Rick Perry’s put his jobs record in Texas at the center of his presidential campaign, but a report in the Wall Street Journal accuses the governor of juking the numbers to build up his signature economic program.
At the center of the claim is Perry’s $440 million Texas Enterprise Fund, which was designed to attract businesses to the state, and the governor’s subsequent claims of the program’s success. One state report from his office in 2011 bragged of creating 12,000 jobs with a $50 million grant to create a Texas A&M Institute for Genomic Medicine. But only ten people work in the new building and the WSJ found that the governor’s numbers used an incredibly broad metric that included jobs in sectors like “dental equipment, fertilizer manufacturing and medical imaging.”
Perry’s campaign told the paper that the figures hadn’t been “verified” yet, but that the program was an overall success.
“Texas is leading the country in job creation because of the policies the governor has put in place, including the Texas Enterprise Fund,” Perry spokesman Mark Miner said.
But others are highly skeptical of its value: a report by Texans For Public Justice in 2010 found that only 11 out of 50 grants issued by the fund were “performing” while a large number had either been cancelled or significantly changed.
