Upon further review, U.S. doing even better, Fitzwalkerstan worse

On my way down to the Super Bowl, the BLS came up with the January 2012 jobs report, and it featured very good economic news, with 243,000 more jobs created in January, and 257,000 in the private sector. It continues a strong last few months after a Summer swoon caused by Teabaggers trying to cause a debt crisis, and the unemployment rate is as low as it's been in nearly 3 years, at 8.3%.

But even more than that, the BLS released revisions to all of the months in 2011, which they do every year. These shouldn't be ignored, and a good example is when a review 2 years ago showed that the country lost 1 million more jobs in the 2007-2009 recession than what was previously thought. Well, the revisions went the other way this year, as page 5 shows, 2011 addedd 266,000 more jobs than we previously knew, which means in January 2012 we were actually 500,000 jobs better than what was in the report released last month, and over 2 million jobs better than 12 months ago. Not a full-fledged boom, but certainly a steady recovery and one that seems to be picking up steam.

Which makes Wisconsin's pathetic job performance for the last half of 2011 even worse. Look at the gap that continues to widen between Wisconsin and the U.S. since Walker took office in January 2011.

Wisconsin vs. U.S., 2011-2012

If Wisconsin had merely kept up with what the country did as a whole, we would have added 35,950 total jobs between January and December, and 42,350 in the private sector, which wouldn't have put us too far behind Walker's goal of 250,000 jobs in 4 years. But unfortunately, we do have Scott Walker as governor, and so here's the result.

Walker job gap, 2011
Wis. actual total job performance- -4,500 (GAP: 40,450)
Wis. private sector job performance- +2,200 (GAP 40,150)

That's right, WALKER POLICIES HAVE COST US OVER 40,000 JOBS. This is really hard to do, but then again, it's not every day when a governor is so arrogant, corrupt and incompetent that a million people sign recall petitions against him, either.

The failures in Fitzwalkerstan are also reflected in Wisconsin's lag in manufacturing growth (Wisconsin's largest sector of jobs), which was picking up in the rest of America while Wisconsin was diving for most of the 2nd half of 2011.

Manufacturing jobs 2011-2012


Shoot, who needs reasons like the first conviction in Walkergate or illegal deceit and secrecy in redisdtricting to take Walker and the WisGOPs out of power, when their disastrous results in job loss in a time of U.S. growth should be enough on its own.