The BLS notes that 5 of the 7 Midwestern states had statistically significant increases in employment last year, including Wisconsin, who rode a strong final 3 months to end up with a decent increase in jobs by the end of 2013.
Change in jobs, Dec 2012-Dec 2013, BLS
Ill. +62,200 (+1.08%)
Ind. +51,800 (+1.77%)
Iowa +12,800 (+0.84%)
Mich +63,800 (+1.58%)
Minn +45,800 (+1.66%)
Ohio +25,600 (+0.49%)
Wis. +44,500 (+1.59%)
On a percentage basis, it looks like Wisconsin is right in the middle of the pack of 2013. Not that bad by itself, and certainly something GOP candidates could point to as some kind of success (others would call it mediocrity, but both would be spinning). However, Governor Walker promised Wisconsinites 250,000 private sector jobs over his 4 years in office, so with 3 years in the books, why don't we look at where that stands, and compare with the rest of the Midwest. I'll rank this by percentage change, since some states are larger than others.
Change in private sector jobs, Dec 2010- Dec 2013
(U.S. rate- +6.38%)
Mich +219,400 (+6.71%)
Ind. +177,800 (+6.62%)
Minn +139,500 (+6.22%)
Iowa +54,300 (+4.44%)
Wis. +100,200 (+4.31%)
Ill. +205,300 (+4.27%)
Ohio +178,700 (+4.17%)
Hey, at least we're finally out of last place! But we are way behind the curve when it comes to keeping up with the U.S., or even the Midwest leaders in Michigan, Indiana, and Minnesota. In fact, even with the decent 2013 numbers, the Walker jobs gap continued to grow last year, as the state fell nearly 4,000 private sector jobs further behind the U.S. pace.
Also worth mentioning is that the state and U.S. numbers will be benchmarked in about a month. This re-sets some of these numbers based on more complete data (the Quarterly Census on Employment and Wages is one of those sources of data), and last year, it played to the Walker Administration's benefit, showing a higher number of jobs. If you want to do some predicting, it's worth mentioning that the 12-month QCEW jobs increase was around 1,600 LESS than the monthly figures, so if anything, Wisconsin's number may be lowered.
So there's the update. Not as brutal as we saw earlier in 2013, but Wisconsin is still badly lacking when you look at the course of the last 3 years, and not only will we not reach 250,000 private sector jobs in 4 years, we'd be lucky to reach 150,000.
Seasonally-adjusted CES showed a private sector job growth of 25,600 from June 2012 to June 2013 while QCEW showed 23,963, which shows the difference you note. Seasonally un-adjusted CES shows a gain of 35,400: the discrepancy is is down to the (benchmarked) seasonal adjustment for June 2012 being a very normal -40,900 while that for (unbenchmarked) June 2013 was -50.700.
ReplyDeleteNow break it down into two halves: looking at the seasonally unadjusted (and benchmarked) CES, for June 2012 - December 2012 it shows a loss of 40,300 jobs while QCEW shows a loss of 25,398. For December 2012 - June 2013 CES shows a gain of 75,700 while QCEW shows a gain of 49,361.
Seasonally unadjusted CES highballed gains by about 25,000 in the first half of 2013, mitigated in the headline figures by the seasonal adjustment being lowered by about 10,000. Initial June 2013 QCEW reports have historically been 2,000-2,500 below their finalized figures, which says that seasonally-adjusted CES highballed the gains of the first half of last year by something like 12,500.
The question is whether CES did something similar in the second half of 2013 or not.