As a long-suffering Titans fan, I’ve been looking forward to the season ahead and thinking back on the 2020 season. That’s when Derrick Henry was named Offensive Player of the Year and put up more than 2,000 rushing yards—and the Titans went on to win the Superbowl.
Oh, wait. They lost in the first round of the playoffs.
Monster rushing yards don’t necessarily translate to the most wins. A single statistic—good or bad—doesn’t tell the whole story.
Our Republican state leaders love waving the big foam finger over a single statistic. When Tennessee had the highest GDP growth in the country a couple of years back, Gov. Lee turned it into a political tagline: Leading the Nation.
Are we, though?
Tennessee’s gross domestic product is the value of the finished goods and services produced here. If our GDP is growing fast, that means businesses are moving or expanding here at a good clip, and workers are busting their humps.
That’s great for those businesses. But is it great for Tennesseans?
The answer should be yes. Ideally, an extremely lucrative business shouldn’t just provide jobs. As a user of public infrastructure, it should pay taxes that help fund public schools and public hospitals and public services. Healthier, better-educated people have a better chance of reaching the middle class. So do their children. Corporate investment in a community can have generational impact.
Is that what’s happening in Tennessee? The same year that our GDP growth was number one, here were some of our other stats, with 1 being best and 50 being worst:
41st for median household income
42nd for food insecurity
42nd for people with delinquent auto loans
44th for people with medical debt in collections
44th for financial well-being
44th for hourly wages for women
47th for hourly wages for high school graduates.
49th for bankruptcy
All those stats, good and bad, tell a story about bad government policies. We’re luring wealthy corporations here with huge tax breaks and cheap labor, and the profits aren’t trickling down. Tennessee will never lead the nation when so many Tennesseans are falling behind.
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