Below is the statement of New Jersey Policy Perspective president Gordon MacInnes on today’s release of August jobs and unemployment data.

The latest jobs numbers for New Jersey merely reaffirm the basic fact that we’ve known for months: we are recovering from the Great Recession much more slowly than the rest of the nation.

The increase in New Jersey’s unemployment rate to 9.9 percent comes the day after New Jersey lost out to New York City for the location of 234 high-value pharmaceutical research jobs. These are the kind of jobs we need to capture if we are to put the state on the path to prosperity. Here’s what we can be sure of: Roche didn’t pick NYC because of its low tax rates. Yet, both the governor and legislative leadership are obsessed with tax cuts as the only response to high unemployment.

Instead, they should follow the priorities of the billionaire mayor of New York who obsesses with creating the infrastructure and culture to attract research, engineering, and software jobs. So far, he’s winning.