anything like here, official bodies have been having trouble modeling/predicting nominal wage growth and inflation over recent history.
[+] [-] codingslave|6 years ago|reply
Hence, the solution to low wages is to stop importing poor foreigners who undercut American wages. Couple that with the elimination of corporate taxes, and there will be no incentive for offshoring or inverting. Become the world's biggest tax haven, and incomes will skyrocket.
The laws of economics cannot be wished away, and the lesson is clear: cut taxes, close the borders, and prosperity will result. If we could, now, substantially cut social spending – with all these people working, it should be possible to seriously reduce handouts – then we could afford to cut taxes AND pay for the sort of infrastructure program (exclusively projects of national importance) while reducing the deficit.
[+] [-] jhayward|6 years ago|reply
Evidence is that the vast majority of immigrant labor, both skilled and unskilled, are net positives economically. There is some modest abuse in a couple of highly specialized cases where the very top end of the labor market is probably priced lower than it might be otherwise, but those are not statistically affecting the national economy.
[+] [-] soulofmischief|6 years ago|reply
What a fantastic argument in which you completely ignore the gargantuan shadow of the US War budget against our social spending programs. Cutting the programs will never come close to the money saved by producing just a few less bombs and aircraft a year.
Ask yourself, if not for market regulation + social programs, what the heck is our government even here for?
If you ask me, it's certainly not to siphon tax money out of the War budget and into politician's pockets at the expense of the general welfare of its people while engaging in a full-on disinformation campaign against them. That's such a Middle Ages approach to running a kingdom.
[+] [-] derriz|6 years ago|reply
This is because immigrants also create demand - for housing, food/consumables, transport, services, entertainment/leisure, etc. This demand raises prices in those areas. Immigrants are also more likely to be "complementary" - e.g. agricultural laborers or software engineers, for that matter, are more likely to migrate to somewhere where there are too few workers of their type available.
Most of the wealthiest countries sustain high immigration. If immigration impoverished the lower paid of the host countries, then this effect should be observable but it isn't. For example, Switzerland has over 3 times the US rate of immigration yet has one of the highest bottom quintile incomes in world.
[+] [-] mikeash|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drewblaisdell|6 years ago|reply
You forgot to mention that we’ll also need to kill the minimum wage and a slew of laws regarding safe working conditions.
[+] [-] pvelagal|6 years ago|reply
- so how about importing goods from china or other countries ? Will you recommend stopping imports ? Practically everything is made in china.. almost all manufacturing jobs have moved to china or asian countries.. i hardly see anything made in USA in target or walmart or any store in any malls..
- cut taxes. Is a strong dollar a curse for unskilled/low skilled workers .. Because.. you have every company getting stuff made in china.. and you propose cutting taxes .. why would any CEO make stuff in USA when it is ridiculously cheap to make in china ? would you recommend dollar to go down ?
Your statements dont consider any of these factors... if politicians dont get back manufacturing jobs or stop importing cheap products there will be no real solution to unemployment or wage increases..
[+] [-] andrekandre|6 years ago|reply
what happens when you cut taxes to zero and you can’t cut anymore? wouldn’t the effect be that they would STILL outsource to countries that have effectively zero tax rate AND lower wages?
> The laws of economics cannot be wished away...
laws of which humans have created and are hence entirely under the control of what we want to do with them... economics is not physics, and i would argue a race to the bottom is, in the end, what that type of thinking is unfortunately arguing for.
[edit] formatting, grammar
[+] [-] platz|6 years ago|reply
That leads to a hot house. Targeting full employment and keeping capital local allows workers to bid up wages, which will create inflation, and investors will go on an "investment strike". It happened in the 70s.
Otoh, Open borders and targeting price stability allows capital to seek it's global return - inflation stays low, but inequality grows.
Pick one.
* explain yourselves, downvoters
[+] [-] Ari_Rahikkala|6 years ago|reply
I have to admit, it's a little bit depressing to see someone just use a straight-out lump of labor argument against immigration.
I can deal with people who believe immigrants tend to be criminal and who are concerned for their family's safety - they're wrong, but they're afraid, and fear's got a way of overriding statistical reason. I can deal with people who believe immigrants will bring poor institutions from their countries of origin - I think their evidence is weak, but I realize there's a lot at stake in keeping the global North rich and well-run, so I can see at least some reason for caution. I can even deal with the racists by letting my eyes glaze over for a while. People who think that brain drain hurts the country of origin too much... believe in a greater amount of responsibility that individuals have for their nations of birth than I do, but okay, at least they're coming from what they believe is a position of compassion. And so forth - I can sympathize with, understand, or at least ignore most arguments against more open immigration, even if I disagree with them.
But just "stop importing poor foreigners who undercut American wages"? What do you think makes your work valuable in the first place? I mean, I assume that like with most people in a modern economy, very little of what you consume comes from what you yourself produced. Your work is valuable because other people have demand for its results, and will exchange some of their own surplus for it. The more surplus there is to go around, the more there is for you to get. You might have to specialize more to compete in a bigger market, but you're surely capable of it. Even the poor generally are. If nothing else, in case of immigration to the USA, the natives tend to have the distinct advantage of being literate and generally conversable in English.
So please at least have the rational selfishness to ask for more surplus! Yes, the one guy who moves in to your tiny geographic area and works in the minuscule sliver of what you produce in the economy will make your life more complicated, because now you'll have to compete with them. But for that guy, there'll be thousands of others whose greater productivity you will now get to enjoy. Maybe if you were the Immigration Czar, you could be very selfish and decide that that person doesn't get to move in but everyone else does. But if you want to make a policy that lets all selfish people benefit, then you have to let everyone face more competition and get more surplus.
To in fact not undercut my own point: I'm not claiming that that's the whole story. You might believe that maybe there will in fact be less surplus overall in the long run if you open up immigration, or you might believe that the fruits of greater productivity will go to people who don't deserve them. Again, those are concerns that I can in fact see reason in. Not that many people actually believe that they live in a world where the only difference between labor in a rich country and labor in a poor country is that the former are more productive because of where they live. In more advanced territory, I might even have to deploy moral arguments, like how unconscionable it is to not let people - individuals of just as much moral worth and agency as you or I, or indeed us behind the veil of ignorance - work in your country because they were born on the wrong side of a border. But I won't do it for lump-of-labor. It doesn't show enough understanding of economics to be worth a moral argument.
[+] [-] rndmize|6 years ago|reply
For the most current example, we can look at the recent tax cuts, which lowered corporate taxes significantly. We heard no end of promises of reinvestment in the US, higher wages, etc. We got stock buybacks instead. No need to believe all the left economists like Krugman that said this would happen - the ratings agencies predicted it as well [1]. Skyrocketing incomes indeed - for the owner class.
You advise closing the borders, which not only goes against American principles, but would reduce business creation -
> “Immigrants are about twice as likely as natives to start new businesses,” says Arnobio Morelix, an analyst at the Kauffman Foundation, which promotes entrepreneurship. [2]
> 216 companies on the Fortune 500 were founded by immigrants or their children [3]
Frankly, I would expect that one of America's continuing strengths is that the people willing to make the journey here are driven folk, willing to travel hundreds or thousands of miles to start a new life in an unfamiliar place, even if they have to work endlessly when they get here.
And truly, I am confused why zeroing corporate taxes would reduce offshoring. If I can pay someone in a different country 1/10 of what I need to pay here to make my goods, corporate tax rates have no impact that I can see on this calculation, and the offshoring would be done regardless.
Is there a reason we need to reduce social spending? Or reduce taxes, as was demonstrated to have little effect in 2001, and 2009 [4], and 2017 [1]? Perhaps if you clarified what you meant by handouts, we could get to some kind of useful discussion - but then it seems frequent that "handouts" is used for a catch-all with no real meaning, and when it comes to nuts-and-bolts changes to government spending, people that advocate for reductions never seem to actually pull it off - I think we can look at Paul Ryan as the most recent example (tax cuts now, we'll figure out spending cuts later, or maybe never).
[1] https://www.axios.com/trump-tax-cuts-companies-stock-buyback...
[2] https://www.apnews.com/ab44ff583d194070a5eae431231c4450
[3] https://qz.com/1151689/216-companies-on-the-fortune-500-were...
[4] https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/economy/reports/2011...
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] caconym_|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hedvig|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] blfr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clairity|6 years ago|reply
> "Perhaps the job market wasn’t as good as the unemployment rate made it look."
so basically, the politically expedient version of unemployment, u3, doesn't have explanatory power in the economy. instead we should use u6, which includes the underemployed and the discouraged [0].
so the slack of the un-/under- employed has now been eaten up and competition in the labor force is driving up prices.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment#cite_ref-47
[+] [-] tootie|6 years ago|reply
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9b/US...
[+] [-] makomk|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] lostphilosopher|6 years ago|reply
Trying to stop or even slow down immigration without addressing the incentives that drive them to leave home and come to the US seems like a doomed and inefficient game of whack a mole...
[+] [-] basetop|6 years ago|reply
Stopping immigration isn't an inefficient game of whack a mole. It's been done before through american history. And it's been done in most countries around the world. If the political and business elites wanted to end illegal immigration today, we'd end it easily. It's really not difficult to stop illegal immigration if we wanted to.
[+] [-] skookumchuck|6 years ago|reply
I.e. Supply & Demand
(It's the law!)
[+] [-] imtringued|6 years ago|reply
Interesting. If you run the numbers you will basically see that if someone isn't counted as looking for jobs and then gets a job they barely shift the unemployment figures at all compared to someone who declares himself as unemployed but is counted as looking for jobs.
The idealized scenario with a 10% unemployment rate and 100 workers would look like this. 90/100 -> 1 worker who "seeks job" gets a job -> 91/100 -> unemployment down to 9% (-1% change)
But reality looks closer to this. 90/100 -> 1 worker who "stopped looking for jobs" gets a job -> 91/101 -> unemployment down to 9.9% (-0.1% change)
In other words you have to be insane to base any political decisions on this number.
[+] [-] RickJWagner|6 years ago|reply
It's probably smart to consider the broad economic landscape and make appropriate moves in the personal finance arena. In a while we'll probably consider these to be very good times, economically. (But they won't last forever.)
[+] [-] srndh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fatjokes|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TAForObvReasons|6 years ago|reply
"Blue states" saw a much bigger bump
[+] [-] m0zg|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dang|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] faissaloo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timbit42|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NTDF9|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] bsder|6 years ago|reply
I read something recently like 70% of all jobs added were in California. And the vast majority of the rest was all in solid blue territory.
The real question is where is Texas on this? It's pretty much the only "red" state that ever posts job growth.
[+] [-] sl1ck731|6 years ago|reply
The top "growth" in terms of average number of employed increase doesn't seem to back that up:
https://www.governing.com/topics/mgmt/gov-states-strongest-j...
In terms of raw job additions it looks like it goes: Washington, California, Texas with all similar raw numbers.
https://www.deptofnumbers.com/employment/states/