Wednesday, August 29, 2012

No matter what they say in Tampa, it still ain't working in Wisconsin

Saw our fair governor was making the rounds at the RNC in Tampa and getting a big ovation from the oligarchs and nutjobs that make up your typical RNC delegates. I didn't care to watch Scotty's crap last night, just like I'm not going to watch Paul Ryan's sure-to-be equally BS speech tonight, but I am going to make a prediction- neither Ryan nor Walker will give the results of the latest Philadelphia Fed surveys of state economies.

I've mentioned these monthly reports a lot here, and in the last week, the Philly Fed came out with their coincident indexes showing the economy of the last 3 months, as well as the leading index for the next six months. And just like on election night, you don't want to see your state in any shade of red on these maps. And Wisconsin is red in both of them.

Here's where we've been the last 3 months


And here's where we're projected to go for the next 6 months.


And notice the one state east of the Mississippi that is dark green for both maps? OH-IO. Yesterday, Ohio Gov John Kasich was at the RNC, and broke with the party's nudge-nudge agreement to not talk up the economies in their states, lest it reflect positively on President Obama. Kasich bragged about Ohio being 4th-best in the nation for job growth in the last year, and credited his GOP policies for the gains.

What I bet Kasich didn't bring up is the fact that a lot of those gains are in the automotive industry that Obama helped save with a bailout in early 2009, including a $220 million expansion at 2 sites to help build Chevy Cruzes for GM in the next year. Oh, and another inconvenient truth I'm betting ol' Johnny didn't bring up? That most of Ohio's gains have been since the state's voters overwhlemingly vetoed Kasich-backed legislation that restored collective bargaining rights to public employees last November.

Walker mentioned in the famous David Koch phone call that he talked to Kasich "every day" about how to proceed with this ALEC-written legislation, but the difference is that Wisconsin has gone nowhere while Ohio has boomed over the last year. This graph uses the Philly Fed leading index, and allows us to see what the total result of the first 2 years after many of these governors and many of their fellow TeaBag legislators took power. For Wisconsin, it's a lot of crawling along the 0 line.


Also interesting to see the decline that has started in Michigan (and to a lesser extent Illinois) is expected to pick up even more in the next few months, which could be worth keeping an eye out for as we go forward. Also, notice that the U.S. as a whole is slated to continue growing through the next 6 months, and at a pace similar to the upwardly revised 1.7% annual rate U.S. GDP grew by for the Q2 2012. So despite the fact that the right-wing bubble world and the media members covering it is convinced Scott Walker is a huge success in Wisconsin, the reality-based world tells us that he is an abject FAILURE, and has stopped what was previously a steadily-growing Wisconsin economy.

No wonder that Walker repeated his recall-election campaign trick today, saying the BLS "confirmed" his tricked out QCEW stats that show job growth, when in fact they probably had just received them (like they did in May). And if it's like the last time, Walker's claims of the numbers being "confirmed" will be proven to be lies, and the feds will show Walker and the DWD inflated these numbers as well.

And our paid-off media will let again Walker and his sketchy DWD slide on this disgusting decpetion. And I'll probably be writing another article on Walker's false report in the next few weeks.

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