Larry Reed: Skvarla’s shoddy analysis

It’s both sad and infuriating to read John Skvarla’s March 1 letter “Reforms helping unemployed find work” in an attempt to respond to the Feb. 21 Point of View “When experiments fail” that rationally critiqued the McCrory-Berger-Moore administration’s abysmal unemployment policies.

The POV supported all the key points about the failure of Gov. Pat McCrory’s unemployment policies with sound analytic data. North Carolina ranks 46th in unemployment benefits, and our state’s unemployment rate (5.6 percent) continues to be higher than the national unemployment rate (4.9 percent) as well as that of our surrounding states of Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida or Maryland.

Instead, McCrory’s commerce secretary referred broadly without any data to “Federal Reserve Reports” from New York and Atlanta. If he worked for me, I would fire him for shoddy, unsupportable analysis.

Unfortunately, all the residents of North Carolina pay for his partisan, ideological denial of the facts. If the failed policies worked, we’d have a much lower unemployment rate. The proof is in the pudding. We need to fire these incompetent partisan hacks.

This story was originally published March 4, 2016 at 5:20 PM with the headline "Larry Reed: Skvarla’s shoddy analysis."