In Walker's last year, some of Wisconsin's worst job rankings yet

This week, we got the final “gold standard” job report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for Scott Walker’s tenure in office as Wisconsin’s governor. And no surprise, but the record isn’t good.

Job growth in Wisconsin last year dropped to its lowest level since 2010, according to new federal data released Wednesday.

The latest numbers from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages show Wisconsin averaged nearly 2.5 million private-sector jobs over 12 months last year, an increase of 24,475 over the previous year.

Remarkably, Kelly Meyerhoffer of the Wisconsin State Journal is giving an inflated number, as the handy QCEW map site shows that Wisconsin only added 17,536 private sector jobs between December 2017 and December 2018 (what most of us define as “during 2018”), a paltry increase of 0.70%.

So what’s the difference? Meyerhoffer explains…somewhat.

The state had 251,027 more jobs in 2018 than in 2010 using a 12-month average. Comparing December 2018 with December 2010 data, which coincides more closely with Walker’s actual time in office, the state added 233,101 jobs.

The state lost 11,229 jobs in 2010 compared with the previous year. Since then, while the nation was recovering from the Great Recession, it added an average of about 31,400 jobs per year. During that stretch the most jobs added in a year was 37,585 in 2015. The state has added fewer in each year since.

I get what Meyerhoffer is looking at, which is an average of the totals of all the months in a given year, instead of looking at the change from December to December. The problem with this is that it tends to give more weight with what you started a year from than where you ended it, and I think most of us would make the comparison on a “we were here, and now we’re there” basis.”

Likewise, Wisconsin’s job growth stalled out in the last half of 2018, as shown by this chart using the QCEW numbers, with year-over-year growth falling from 1.0% to 0.7%.

And 2018 wasn't just one of the worst of Wisconsin's years due to the bad rankings, but also in the amount of jobs added. It's one of our lowest 12-month levels of growth since Walker took power, well below the 1.6% that the country had last year, and way below the rate that Walker inherited in January 2011.

But only part of that late-year stagnation is figured in a year-long “average”, so it doesn’t give as accurate a picture over what actually happened between the time when Walker took office, and when he was booted out.

This is especially true in Wisconsin’s case, as January 2010 was the depths of the state’s (and country’s) job losses during the Great Recession. I’ll use the seasonally-adjusted monthly job numbers to show you what I mean.

Wis private sector jobs, seasonally adjusted Jan 2009-Jan 2011
Jan 2009 2,385,300
July 2009 2,301,800
Jan 2010 2,290,800
July 2010 2,307,100
Jan 2011 2,325,000

When Scott Walker took over at the start of January 2011, we already had added 34,200 jobs since January 2010. That doesn’t sound like a loss in 2010 to me, so why should we assume that smaller number to start Walker’s numbers off of?

And if you go December to December, Wisconsin ended up 39th for job growth in 2018 for both private sector jobs gained, and all jobs. This made for 7 out of 8 years that Wisconsin was ranked below 30th in the country in these measures during Scott Walker's tenure in office. As you can see, that was quite a difference from the top 15 ranking that the state had in 2010, the last year Jim Doyle and the Dems were in power.

It's a mostly uninterrupted record of failure on job growth - the one topic that was supposed to be central to Scott Walker's and WisGOP's plans for doing all of these radical changes to way things were done. But instead, it's pretty evident what "Open for Business" REALLY was about - using the power of the State to funnel tax cuts and dollars to donors and allies of the GOP, at the expense of everyone else.