The Capital Times has a story today that says everything you need to know about the total failure of Walkernomics in Wisconsin:
...going back two years, Wisconsin is No. 50 in percentage change, with an actual decline of 15,900 jobs since January 2011.
Wisconsin governor Scott Walker recently
acknowledged to Wisconsin Public Radio that his promise of creating 250,000 private sector jobs by 2015 will be tough to meet. As usual, he took full responsibility for his failure by saying it was caused by his lack of planning, his ignorance of how the economy works, his divisive political style, and his preoccupation with hoarding money from out-of-state corporate donors.
Just kidding. He blames protesters, recall elections, and Obamacare.
His admission came around the same time the Republican speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly shoved Walker under a herd of Holsteins by telling attendees of a press club gathering:
“Governor Walker made that promise. Assembly Republicans — we did not make that promise.”
Walker’s public relations strategy up until recently was to embrace any government job survey that showed job growth while discrediting any survey that reported job losses. Sometimes he even flip-flopped on the same survey, depending on that month’s results.
We're number 50 in job creation! That news is so shocking that the Sta-Puf Marshmallow Man turned orange and fainted right in the middle of my diary. Hop over him to read more about Wisconsin's employment woes.
The Capital Times has started tracking the numbers in their own database , probably because it’s become almost impossible to decipher the increasingly Orwellian monthly press releases from Wisconsin’s Department of Workforce Development (DWD). After Walker’s numbers started to go south, the DWD started quoting different surveys than the ones traditionally used. Then they began issuing numbers before they had even been vetted by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. I myself had been writing monthly updates on Wisconsin’s employment figures for another blog based on the information released by the DWD, but when it became clear that the DWD had given up any pretense of accuracy or consistency, I gave up.
From the Capital Times:
The numbers in the Cap Times database are from the BLS "current employment survey" or CES, a monthly survey of about 3 percent of employers in a state.
Those CES figures have been criticized by the Walker administration for not offering a true reflection of the economic condition in the state.
Rather, state officials have been citing the QCEW — quarterly census of employment and wages — which is data from 96 percent of employers, also produced by the BLS.
The most recent QCEW didn’t show Wisconsin faring a whole lot better, however. The state was No. 42 in job growth from June 2011 to June 2012 using that data.
…
Actually, the Walker administration did embrace the CES figures in June 2011 when it showed Wisconsin adding 12,900 jobs, one of the best monthly performances of any state.
Gov. Scott Walker and several Republican legislators even gathered for a press conference, where one lawmaker wrongly claimed that Wisconsin had created half the new jobs in the entire country that month.
Since then, the administration has not made much mention of the monthly jobs numbers.
As grim as it looks, though, all is not lost. The Assembly is voting today on a mining bill already passed by the State Senate that will allow a giant strip mine just upstream from Lake Superior and the Bad River Indian Reservation. If the bill (which was written by the mining company that wants to dig the hole) passes and is signed into law by Governor Walker, Wisconsin can look forward to 750 jobs over a period of thirty years. Yowza! That's a lot of jobs. And all it will cost us is the destruction of several thousand acres of pristine wetlands, some pollution in the worlds largest fresh-water lake, and a slew of lawsuits from the Bad River Chippewa, the EPA, and the Army Corps of Engineers.
