As we enter election season, political parties will again ready their claims about what’s up and what’s down in the economy and why that should cause voters to fill in Bubble A or Bubble B (or, in certain markets, Bubble C).
Those, of course, are arguments dressed as descriptions, based on a whole bunch of funky assumptions.
On Monday, the magazine Governing ranked Maine 28th in a list of state economic performance based on a variety of variables. Forbes has regularly, and notably, ranked Maine dead last, which has gotten the lion’s share of the attention.
At their best, those efforts to rank and categorize are attempts to understand, contextualize and investigate what’s happening where. But there’s no one number to sum up how the economy is working for everyone.
GDP last year in Maine was up 0.4 percent. Up! But manufacturing was way down.Per capita income was up, too, with more total income spread across a relatively stagnant population. It doesn’t mean everyone’s pockets got fatter.