Idaho Continues to Buck National Trend on the Economy

May 8, 2024

Idaho Continues to Buck National Trend on the Economy

“Idaho’s job market has remained remarkably robust since September 2023, maintaining a steady unemployment rate of 3.3%. Excluding the immediate post-pandemic period of 2020-2021, Idaho has not had an annual unemployment rate of over 4% since 2014,” according to an Idaho Department of Labor news release. Also in the same week, Gov. Brad Little sent out a news release commenting on the jump in average hourly wages by 8.3% from 2022 to 2023. “Other states’ economies are lagging while Idaho’s job market and economy keeps surging ahead. Why? Because employers and businesses see what Idaho has to offer – lower taxes, fewer regulations, an enthusiastic workforce, and a high quality of life,” said the governor. “Other states have seen that Idaho practices what it preaches about healthy economies,” said Suzanne Budge, Idaho state director for NFIB. “The most recent example of this was the governor’s signing of House Bill 428, which reduces the unemployment insurance taxes that employers pay by 20%. Compare that to the mess California has created for itself by having a $20 billion debt with the federal government for loans it took out to shore up its unemployment insurance trust fund and which employers are now paying interest on, while the state has done nothing to pay down the principal.” Another area of the economy Idaho has excelled in is in the state’s minimum wage rate. Wisely, it links the state’s rate with the federal government’s rate so that businesses can plan expanding and hiring more workers with a degree of certainty that fixed costs will remain the same over time. “Again, California is instructive for what not to do,” said Budge, and that is make the minimum wage a political issue not an economic one. As a result, its recent law boosting the rate $20 an hour for fast-food workers has let to immediate scaling back of hours for current employees and, in a lot of cases, business closures. Also as a result the fast-food industry in California has now shifted into high gear in a bid to replace workers with AI-driven [artificial intelligence] kiosks.” Policy matters, and matters big, according to Budge. “As illogical as this might seem, as long as we can resist the temptation to do something, the better off we’ll be economically. All economies respond to realities not appearances.”