Walker jobs gap at 40,000, to grow tomorrow?

Tomorrow's the long-awaited release of the January Wisconsin jobs report. Now, if the state was a normal part of the U.S.'s 243,000-job increase, we should be in pretty good shape, with a few thousand jobs put back into our state's economy. However, I'd be surprised if we got there, as we saw Wisconsin lead the Midwest in mass layoffs in January, and had tax revenues fall 1.9% vs. January 2011.

And it's not like Wisconsin isn't already massively in the hole in the time of Fitzwalkerstan, as we've shed the most jobs in America the last six months while the country has consistently added 150,000-200,000 private sector jobs each of those months. In fact, if Wisconsin had added jobs at the same rate as the U.S., we'd have had 40,000 more jobs than we had at the end of 2011. What I've done in these two charts is take Wisconsin's January 2011 job totals (when Walker took over), and then (1. show how much we would have gained had we added jobs at the same pace as the rest of the country up through the Jan. 2012 report. Then I (2. Compared it to what we actually got in Fitzwalkerstan through our last job report in December 2011. Once Walker's budget took over on July 1, well, you'll see the result.

Wisconsin vs. U.S.- total jobs


Wisconsin vs. U.S. - private sector jobs


As you can see in both cases, Wisconsin was holding up with the U.S. growth under the Doyle/Dem budget, and ran ahead of the country with the fluky June jobs report that Walker knew was a one-time deal, but took credit for anyway.

And now instead of gaining over 23,000 jobs since June, we've lost 35,000, and what was our advantage now has left us more than 40,000 in the hole for both all jobs as well as the private sector. So now we need to gain 5,200 total jopbs and 5,600 private sector jobs in tomorrow's report JUST TO KEEP FROM FALLING FURTHER BEHIND.

This is the biggest danger of keeping this disastrous administration on any longer than this Summer. Every month we keep from recovering from our Wisconsin recession, we fall further back from a U.S. economy that seems to be not only recovering, but picking up steam. Anything less than several thousand jobs created should be considered another loss for the Walker Administration, and with Friday's U.S. jobs report for February's also predicted to be strong, the Walker jobs deficit will only grow unless things are turned around NOW.

And a pathetic corporate giveaway of a mining bill that's written by industry lobbyists isn't going to be the magic pill, Scotty. Maybe instead of acting like a Confederate low-tax, low-wage, low-skill state, you need to try something that actually improves consumer demand and improves the workers coming into the pipeline.

But since you aren't paid to know that, we'll just get a new governor and a Legislature that does understand these things, and throw your underperforming corporatist asses out.