Walker/WisGOP failure on jobs got worse this Summer. Fox-con won't fix it

On a day when Governor Walker and Assembly Speaker Robbin’ Vos and other WisGOP hacks try to claim the Foxconn package becoming law in Wisconsin will be some kind of “game changer”, I wanted to go more into why these guys felt the need to do such a drastic move in the first place. The state’s jobs numbers have taken another downturn in recent months, capped off by the release last week that showed 8,800 jobs were lost in Wisconsin in August.

Now that the Bureau of Labor Statistics has followed with the state-by-state jobs figures for August, we can get a clearer picture of just where Wisconsin measures up with the rest of the country. And it’s not good. While the August job numbers do seem have some goofiness going on in regards to seasonal adjustments and vacations (something that has led to lower-than-reality initial reports for the US’s August figures in recent years), Wisconsin still stands out as notably bad.

Largest job losses, Aug 2017
Ore. -9,500
Wis. -8,800
Cal. -8,200
Penn -8,000
Ark. -7,200

But states like Oregon and California had solid growth before August’s figures, with 1-year growth rates over 2% in Oregon and over 1.5% in Cali, even including the August losses. By contrast, Wisconsin has been flailing for several months when it comes to recent job growth, with 7,000 jobs lost in the private sector since April, and more than 12,000 jobs overall.

And that lagging trend has gotten even worse in the last year, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows.

Private sector job growth, Aug 2016-Aug 2017
U.S. +1.71%
Minn +1.62%
Iowa +1.46%
Ohio +1.30%
Mich +1.26%
Ind. +0.96%
Wis. +0.80%
Ill. +0.51%

Total job growth
Minn +1.52%
U.S. +1.45%
Mich +1.40%
Iowa +1.09%
Ohio +1.04%
Ind. +1.02%
Wis. +0.65%
Ill. +0.40%

The lousy August numbers led UW’s Menzie Chinn to update his charts at Econbrowser. It reiterates just how badly the state has been left in the dust by our neighbors to the west, and the nation as a whole, during the Age of Fitzwalkerstan.



These stats, along with Gov Walker’s approval going back down to the low 40s, are the real reasons that Walker and his WEDC lackeys came up with the desperate Fox-con scam. They know there is nothing coming in this budget that will help the average Wisconsinite or encourage others to move into Wisconsin for better opportunities or a higher quality of life, so they have to try to promise that something better is around the corner, and hope the rubes fall for it.

But it won’t get better in Wisconsin than the already lousy situation we have in Wisconsin late Summer 2017, either fiscally or job-wise. And there has to be a price paid by the Governor and other GOP-puppets who have continued to double down on the same trickle-down/wage suppression failures despite years of proof that this shit ain’t working.