Trend still not Walker's friend

Given a lot of the "1 year ago" look-backs at the Wisconsin Uprising, I wanted to update a chart I threw out here a few weeks back. Basically, this compares Wisconsin's unemployment claims with the rest of the U.S., and we can pretty much give a long-range comparison with Wisconsin under the Doyle/Dem budget and policies in early 2010-early 2011 (marked in blue), and in the 1 year since Walker "dropped the bomb" in early February (marked in red). And in this chart, you do not want to be rising, because it means your unemployment claims are rising faster (or falling slower) than the U.S. as a whole.

Wisconsin vs. U.S. weekly unemployment claims, 2010-2012


You read that correctly, we've done worse than the Doyle-Dem budget almost every week since Scotty "dropped the bomb", and are now consistently doing worse than the rest of the nation (as shown as the trendline going above 0 in the last few weeks).

Daniel Gross of Yahoo! Finance also reminds us of another way that Wisconsin's lagging behind the rest of the nation - when it comes to revenue growth. While Gross notes that federal revenues were up 3.5% last month vs. January 2011, the Wisconsin LFB said last week that Wisconsin's January revenues were DOWN 2.1% vs. January 2011. Likewise, while Gross notes the U.S. deficit is down 16.3% vs. this time last year, the LFB revealed a Wisconsin deficit of just over 1% (meaning 1% over the "balanced" budget) last week, and more than 2% below last year's SURPLUS under the Doyle/Dem budget.

And you wonder why Obama will do better than Walker in this state in the elections over the next few months? Despite what Walker World tries to tell you, results do matter, and lack of results also matter.