On Wednesday, Scott Walker delivered his 2013-15 Budget Address. Others have covered the school voucher expansion, the below-inflation education "increase" that leads to net zero extra funding because of caps, kicking people off of Badgercare and calling it helping them achieve independence, the insulting #TacoBelltaxcut (named after what you can afford with it if your income is high enough) and decrying the Federal government as being an unreliable funder of expanded Medicaid as justification for refusing it while simultaneously requiring the Federal government to be a reliable subsidizer of private insurance on the Obamacare exchanges in order to make his plan work enhance his Tea Party creds.
I'm going to instead look way down his Budget in Brief where on page 81 is this table including past and projected state job totals:

The data listed under 'actual' is the average of the 12 monthly seasonally adjusted CES reports for each year and regularly appears in Wisconsin budgets - or at least it did until the 2012 value. That is not from the CES historical data, but rather is a projection from the Fall 2012 Wisconsin Economic Outlook report:

The actual average seasonally-adjusted CES value for 2012 is 2,728,500. To be sure, CES data displayed an anomalous drop in 2011 that makes this suspect (more details about that below), but sorry Governor Walker, you're not allowed to pretend that job projections are actual values.
But beyond that, the change from 2011 to 2015 that Walker's Budget in Brief projects is a four-year gain of 147,500 jobs - nowhere near his oft-repeated 250,000 promise and one which includes some of a more bountiful 2015 than 2011 ever was.
Now, that's total jobs, not the private jobs promised and just between annual averages at that. So delving deeper into the projections in the Wisconsin Economic Outlook produced by the Walker Administration's Department of Revenue, at the end of 2012 we're looking at about 2,368,050 private nonfarm jobs (by averaging the 2012Q4 and 2013Q1 values given). By averaging the 2014 and 2015 values given, we should be at 2,450,450 at the end of 2014.
The absolute values here may be wrong, but since it's only the increase we're interested in we can do some subtraction to see that roughly 82,400 more jobs are projected over the course of 2013 and 2014.
Since we have final QCEW numbers for 2011 (+29,800) and preliminary CES values for 2012 (+9,700 - you'll have to subtract government from total to get private - I'll go into why they're credible after the jump).
Add them all up and that's about 121,900 private sector jobs forecast for Walker's first term: the Walker Administration's own data and projections show that we'll be lucky if he gets halfway to fulfilling his promise.
On Friday the news was dumped that during September 2011 - September 2012 Wisconsin gained a mere 20,481 private sector jobs. That previous DWD releases of preliminary QCEW data have been on a Wednesday or Thursday should hint how bad this is. This is a 12-month gain of 0.9% vs 1.5% in the 12 months up to June 2012.
You're probably familiar by now with Wisconsin's placing of 42nd in private sector job growth among the states for the 12 months leading up to June 2012, down from the 11th place that we were in prior to Walker's inauguration.
Without other states' QCEW numbers, we don't have a September 2011 - September 2012 ranking yet. What we do already have is the CES national growth rates estimates for the 12 months to June 2012 and to September 2012 - these were 2.2% and 2.0% respectively. If this is reflected uniformly across other states' growth rates then we'll see ourselves in 46th or 47th place when their Q3 numbers come out.
The other ghastly news there is that total wages are down from 2011Q3 to 2012Q3 - the corresponding private sector weekly wage being $770 which you can compare to historical values here. That's a Q3 year-on-year drop for the first time since 2009. However, when one considers Midwestern inflation this represents the second greatest annual drop in private sector Wisconsin weekly wages of any quarter in at least the last ten years (only Walker's first year in office was worse).
Total private sector wages in real terms are down 2.9% annually, which bodes ill for subsequent demand and jobs (for comparison, real total wages in Wisconsin were dropping 5% annually during 2009).
Now, I promised above that I would explain about CES and why it's credible indicator of the 2012 jobs picture even if it was off in 2011.
First, a little background
CES (Current Employment Statistics) is based upon a national survey of employers augmented with statistical modelling and UI analysis that produces values monthly, which is great if we're trying to get a current picture since it comes with a seasonally-adjusted version.
QCEW (Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages) is based upon payroll reporting by employers, has no seasonal adjustments and isn't usually released until 6 or 7 months after the end of the quarter. Which is great if we need an accurate long-term view. Employment statisticians will always use QCEW where available.
CES, QCEW and Wisconsin
In Wisconsin we were all made familiar with the difference by Scott Walker when he decided that the 2011 job losses indicated by CES (-33,900 at the time, since revised to -9,700) didn't look as good as the modest gains indicated by QCEW data +23,321 at the time, since revised to +29,800) and so as is his m.o. used state resources for political gain to bring the latter out a few months early, less than 3 weeks before the recall election. Then lied that the BLS had verified these preliminary numbers.
While the basic idea is sound, Walker was replacing an apocalyptic data series with a merely catastrophic one. The data swallowed by his supporters as demonstrating his economic prowess actually showed Wisconsin in 38th place in 2011 (down from 11th in 2010 as I've mentioned) when other states' data was reported - a detail only available a safe few months after the election.
So if QCEW trends were so different than CES's in 2011, why believe CES in 2012?
As mentioned, CES has a seasonally unadjusted version. If we take the difference from that to the QCEW monthly data so far in order to see if trends in CES data are reflected in trends in QCEW data when they come out (the flatter the chart, the better CES anticipates QCEW), we get the following:

So the difference is rather stable until the middle of 2011 when it took a dive to a new equilibrium over the latter half of that year. In particular, unadjusted CES shows 39,500 more jobs in September 2012 than December 2011. QCEW shows 42,173 more over the same period (it's a seasonal thing), so CES has been following it closely this year so far. With 2012Q3 being the last quarter where annual changes include the 2011 anomaly, there won't be an appreciable difference to highlight, and the "actual jobs data" news releases will no doubt continue to be buried on Fridays or be allowed to fade away, having served their purpose already.
Preliminary CES pegs Wisconsin 2012 private sector job growth at 9,700 or 0.4%, good for 49th place if it holds up and other states uniformly follow the annual national CES trend from Q2 into Q4 with their QCEW figures. The statistical error bars in CES data are about 10,000 either way, so it is yet possible that we'll hold on to an annual rate of 20,000 in 2012 as a whole and find ourselves ranked in the mid-40s. That's about as good a spin as I can put on the economic news with a straight face.
Before the recall election Walker told us that if he won, "like a rocket, you'll see businesses hiring."
His next performance review is scheduled for November 2014.
Mon Mar 04, 2013 at 2:11 AM PT: The Current Population Survey has been revised (n.b. linking to seasonally-unadjusted numbers there; seasonally adjusted figures here). CPS is a survey of households, unlike the QCEW and CES which study businesses. It's most commonly known for producing the unemployment rate figures. While its employment total is not directly comparable to CES or QCEW, it is trying to measure something similar, i.e. the number of Wisconsinites with some kind of job, as opposed to the number of filled jobs in Wisconsin. As a result they tend to have similar trends.
The newly-revised seasonally-unadjusted figures show a 23,043 drop in the number of employed Wisconsinites from September - December 2012, compared to the CES drop of 16,200 total jobs. Which is another independent indicator that 2012Q4 was a bad one for Wisconsin.