Walker Wrecks Wisconsin as State Plunges to 44th in Private Sector Job Growth

How’s that union busting for job creation thingie working out? Oh, a nice, slow, painful race to the bottom.

Remember when Scott Walker promised 250,000 additional private sector jobs if only the voters would elect him Governor of Wisconsin? Well, they did but he hasn’t delivered. Wisconsin has fallen again, according to a U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics report. They are now at 44 out of 50 states for private sector job growth from September 2011 to September 2012.

For years, Walker has been manipulating numbers in order to hide the truth, but today’s report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the final nail in his job creation shell game.

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From September 2011 to September 2012, employment increased in 276 of the 328 largest U.S. counties, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. But in Wisconsin, private sector job growth trails the nation.

Just to make things clear, the Milwuakee/Wisconsin Journal Sentinel pointed out, “The gap between private-sector job growth in Wisconsin and growth nationally has increased substantially since 2010.”

Furthermore:

For example, Wisconsin ranked 11 among the 50 states in 2010 in private-sector job growth. But it dropped to 38 in 2011. The accompanying table shows the long-term trend and is based on the quarterly census data.

Wisconsin ranked 44 out of the 50 states in private-sector job creation, according to the latest available government jobs data deemed credible by economists.

The data also shows that wages in the manufacturing sector (a large segment of employment in Wisconsin) dropped more than national wages, leaving the “Open for Business” state ranking 46.

This is nothing new for Walker. It’s hardly an anomaly — in fact, it is part of a consistent trend downward since he took office, and he is faring worse than most other states, shooting down the argument that the recession is to blame for Wisconsins’s relative placement nationally.

In May of 2012, after Wisconsin suffered the largest job losses in the nation, Walker tried to change the numbers game so that his state wouldn’t be compared to other states, because again, the numbers were shooting a rather big hole in his promise that he knew how to create jobs.

Walker is rejecting the CES monthly employment series, which is an economic indicator of current economic trends each month, together with the unemployment rate. These numbers are inputs to many gauges of the U.S. economy including the overall health of the economy (employment).

This is the measurement Scott Walker has decided does not apply to his job numbers. In other words, he feels his economy should be given special privilege, in order to avoid being measured by the same measurement as the rest of the country. It’s economic affirmative action and distortion of the financials, courtesy of the conservative Governor.

The CES numbers used by every other state don’t look good for Walker and he tried to blame the protesters for his failed policies, but that narrative didn’t stick. So, he decided to spin his policies by using only one measurement, the Current Population Survey also provided by the DOL. These numbers are subject to a larger margin of error due to smaller sample size.

Then Forbes named Wisconsin one of the worst states for business, somehow claiming that because they weren’t a “right-to-work” state they are flailing, when in reality, Walker’s union busting policies have had plenty of time to attract business, per the Right wing claim. But they haven’t.

We could call this leading from behind. Certainly this won’t look good on Walker’s resume for Presidential candidate in 2016, but then, if the conservative base is so willing to overlook the gross criminal activity in both of his administrations (some of which led to convictions), they probably won’t give a hoot that his austerity for the people corporate giveaway plan has proven to be an epic failure for job creation.

Sarah Jones

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Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.

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