Just when Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker thought he might have turned a corner - Wisconsin actually created jobs in January and February of 2012 after having the worst job creation numbers in the nation for 2011 - the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics just released national job figures for March, 2012 and Wisconsin once again landed at or near the bottom in many categories.
The state's Department of Workforce Development actually released the Wisconsin job numbers yesterday* so we already knew Wisconsin had lost 4,500 jobs, most of them in the private sector. Now we know how Wisconsin compares to the rest of the states. In short, Wisconsin's economy is going down the toilet. It's one thing to lose jobs when the whole country is experiencing a major recession. It's quite another to continue shedding jobs after most of the country has shown small but sustained growth for two years.
*The Secretary of the DWD waited until after Scott Walker's photo op at a Brookfield, Wisconsin factory yesterday morning before issuing a comically absurd press release (which hid the job losses on page 2.)
The following tidbits are from today's national Bureau of Labor Statistics press release:
The largest over-the-month decrease in employment occurred
in Ohio (-9,500), followed by New Jersey (-8,600) and Wisconsin (-4,500)...
The largest over-the-year percentage decrease in
employment occurred in Wisconsin (-0.9 percent).
So how can Wisconsin's
unemployment rate continue to go down while the number of employed also goes down? Simple. The workforce is shrinking. People are bailing out. They are leaving the state, or finding jobs in neighboring states and commuting, or retiring earlier than planned to protect pensions. Many have run out their unemployment benefits and have given up looking for work, so they aren't counted.
This table is the most shocking of all. The only statistically significant decrease over the past year in the number of workers employed was in Wisconsin:
So, this morning I have the radio on and I hear an economist from the University of Wisconsin barely acknowledge that taking hundreds of dollars a month out of the paychecks of tens of thousands of public employees might have an impact on the economy, but that the real problem is the "uncertainty" about the upcoming recall elections. I almost fell over laughing. He actually said that people aren't buying cars or hiring more workers because they are "uncertain" about what's going to happen in the recalls.
Well, yeah, sure that iceberg was a problem for the Titanic, but the reason people died was because they were uncertain about which waltz the orchestra on the deck was going to play next so they hesitated to climb into the lifeboats.
It's the austerity, stupid. My family is doing OK. We're healthy and we have two people working, but my public school teacher wife took a very large cut in her take home pay this year. You want to know why we aren't going out to the local restaurants? Why I haven't purchased new clothes in a long time? Why we aren't taking a family vacation? Why I'm still driving my 1995 Saturn with the check engine light blazing? It's because we don't have money for those things, and I have a son going to college in the fall. I'm uncertain about how we're going to pay for that, but somehow we will.
My son will be attending the University of Wisconsin. I should find out the name of that UW economist I heard on the radio earlier and advise my son to avoid taking a class from that dumbass Kool-Aid drinker.
Oh, and that photo-op by Walker yesterday? He was at that factory to announce that the company was eligible to receive a $300,000 welfare check tax credit from the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation. That's the secretive public/private entity created by Walker to dole out taxpayer funds with almost no oversight from the legislature or the taxpayers. The big fat check, according to Walker, will result in 35 jobs.
It's Working! (end snark)