Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker says his Department of Workforce Development (DWD) will issue a report later this week claiming that 2011 was a better year for job creation in Wisconsin than has been previously reported. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports have consistently placed Wisconsin at or near the bottom in job creation since Scott Walker’s first budget was implemented in July, 2011.
Walker is facing a recall election on June 5th. In the past couple weeks, Walker has also announced that his administration will be investing millions of dollars to revitalize a downtown section of Milwaukee (don’t hold your breath, Milwaukee), and that he and his Department of Administration magically fixed a budget deficit and now project a surplus (they did this largely with wishful thinking and by delaying some debt payments.) Any day now, the Department of Agriculture, Trade, and Consumer Protection will announce that Wisconsin cows will start shitting candy bars.
My predictions about Walker's rewrite are below the holy orange hand-grenade...
I can almost guarantee what Walker’s new “jobs report” will look like. There will be no new numbers, just an emphasis on old numbers misrepresented as showing job growth and a de-emphasis on numbers that show job losses. Walker's DWD will claim that the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics produces two conflicting reports on jobs, that one of the reports shows job growth while the other shows job losses. Then, they will say that some new (not really) statistics prove that the BLS report showing “job growth” is accurate, while the BLS report showing “job losses” (or a much smaller amount of growth, depending on the time frame Walker chooses) is not accurate. Walker and his DWD Secretary will mumble some stuff about unemployment claims not rising quickly, and they will point out that the unemployment rate in Wisconsin is going down, and that all of these things “prove” that Walker is a wee bit closer to his campaign promise of 250,000 new jobs in Wisconsin by the end of 2014.
The problem is, the report that Walker favors does not measure the number of jobs in Wisconsin. It measures the number of Wisconsin residents who report having worked during the reporting period. It is an employment report, not a jobs report.
But isn't that the same thing, you ask? No, it's not. The reports do not contradict each other because they do not measure the same thing. The Walker administration, and right-wing hacks disguised as journalists or policy analysts, consistently and purposely misrepresent that the number of Wisconsin residents working is the same as the number of jobs in Wisconsin. It’s not. Lots of southeastern Wisconsin residents commute to Chicago to work. Lots more on the other side of the state commute to the twin cities in Minnesota. Those people are (properly) counted as employed on the Wisconsin employment report, but their jobs are (properly) not counted on the Wisconsin jobs report.
Lots of Wisconsinites also work more than one Wisconsin job. If the worker working two jobs has one job eliminated, that job is subtracted from the “jobs” report, but since the person is still working, that person is not subtracted from the “employment” report.
There are others, but those are the main differences between the jobs report and the employment report. What it boils down to is that the following statements are both true:
There were 23,900 fewer non-farm jobs in Wisconsin in March, 2012 than there were in March, 2011.
18,500 more Wisconsin residents were working in March, 2012 than in March, 2011.
It is a worthwhile endeavor to analyze what might seem like conflicting data, but the answer is not to simply ignore the data you don’t like, which is what Scott Walker wants to do.
Scott Walker promised the creation of 250,000 new jobs in Wisconsin, so it makes sense to use the statistics that measure jobs to evaluate Walker’s performance. (Even if we were to use the employment report that is often misinterpreted as a jobs report, Walker would still be so far behind on his goal that it’s accurate to say his policies have been a total failure to this point.)
Walker and the DWD already know the April, 2012 numbers which will also be released later this week. It sounds like the DWD’s doctored-up job numbers for 2011 will be released along with or just before the newest job numbers for April 2012 are announced. This tells me that the job numbers for April are probably another loser for Walker and that he wants to deflect attention from them.
Will Walker’s fake job reports help him? Probably. Not because anything is different, but because most of the stenographers who occupy the press room at the state capitol are too lazy or just too dumb to learn what the numbers measure. There will be some headlines saying “State Says Job Creation in 2011 Better than First Reported”, even though the report will contain nothing new and will be based on a false premise. The stenographers will read a few lines from the executive summary. They will seek a comment from the campaign of Tom Barrett, Walker’s opponent in the recall. The stenographers will then print the highlights of the executive summary next to the Barrett campaign’s comments and pat themselves on the back for being all fair and balanced without having actually read the report or dissected its lies. They are starting already.
Mind you, these are only my predictions, but I’ve seen this movie before. My track record is pretty good on this stuff. When “The Titanic” was re-released in 3D, I predicted that the ship would still sink. I haven’t seen it, but I’ll bet I’m right.