Economist Menzie Chinn, Professor of Public Affairs and Economics at the Robert M. La Follette School of Public Affairs, University of Wisconsin – Madison has an article up this morning puts Scott Walker's "Actual" jobs numbers in context.
With graphs and formulas Professor Chinn has painstakingly analyzed the data released by the Walker campaign and compared it to the original jobs numbers released last month and similar national data. His conclusion:
...even with the numbers provided by Governor Walker's Administration, historical correlations between the NFP series and the QCEW show a lackluster performance in the Wisconsin labor market, with employment essentially stagnant since April 2011.
h/t to
Phil Scarr over at Blogging Blue who writes:
This last point, that other data support the assertion that Wisconsin’s economy continues to suffer, is perhaps the most important. Scott Walker’s thinly veiled attempt to hoodwink the voters with out-of-context data is just so much political theater. There is no substance to them. They are an illusion.
Did you get that? Even if you take Walker's numbers at face value and accept them as real they still show that the Wisconsin jobs outlook is shitty.
9:00 AM PT: From Jud Lounsbury at Uppity Wisconsin:
While it is true that there are indeed different BLS surveys, it is also true that all of these surveys are done uniformly the same in each state. So, if one survey is off-the-mark, as Walker is claiming, then its going to be off-the-mark by the same proportions for every state. (...snip...)The only relevent statistic is how Wisconsin compares to other states in job growth and even Scott Walker and his team of Kremlin economists aren't claiming that their set of statistics changes the fact that Wisconsin ranks dead last in job growth.