There is no contest. Texas added jobs without ever dropping below the number of jobs in December 2007 despite the Great Recession. It has now added 1.44 million jobs, while the remainder of the nation has yet to recover all the jobs lost since December 2007!
[The oil and gas industry in Texas, which Obama has fought and tried to suppress, is responsible for a large part of the Texas jobs creation success.]
But some of those other states did add jobs and some lost a particularly large fraction of the jobs they had in December 2007. Let us see which states are relative winners and which are relative losers. I will use BLS seasonally adjusted Establishment Data on non-farm payrolls which excludes public administration. I am going to break the states into three groups. The first group is the one that created more jobs over the 7 year period than would be needed to keep up with the average population growth of the country over the 10-year period of the last census. That population growth rate was about 0.9%, so 7 x 0.9% = 6.3%. The next group of states managed some kind of job growth, though as we will see that job growth was most commonly pathetic. The final group of states are those which still have fewer jobs now than they had in December 2007. I have simply taken the non-farm non-public administration jobs in December 2014 and divided by the number of such jobs in December 2007. Thus, North Dakota had 32.24% more such jobs in 2014 than in 2007.
The heroic states with more created jobs than average population growth from Dec 2007 to Dec 2014:
North Dakota, Texas, and Oklahoma certainly benefited from both business-friendly state governments and the shale oil boom. Alaska benefited from high oil prices. Obama did nothing but hurt the jobs creation in these states. The District of Columbia benefited from the inexorable growth of the federal government and the many well-paid lobbyists located there. Gov. Rick Parry of Texas has some real bragging rights in his bid for the Republican presidential nomination due to the record of Texas during his long term as governor. Of the five states and DC which created jobs in excess of population growth, only those jobs in DC were created by Obama and his socialist cronies.
The states that could not keep up with population growth, but at least did not actually lose jobs:
Massachusetts, New York, and California on this list certainly benefited from the huge out-pouring of Federal Reserve money propping up the largest financial institutions largely located in these states. Note that the bottom 12 states in this group did not even manage a 1% growth of jobs in 7 years! Both Virginia and Maryland, despite being benefited by the growth of the federal government by their proximity to DC, managed virtually zero private job growth at 0.6% and 0.15%, respectively. Six of the bottom 9 states in this group voted for Obama twice, so they deserved no better. Scott Walker, Republican governor of Wisconsin has little to brag about in terms of job creation in his state in his presidential bid. Democrat Gov. Martin O'Malley of Maryland has still less to brag about.
Finally, we have the states that actually lost such jobs in the 7-year period of the Great Recession and its supposed recovery:
Of these 17 job losing states, 11 of them voted for Obama twice. That is certainly a fair indicator of an anti-business mentality in those states. Only Idaho, Florida, Arizona, and Nevada on this list appear in many lists of business-friendly states. Republican Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey has only a 3.06% job loss in seven years to talk about.
It is very clear that the federal government and very many of the state and local governments need very badly to become more business-friendly if Americans are ever going to be able to enjoy plentiful and good jobs again. This does not mean doing things to favor businesses. It just means they need to get out of the way and let free Americans in the private sector create jobs and provide great products and services.
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