Friday, October 7, 2011

New U.S. job data shows Wisconsin further behind under Walker

While it's nowhere near enough to get our economy back on strong footing, today's jobs report is a good sign that we're not yet over the cliff. The big assist to me isn't the 103,000 in jobs created in September, but the 99,000 additional jobs mentooned in the last 2 months of revisions. So we're up 202,000 jobs compared to where we thought last month, an even 1.5 million jobs created for the last 12 months, and 1.78 million in the private sector. So despite the Tea Baggers' best efforts to derail things this summer, we continue to be in a slow growth scenario, even if much of that growth isn't going to the vast majority of Americans.

But these new numbers also makes Wisconsin's sliding job numbers look even worse. Look at the July and August's numbers, and it's horrifying. Let's plug the new numbers using a similar comparison I made last month, and you'll see the U.S. is adding jobs while Wisconsin has collapsed.

Change in Jobs July-August 2011
U.S. +0.14% overall, +0.20% private
Wis. -0.31% overall, -0.49% private

But wait! What about the "half of the nation" (really 20% of the nation's total) job increase in June for Wisconsin? OK, let's put it in there.

Change in Jobs June, July + August 2011
U.S. +0.16% overall, +0.27% private
Wis. +0.08% overall, +0.14% private

U.S. jobs are still growing at twice the rate of Wisconsin. And that's not taking into account the huge amounts of retirements and cutbacks in the teaching profession in Wisconsin that will show in September's job numbers. Ruh roh, Scotty.

And Wisconsin's going to have to do a lot of work to catch up to the nation's trend for September. They'd have to add 14,700 jobs overall and 19,100 in the private sector to match the 3-month trend for the U.S. Guess what, that ain't happening, and I'd be stunned if it was 1/4 of that.

Don't know how much more you need as proof (well, you'll get more when the budget deficit shows up in the next month, but I digress). This state has lost the edge it had last year, and has fallen behind the growth in the rest of the country since Scott Walker and the WisGOPs took over. To paraphrase the president, it's not just an opinion, it's MATH. So drop these losers and get the state back on the right track.

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