Friday, May 17, 2013

April a jobs bomb in Wisconsin

Despite the Walker Administration's best efforts to distract the public, eventually they had to release April's jobs numbers yesterday afternoon. And they were an unmitigated disaster, with 24,100 jobs lost overall, and 22,600 in the private sector. I would expect that to be the biggest job losses in the country when the state-by-state numbers are released by the BLS later today, and unlike what Robin Vos promised, job creation has not taken off like a rocket. In fact, the Walker job charts now show that we have fewer jobs in Wisconsin than we did before Walker was retained in the recall election in June 2012, and the private sector Walker jobs gap is now over 70,000.





I'll have more on this at a later time, especially on this Administration's cynical and disgusting attempts to hide this report and promote out-of-context numbers that badly lag the rest of the country (sorry, had to take advantage of the perfect weather yesterday), and I'll also discuss how our paid-off media fell for some of it. And yes, some of this is related to the horrible April weather, which shows up in lower-than-normal seasonal hiring being listed as job "losses" (especially the 3,900 lost in Construction and 3,600 lost in Leisure and Hospitality. I'd expect a nice "gain" in these same positions for May as a result).

But don't be fooled, it is not working, it never will work, and every month that these people are allowed to be in office is another month that Wisconsin slips further and further into the hole. Walker really is Dubya-2 on a Wisconsin level.

3 comments:

  1. Withholding tax revenue is down 5.4% from April 2012 to April 2013. It's a fairly noisy series, but this is way down at the bottom of the range (still watching for the April sales tax revenue figures to come out).

    UI claims for the March - April reference weeks dropped by half as much as they did last year (7,376 vs 15,606) and these changes are in very consistent ratios with the increases in non-seasonally adjusted CES for these months (13,400 vs 33,900).

    A certain amount of the headline job drop (no more than 5,000) is a return of seasonal adjustments to values closer to historical norms: these have been higher than normal the last 4 months, but getting back to the fold now.

    One political ramification of our bad April is that the national rankings that Walker will be taking into next year's election will be from QCEW for the now-started 12 months of March 2012 - March 2013.

    Speaking of QCEW, if you add in the mean of recently-benchmarked CES seasonal adjustments to it, you can see that only 1/4 of the 2012 gains were in the second half of the year.

    P.S. I only just noticed: the Mass Layoff Statistics program has been a casualty of the sequester http://www.bls.gov/bls/sequester_info.htm

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    Replies
    1. Excuse me, the now-started 12 months of March *2013* - March *2014*.

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  2. Sales tax collections in April 2013 were up 3.0% vs April 2012.

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