By Jason Tolbert

Simply put, Gov. Mike Beebe has a bad record on job creation. Up for re-election this year, the one-term Democrat has recently tried to finesse the issue by touting “job announcements” instead of the actual employment data.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statics, the federal government’s official scorekeeper, shows that total nonfarm employment in Arkansas has decreased by over 36,000 since Beebe took office. (1,201,000 in January of 2007 to 1,165,000 in June 2010). By comparison, Beebe has the worst jobs record of any Arkansas governor — Democrat or Republican — since the Great Depression.

Over the last 65 years, Democratic Gov. David Pryor fared the best with 5.4 percent growth from 1975 to 1979. Republican Gov. Frank White was the only other governor with negative job growth when jobs fell by 0.8 percent from 1981 to 1983. Beebe’s negative job growth is more than three times that — 2.9 percent on the minus side.

Nonetheless Beebe attempted to frame the issue in a recent campaign video: “Unlike in other states, average family income is on the rise and we are attracting new jobs to our state. Twenty-five thousand new jobs have been announced and counting,” the narrator said.

But even the governor’s finessing is suspect.

According to the Arkansas Economic Development Commission, the agency charged with luring jobs to the state, its own staff isn’t sure about how many of these job announcements, which were often accompanied by huge press events, have become actual jobs. AEDC doesn’t even know how many companies have since pulled back their operations or laid off workers.

But here is a sample of some of Beebe’s “job announcements” that we know have not panned out.

Fort Smith’s planned Mitsubishi Power Systems Plant, which was supposed to employ 400 workers, will likely sit idle because of litigation between General Electric and the Japanese conglomerate over its wind turbine business.

When LM Glasfiber laid-off close to 230 workers last year, the windmill blade company wasn’t required to repay the incentives Beebe awarded to the company for coming to Arkansas.

Man Industries, an Indian pipe maker, scraped its $100 million dollar plant planned for Little Rock that was supposed to employ 300 workers.

Polymarin, a Dutch wind-turbine company, announced last year that it was “putting everything on ice.” Everything was a reference to its $16 million planned plant that was supposed to employ 600 workers.

Beebe’s campaign insists that they kept things from being even worse. His aides counter the governor’s poor jobs record by touting an improved personal income rank, but it doesn’t hold up under close scrutiny.

From 2006-2009, the state did move from 48th to 45th, but Arkansas’ income rank was helped along due to the ill fortunes of other states and his aides didn’t bother pointing out that, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Arkansas’ personal income ranking has dropped back to 47th.

When Ronald Reagan ran for President in 1980, he famously asked Americans, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Beebe’s opponent in November, Jim Keet, may be asking Arkansans the same thing this fall.

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Jason Tolbert is an accountant and conservative political blogger. His blog — The Tolbert Report — is linked at ArkansasNews.com. His e-mail is jason@TolbertReport.com.