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The 10 Best (and Worst) States to Find a Job

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state-hiring-rankings

The 10 Best (and Worst) States to Find a Job

Kate Scanlon / @scanlon_kate / February 16, 2015

See where your state ranks here:

Chart: Gallup

North Dakota has ranked No. 1 for six years in a row. Gallup noted that Michigan experienced one of the “sharpest turnarounds of any state” in the seven years its has conducted the survey.

Nick Loris, an economist who focuses on energy, environmental and regulatory issues at The Heritage Foundation, said North Dakota’s No. 1 ranking came as no surprise.

“Energy development on private and state-owned lands in North Dakota and Texas is a critical reason why they rank at the top,” said Loris. “The regulatory environment has allowed companies in these states to create jobs, grow the economy, and increased energy supplies to save families money—all while effectively protecting the environment.”

Chart: Gallup

In his recent State of the State address, Gov. Jack Dalrymple, R-N.D., said energy jobs were a large factor in his state’s success.

“We should all be proud of the vital role our state is playing to help America strengthen its energy independence,” said Dalrymple.

“Over the past 10 years, North Dakota’s economy has averaged an annual growth rate of 10.3 percent, nearly three times that of the nation’s economy,” he added. “We also continue to have the nation’s lowest unemployment rate at just 2.4 percent, and our growing commercial activity has created more than 106,000 new jobs in the past 10 years.”

Dalrymple said North Dakota’s “economic progress has not been confined to oil country,” and pointed out that the state’s population and personal income rates are growing as well.

Chart: Gallup

James Sherk, senior policy analyst in labor economics at The Heritage Foundation, closely follows job growth. He noted that the labor market has slowly recovered since the recession ended. Last year represented a move in a positive direction.

“This recovery stands in marked contrast to the forecasts of Keynesian analysts who predicted that the sequester—a measure of spending restraint—and end of extended unemployment insurance benefits would harm the economy,” Sherk told The Daily Signal. “Instead, the economy has improved.”

Looking ahead, Sherk said government should remove barriers to job creation.

“The states with the fastest job growth have been those that have allowed hydraulic natural gas and oil extraction, with Texas and North Dakota enjoying some of the strongest labor markets in the country,” Sherk said. “New York decided to ban this new energy extraction technique—harming its workers and labor market.”

3 thoughts on “The 10 Best (and Worst) States to Find a Job

  1. NJ is great though if you want to become a retired $100K pensioner at taxpayer expense… https://watchdog.org/200210/nj-100k-pensions-double/

  2. Part of the problem is that they can retire and start collecting. 25 years of work and 40 years of collecting pension.

    Retire whenever you want but wait till age 65 to collect.

  3. https://njpp.org/assets/reports/NJPPPensionBenefitsDecember2014.pdf

    New Jersey Has Modest Public Pension Benefits

    Garden State Ranks 95th in Pension Generosity Out of 100 Top Plans Nationally

    By Stephen Herzenberg1

    While one of the central tenets of repeated calls for major changes to New Jersey’s public pension system is the claim that public employee pensions are overly generous, retirement benefits for the state’s public workers are already among the least generous of all large public-sector pensions in the country, in part because of cuts enacted in the pension reforms of 2011.
    In fact, New Jersey ranks 95th in pension generosity among the country’s 100 largest plans.

    To arrive at a ranking for each plan, we measured three key dimensions of pension generosity: whether the plans offer inflation protection to retirees, how benefits are calculated and the amount employees contribute to their own retirement plans. (For the full methodology, see Appendix A.)
    Here’s how New Jersey gets its low ranking for overall generosity:

     New Jersey retirees have no automatic protection against inflation. While 69 of the 100 largest plans offer retirees some inflation protection, cost-of-living adjustments for New Jersey retirees were suspended indefinitely by the 2011 legislative pension reforms.

     New Jersey uses a very low multiplier. The percentage by which New Jersey calculates state pensions per year of service – known as the multiplier – is among the lowest nationally, at 1.67 percent. This means pensions benefits equal 1.67 percent of final salary multiplied by the number of years of service; 1.67 percent is a lower multiplier than all but 21 of the 100 plans. New Jersey lowered the multiplier from 1.81 percent in 2011.

     New Jersey employees pay more into the system than those in most other systems. New Jersey public employees contribute 6.93 percent of their salaries to their own pensions, more than 55 other plans in the top 100. By 2018, the employee contribution level for New Jersey pensions will rise to 7.5 percent, which is more than employees contribute today in about two-thirds of the top 100 plans.

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