Wisconsin jobs and wages were horrid in 2016. Fire the GOPs in charge

I figured Wisconsin’s numbers from the “gold standard” Quarterly Census on Employment and Wages (QCEW) for 2016 would be bad when I noticed that Scott Walker’s Department of Workforce Development left out its usual pre-release of the numbers in last week’s Wisconsin jobs report. And my hunch was proven correct when Walker’s DWD pulled a pre-holiday weekend news dump and put the QCEW figures out this afternoon.

These numbers aren’t just bad, they are by far the worst of Scott Walker’s and WisGOP’s 6 years in power.

Job change, QCEW 2016
All jobs +15,462 (+0.55%)
Private sector +11,590 (+0.48%)
Manufacturing -3,776 (-0.81%)

By comparison, even in Walker’s first 5 sub-par years in office we were adding far more jobs than this. Job growth plummeted by 2/3 in 2016 compared to 2015, and hell, we added twice as many jobs in Jim Doyle’s last year in office than we did in 2016.



And these numbers continue a plummeting in the rate of job growth that coincides pretty well with the last “crappy” Walker/WisGOP budget, which took effect in July 2015.



Also note that loss of 3,776 manufacturing jobs for 2016. That was with the state’s Manufacturing and Agriculture credit in full effect, which makes GOP hack/UW professor Noah Williams look like an even bigger fool for claiming that the M&A credit worked in adding jobs (I wrote about that piece of shit "report" last month). Amazingly, Williams is still peddling his “it’s working” crap in Forbes this week, proving that the true party that benefits from affirmative action is the Republicans (because “both sides”, you know).

These QCEW figures add to my strong skepticism about the allegedly good jobs news that Walker’s DWD has been reporting for 2017. I highly doubt that things turned around so fast that we’ve gained over twice as many jobs in the first 4 months of this year than we did in all of last year. And “3.2% unemployment?” That could only be happening if people were leaving the state in droves (even above the stagnating population figures in every area outside of Madison). That, or the 3.2% unemployment number is bullshit and will be “corrected” in the coming months.

To top it all off, DWD’s pre-release of the QCEW also shows that wages actually went down in Wisconsin in 2016.

Total wages, 2016 QCEW
All jobs -1.28%
Private sector -0.62%
Manufacturing -5.30%

And these garbage figures are absolutely why Scott Walker is spending taxpayer dollars to get around the state campaigning, and claiming everything is “looking up” or “going great” in Wisconsin. He, his cabinet and his paymasters Cabinet have to sell propaganda to the unsuspecting rubes to trick them into giving Walker and his puppeteers one last term to screw things up for good.

We’ll see in a couple of weeks just how bad Wisconsin’s job stats look compared to the rest of the country for 2016, but it seems guaranteed that Wisconsin will be in the bottom 20 for job growth for the 22nd straight year. Then again, I’ve posited in the past that maybe these horrible numbers were partly by design- to make blue-collars feel enough anger at their dead-end situation that they’d vote for a dimwit like Donald Fucking Trump to “shake things up” and “get even.”

Well, good luck with thinking things will be better for you by November 2018, rurals and other angry white guys. Because after 6 years, the jury is back in the thinking world. USING WISCONSINITES AS RIGHT-WING LAB RATS HAS FAILED, at least when it comes to improving the economy. Then again, any economic growth that resulted from this Reign of Error was always coincidental to the real Koch/ALEC/Bradley agenda of grabbing the levers of power and making everyone an indentured servant to their needs.

Now do you get it, guys? The answer to your economic anxiety wasn’t going to be solved by replacing the guy in the White House. The answer comes from changing who’s in the Governor’s Mansion and in the Capitol in Madison.