New info gives same ol' story- Wisconsin trailing U.S. economy

A couple of reports out this week show that the country largely remains in a slow-but-steady recovery. This week's revised 2nd quarter GDP report gave some not-so-good news for the U.S. economy in terms of overall growth, with the growth rate dropping from 1.7% to 1.3%. But the monthly Philly Fed coincident index of economic conditions by states indicates that U.S. growth is still happening, with a slight majority of states increasing over the last 3 months. However, you will notice that Wisconsin is not one of them.

In fact, Wisconsin's economy has remained stagnant since Walker's inauguration in January 2011, while the U.S has gained 4.2% in the same time period. And as this chart shows, Wisconsin lags well behind any other state in the Midwest for the last 21 month

Another report from the feds that indicated we might be better off than we thought, as there were 453,000 private sector jobs then first estimated, and 386,000 more overall. While there should be some skepticism with these numbers (the timing 6 weeks before the election is "interesting", and they can be revised later on), it also indicates that the recovery may be on firmer ground than we first thought as well.

However, this is also bad news for Wisconsin, because if you plug in those 386,000 total jobs and 453,000 private sector jobs, it pushes the Walker jobs deficit grow even larger past the 90,000 job mark. In these graphs, I added the additional jobs starting in March and prorating over the 6 months, to make for a more gradual increase.

Wisconsin vs. U.S. jobs, all jobs

Wisconsin vs. U.S. jobs, private sector

Yeah, it still ain't working.