Scotty's a job-killer- the rest of the story

The April release of jobs info from the Wisconsin DWD has a few other interesting kinks to it, in addition to the obvious headline that is the continued failure of Scott Walker's policies (as outlined in the first part from earlier Thursday).

The first is where a huge amount of the revisions from March comes from. Now Scotty's TeaBag supporters might say the data isn't as bad as advertised, but the major reason that may be so is because of STATE GOVERNMENT JOBS BEING REVISED UP BY 6,600! And when compared with last year, Mr. "Small Government", Scott Walker has actually added 900 jobs to state government since Act 10 was passed in March 2011. It proves once and for all that Walker's not about cutting state government spending, he's just about cutting where that money goes (look at all the money he's giving away to the road builders).

Where government has been cut has been at the local level, by 10,500, and that's your cops, road workers, and teachers. And again, this is by design by the Walker boys, because the goal is to cut funding to local communities without giving them any way to make it up other than privatizing and cutting services, all while telling people that Walker's policies had nothing to do with it. The cynicism of such a move is beyond disgusting, but par for the course for an Administation that thinks the average Wisconsinite is a stupid as the average talk show listener.

Also worth mentioning is the drop in manufacturing jobs by 1,300 for April, which happened despite a nationwide increase in manufacturing jobs in the same month. This is especially concerning since Wisconsin is tied with Indiana for having the highest percentage of its jobs in manufacturing out of any state. But even in this important metric, Wisconsin lags behind the nation, with fewer jobs in the sector than there was before Walker's budget was signed in June, and that's while manufacturing has made a steady comeback under President Obama.

The other drop worth mentioning is the collapse in construction work, which is down by a seasonally-adjusted 6,000 jobs in the last 2 months (due to slower than usual seasonal hiring), and 7,300 since Act 10 was signed in March 2011. Hmm, you think that cutting the take-home pay of hundreds of thousands of public sector workers might put a crimp in the home-building and road-work market? Of course it does, and now you're seeing the results.

There are other sectors to go after in this report, including the slower-than-normal seasonal hiring in the "Hospitality" sectors (resulting in a seasonally-adjusted "loss" of 5,000 in April), which bodes poorly for the upcoming tourism season. But the bottom line is that the failure of Scott Walker's policies cut across numerous sectors, and it has rendered this Wisconsin austerity experiment as a setback that has hit this state in almost every corner. And unless we stop it on June 5, it'll only get worse.

P.S. Here's great work from UW Professor Menzie Chinn further showing how dreadful Walker's record truly is, and how BS his "new jobs metric?" is.