As a candidate in the 2024 Republican Party presidential primary, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley is boasting of her achievements while she was governor of South Carolina (2011-2017) including lowering unemployment.
Yesterday, in front of a live audience at conservative radio host Erick Erickson‘s annual conference, Haley said that while she was governor, “We took a double-digit unemployment state and turned it into the Beast of the Southeast.”
[Note: While the next President will have much to do, lowering the unemployment rate won’t be a high priority: Under the Biden administration, the current national unemployment rate is 3.5 percent, after hitting an all-time high (14.7 percent, during the COVID lockdown) in April 2020. The lowest unemployment rate on record is 2.5 percent, recorded in 1953.]
We took a double-digit unemployment state and turned it into the Beast of the Southeast. We did it in South Carolina, we’ll do it nationwide! pic.twitter.com/s7wZYnUgA4
— Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaley) August 19, 2023
One of Haley’s effective tactics as Governor, she says, was promising businesses that if they moved to South Carolina “the cost of doing business is going to be low here. We are going to make sure that you have a loyal, willing workforce and we are going to continue to be one of the lowest union-participation states in the country.”
Haley boasts by the time she left the Governor’s office in 2017 (and took on the job of U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. under President Donald Trump), South Carolina was “making planes with Boeing, (making) more BMWs than any place in the world.” The state also brought in manufacturing by Mercedes-Benz, Volvo, and five international tire companies.
When the former Governor recalled her time recruiting businesses she said: “I didn’t want any company to come to South Carolina if they were unionized. We never wanted a unionized company,” the audience applauded. “I didn’t want them to taint our water at all.”
[Note: In 2019, Haley joined the board of directors at Boeing (“earning a minimum annual compensation of $315,000“) but gave up the seat after less than a year because, according to Boeing, she opposed “government aid to help the aircraft manufacturer weather the coronavirus crisis.”]
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