Updated Walker jobs gap, with more pictures!

Yesterday's Wisconsin jobs report seemed OK on the surface, with 7,800 seasonally-adjusted jobs created overall in August. But it masked a lot of weakness beneath it. Among the not-so-great things about it.

1. 3,600 of those jobs created were in local government, and a lot of those seem to be the result of a lack of seasonal, end-of-summer layoffs, because there were only 300 jobs created in the non-seasonally adjusted survey.

2. 5,900 jobs were created in the "Leisure and Hospitality" sector, which is code for "Bars and Hotels." Not exactly big-paying jobs, and probably not unrelated to college getting back in session, but Summer tourism season not quite ending. Watch for this to even up in September.

3. 4,500 jobs were LOST in manufacturing in Wisconsin in August. Much like the rest of the country, some of these are probably related to a snapback from a lack of automaking layoffs in July (I touched on this in this article). But there were still 1,900 actual jobs lost in manufacturing in Wisconsin in August, and as this chart shows, our manufacturing losses were far greater than the nation's as a whole.

Given that manufacturing has contnued to come back in the U.S. over the last 12 months, you'd think a heavy-manufacturing state like Wisconsin would be booming. The fact that we've lost jobs in manufacturing instead illustrates yet another Walker jobs failure. So what's Scotty's solution? To fly to Texass and meet with Chinese investors. Unbelievable.

Wonder if he'll point to these charts to show how Wisconsin's "going in the right direction." For example, that the Walker jobs gap is at 80,000 jobs overall, and that 20,000 jobs have left since the start of his term in January 2011.

Or maybe Walker can point to the private sector jobs gap, which is now at 84,000 jobs and is down 15,000 from the time he took office.

Yeaaaaah, I'm betting that's not going to get brought up to the Chinese today by ol' Scotty. Oh, and just in time for your weekend, public employees are now slated to get another take-home pay cut of 0.75% due to higher pension contributions, (well, unless Act 10 is thrown out). I'm sure fewer jobs and lower take-home pay for hundreds of thousands Wisconsin families will do wonders for demand in our state for 2013, won't it?

No, it really isn't working.