Walker spin on jobs- more lies and failures

Thanks to James Rowen, I got this heads-up on more Twitter spin from Gov. Walker's office.

@GovWalker- From 2007-10, WI lost more than 150,000 private sector jobs. From Jan - Oct 2011, WI added more than 20,000 private sector jobs.

I suppose the point that Walker and co. are trying to make is that somehow Jim Doyle and the Dems were responsible for the large job losses from 2007-2010, and that Walker and the WisGOPs were the ones who turned around Wisconsin's job losses in the last 9 months. Seems laughable enough on its face, given Wisconsin's last-in-the-nation "honors" for job growth in the last 4 months, and the charts showing Wisconsin falling behind the rest of the country under Walker, but let's take a closer look and see what we have.

Well, the numbers seem close enough to reality (I'll even allow Scotty his 20,000 "private sector job growth" claim, although half of that was in the month of January, before he "dropped the bomb" on public employees). But as is typical in Walker World, key context is not mentioned. And the big context here is how the U.S. economy dropped its own bomb on American jobs, and we should look at how Wisconsin compared to the rest of the country. We'll use the 12-month change from December of each of these years.

Job growth Wisconsin and U.S., 2007-2010
2007 - Wis. +0.43%, U.S. +0.80% (Wis. -0.37% vs. U.S.)
2008 - Wis. -1.71%, U.S. -2.61% (Wis. +0.90%)

In 2008, Wisconsin elected the Dems to control of both houses of the Legislature, and they passed a budget in the face of a massive budget deficit and job losses in June 2009, let's see how they did.

2009 - Wis. -4.74%, U.S. -3.77% (Wis. -0.97%)
2010 - Wis. +1.40%, U.S. +0.73% (Wis. +0.67%)

So the collapsing Wisconsin economy had stabilized under the Doyle/ Dem budget, and were adding jobs at almost twice the national rate in 2010. Walker took office in the midst of these recovering times in January 2011, and has thrown it into reverse, even as the rest of the country keeps adding jobs.

2011 All jobs Wis. +0.13%, U.S. +0.91% (Wis. -0.78%)
Private sector Wis. 0.38%, U.S. +1.33% (Wis. -0.95%)

So when Scotty and his minions throw Tweets out like Friday's spin, remind them that we are lagging the U.S. badly, and losing as badly as we were 2 years ago. Unfortunately, we don't have a Dem-controlled Legislature or Governor that will make the moves necessary to turn that around and get us back on track.

Hmmm, sounds like we might need to put in Dem legislators and a Dem governor in 2012 to get moving again, doesn't it?